Reviewed by: Gao Xingjianâs Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre by Mary Mazzilli Tarryn Li-Min Chun Gao Xingjianâs Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre. By Mary Mazzilli. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015. Ebook, $72.99; cloth, $104.00. Since Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, his work has drawn a steady stream of attention from scholars of Chinese literature, culture, and theatre. Much of this scholarship has grappled with the same questions that caused controversy when Gao was awarded the Nobel: should he be considered a Chinese writer, when he has French citizenship and the government of the Peopleâs Republic of China refuses to acknowledge him as such? Alternatively, can we brand him a writer of Chinese literature, even though he now also writes in French? Or are terms such as âtransculturalâ and âtransnationalâ better descriptors despite the difficulty of precisely defining them? In Gao Xingjianâs Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre, Mary Mazzilli begins with a critique of the prevailing obsession with China in scholarship on Gaoâs dramatic oeuvre and proposes instead a move away from issues of identity and the East-West binary. Her study builds on other work in this veinâsuch as that of Sy Ren Quah (2004), Claire Conceison (2009), and Todd Coulter (2014)âbut offers a new intervention by decoupling plays written while Gao was still in China from those composed after the authorâs self-imposed exile to France in 1987. Focusing on the latter group of âpost-exileâ plays enables Mazzilli to reposition Gao in relation to more global trends in theatre, namely the postdramatic turn of the late twentieth century. The goals of the monograph are twofold: first, to demonstrate the connections between Gaoâs dramatic work and that of other contemporary European playwrights, and second, to show how this reconsideration of Gao reshapes our broader understanding of transnationalism and of postdramatic theatre. [End Page 239] Mazzilli offers a new critical termââpostdramatic transnationalismââthat brings the work of German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann to bear on concepts of the transnational. She aligns the dramatic with earlier, binary models of transnationalismââhome country vs. destination countryââand the postdramatic with a more recent, fluid, and multivalent transnationalism that has âembraced its own hybridityâ (p. 7). In Gao Xingjianâs post-exile work for the theatre, she contends, we see a form of contemporary transnationalism that transcends ideology and is akin to postdramatic theatre in its rejection of prescriptive (often nation-based) cultural and aesthetic norms. To borrow Gaoâs own words, it is âwithoutismsâ (meiyou zhuyi). The bookâs two lines of argument unfold in tandem over the course of its six body chapters, all of which are anchored by close readings of Gaoâs post-exile plays. Chapter 1 begins with a thorough discussion of postdramatic theatre, with reference to Elinor Fuchâs The Death of Character (1996), Lehmannâs Postdramatic Theatre (2006), and the work of Austrian playwrights Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek. In this chapter, Mazzilli argues that The Other Shore (Biâan, 1986), written shortly before Gao left China, begins for the playwright a process of âbreaking further away from the dramatic and exploring the possibilities of the theatricalâ (p. 46)âin other words, a move away from realism, dialogue and linear dramatic action, and a closed âfictive cosmos,â and toward the use of dream images, monologue and narrative, physicality and musicality, and self-referentiality. Subsequent chapters follow this process of exploration chronologically and delve further into the use of postdramatic techniques in Gaoâs later work. Chapters 2 and 3 take a comparative approach, demonstrating that Gao shares certain stylistic and thematic concerns with other contemporary postdramatic playwrights. In chapter 2, for example, Mazzilli reads Gaoâs Between Life and Death (Shengsijie or Au bord de la vie, 1991) alongside British playwright Martin Crimpâs Attempts on Her LifeâSeventeen Scenarios for Theatre (1997). With reference to some of Lehmannâs key terms, she argues that both plays use âpost-epic narrationâ to string together sequences of otherwise unconnected theatrical moments and that both create a âtheatre of spectatorshipâ by self-consciously...