The story of Mulan originated in the "Ballad of Mulan," a Xianbei ballad dating back to the Northern Dynasties. Having undergone countless transmedia adaptations, the heroine has become an iconic figure of patriotic feminism in China, has been integrated into the American literary canon through Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and has achieved global popularity with Disney's Mulan. Kingston's and Disney's works have drawn most scholarly attention, leaving other adaptations largely overlooked. This presentation, by interpreting an unexamined film titled Hua Mulan/Moonlight (2020), aims to unsettle the conventional nationalist-feminist paradigm and explore the possibility of unlearning nationalism in this nationalistically charged story. First, I review Mulan's chronological metamorphosis to reveal how the nationalist-feminist paradigm--the most dominant framework for perceiving Mulan in Chinese culture--has been invented and stabilized. However, through an analysis of the linguistic, visual, and acoustic apparatuses of Hua Mulan/Moonlight, I argue that this paradigm is destabilized by the film, which otherizes nationalism to unlearn it and reinterprets Mulan's story as a narrative concerning the conflict between instrumental-rationality-oriented nationalism and value-rationality-oriented humanitarianism. Consequently, Mulan is recast as a humanitarian who betrays her country. I further argue that what gives birth to this subversive moment of conceiving an anti-nationalist Mulan is the production team's philosophy of "film as a means of self-reflection" and, ironically, the popularization of the concept of human rights by Chinese national discourse. Ultimately, this presentation seeks to initiate an epistemological iconoclasm by challenging the ontological truism of Mulan as a nationalist woman warrior.

Authors:
Liying Wang, The University of Osaka, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Liying Wang is currently a PhD student at the Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University, Japan. Her research focuses on the Mulan-themed adaptations. Generally, she is interested in comparative literature and cultural studies.

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