Rethinking Chinese Stardom In and Beyond Sinophone Media Culture: A “Linguaphonic” Paradigm

Drawing on Dorothy Lau’s book Reorienting Chinese Stars in Global Polyphonic Networks: Voice, Ethnicity, Power, this seminar offers a cutting-edge perspective on the study of Chinese film stars by advancing a “linguaphonic” paradigm, moving away from a conceptualization of transnational Chinese stardom reliant on the centrality of either action or body. It explores specific phonic modalities – spoken forms of tongues, manners of enunciation, styles of vocalization -- as means to mine ethnic and ideological underpinnings of Chinese stardom. This seminar uses Chinese film actress, Tang Wei, as an example and discusses Tang’s lingual versatility, star mobility, and crossover fandom within and outside the Sinophone space. It examines how Tang’s Cantonese-speaking screen identity and its extension to her offscreen life as a migrant to Hong Kong, her translingual persona in Korean-language Late Autumn (2010), and her performance in the Sinophone production A Tale of Three Cities (2015), all work together to renegotiate her star identity. In doing so, this seminar asserts the phonic as a legitimate bearing that can generate novel vigor in the reimagination of Chineseness, providing insights on a methodological reorientation of Chinese star studies.

Dorothy Wai Sim Lau is an Associate Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include stardom, celebrity, fandom, Asian cinema, Chinese cinema, platform culture, and screen culture. She is the author of Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (2019), Reorienting Chinese Stars in Global Polyphonic Networks: Voice, Ethnicity, Power (2021), Celebrity Activism and Philanthropy in Asia: Toward A Cosmopolitical Imaginary (2024), and East Asian Auteurism, Cinephilia and the Media Platform Era: Film Authorship Rethought (2025). Lau is the visiting scholar to the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield in 2022.