Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Language at the University of South Carolina
Krista Van Fleit teaches courses in modern/contemporary Chinese literature and film as well as Chinese language courses. In both her teaching and research she strives to present a sympathetic understanding of culture in a period of China’s history in which both people’s lives and the art they produced were greatly affected by political events. Dr. Van Fleit’s book, Literature the People Love, provides students and scholars with a new interpretive framework to approach texts of the Maoist period.
Currently, Dr. Van Fleit is fascinated by the cultural connections between China and India. She spent six months in residence at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi on a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award researching film exchange and cultural production in China and India. Her first article from this project, a study of the reception of Raj Kapoor and the blockbuster film Awara in China, was published in Asian Cinema in January 2014. Her chapter, “Mao and Gandhi in the Fight Against Corruption: Popular Film and Social Change in China and India,” published in The Palgrave Handbook of Asian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan London, 2018), also progressed during this time.
In 2016, Dr. Van Fleit spent six months in China with the support of a Provost’s Humanities Grant where she wrote chapters about the use of “national forms” in China and India in the 1940s and the reception of Indian film in China in the 1980s. She gave a talk at Beijing University on the biopic Dr. Kotnis ki Amar Kahani for a class on the cultural legacy of Yan’an in the Chinese department.
In 2025, she was appointed faculty director of the University of South Carolina’s Global Fellows LLC (Living Learning Community).
Panel 6 | Figural Representations of the Past and the Future
Arise! The Orientalist Gaze and Progressive Politics in Dr. Kotnis ki Amar Kahani
Abstract
One of the most famous depictions of China on the Indian screen is presented in the story of the historical figure Dwarkanath Kotnis, who travelled from his home in South India to work as a doctor to help the Chinese during World War II.
In this talk I am inspired by Prasenjit Duara’s concept of circulatory history as I trace the entanglement of two different threads of global cinema—Orientalism and progressive socialism—in the 1946 film Dr. Kotnis ki Amar Kahani.
Images of lead actress Jayashree in yellowface sitting under a flowering plum tree are juxtaposed with those of her singing a Hindi version of “The March of the Volunteers,” the Chinese revolutionary song that circulated throughout progressive spaces in the 1940s and eventually became the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China.
Using the lens of convergent comparison shows how global flows of culture interact with the representation of national interests onscreen, making visible two competing ideological registers, one that temporally locates China (and Asia) in the past and the other in the future.
