Les Chinois à Paris : The Red Detachment of Women and French Maoism in the Mid-1970s

ABSTRACT: Existing scholarship on the Chinese revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women (1964) typically adopts a Sinocentric perspective, overlooking the ballet’s significance as part of international Cold War cultural politics rather than an isolated ideological project of Maoist China. To address this shortcoming, this essay argues that the historical production of The Red Detachment was in dialogic relations with other foreign performing works produced in different yet overlapping cultural-political contexts. That is, the meaning of the ballet is not just located within the performing “text” itself or its immediate context, but also in the dialogic space between “texts.” To demonstrate this, the essay examines the “intertextuality” between The Red Detachment and a French satirical comedy The Chinese in Paris (Les Chinois à Paris , 1974) in relation to French Maoism in the early to mid-1970s.

KEYWORDS: The Red Detachment of Women, Cold War, Cultural Revolution, Les Chinois à Paris , French Maoism, Tel quel .