Posts

Beijing Westerns and Indigenous Opacity talk

Online Talk: Dr. Robin Visser – Beijing Westerns and Indigenous Opacity in Ecoliterature of Southwest China
Mar 7, 2024, 6-7:30pm CST (7-8:30pm EST)
Virtual event held on Zoom.

Please register to attend.

Abstract

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. In this talk, I present findings from my book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023), which analyzes relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in literary works by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan. I compare “root-seeking” novels by Beijing writers, set in China’s “exotic” southwest, with literature by Wa and Nuosu Yi Indigenes from Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. I argue that Beijing westerns appropriate “peripheral” Indigenous ecological perspectives to critique Maoist destruction of the environment and the undermining of Han neo-Confucian values to strengthen the “center” of the nation-state. Indigenous accounts, on the other hand, manifest what Edouard Glissant has called “opacity,” refusing colonial epistemes by centering the border as a place of home, heritage, and everyday humanity, though under great duress from climate change.

Speaker Bio

Robin Visser is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia University Press, 2023), compares contemporary literature on the environment by Han Chinese and non-Han ethnic minority writers. Her book Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke University Press, 2010), translated into Russian (Academic Studies Press, 2022), analyzes Chinese urban planning, fiction, cinema, art, architecture, and intellectual debates at the turn of the 21st century.

Posted by: Faye Xiao hxiao@ku.edu

Bridging Worlds–cfp

CFP: Bridging Worlds: Unpacking Asian-German Interconnections in Comparative Asian Literature and Film 
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 77th Annual Convention Conference
Dates: October 10-12, 2024
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada

The “Bridging Worlds: Unpacking Asian-German Interconnections in Comparative Asian Literature and Film” panel invites scholars to explore the multidirectional and multifaceted connections between Asian and German cultures, histories, and philosophies as represented in literature and cinema.

This panel aims to dissect and discuss the complex interactions and influences between Asia and Germany, emphasizing their representations in literature and film. It challenges the boundaries, providing an opportunity to examine how Asian and German intersections contribute to our understanding of global cultural and historical dynamics on the one hand, and reconstructs our traditional understanding of German Studies and Asian Studies on the other hand.

Aiming to foster deeper intellectual intersectionality, we are particularly interested in submissions that challenge the existing narratives and binaries. We welcome critical perspectives on renowned literature and cinema that question dominant discourses and research on lesser-known works that spotlight marginalized voices and narratives. Topics of interest span a wide array, including but not limited to the enlightenment and modernity, colonial and post-colonial legacies, gender and queer identities, ecocriticism and ecofeminism, as well as indigenous and transnational discourse.

Submissions should comprise a 250-word abstract and a brief biography (2-3 sentences), formatted in a DOC file, to be sent to Yingwei Mu at ywmu@ucdavis.edu by March 15, 2024. The presentations will be conducted in English.

Posted by: Jasmine Li <yul282@ucsd.edu>

Intersecting Ecologies–cfp

CFP: Intersecting Ecologies: Navigating Crises, Traumas, and Movements in Asian Comparative Literature and Film
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 77th Annual Convention
Conference Date: October 10-12, 2024
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada

The “Intersecting Ecologies and Narratives: Navigating Crises, Traumas, and Movements in Asian Comparative Literature and Film” panel welcomes scholars to an interdisciplinary exploration at the intersection of ecological themes, migration and refugee experiences, medical humanities, and the post-COVID era within the context of Asian literature and film.

Our panel aims to engage in comparative analyses across various regions and genres within Asian literature and film, focusing on their navigation of crises and traumas, particularly those related to ecological themes. We invite contributions that dissect not only ecological crises and traumas from diverse perspectives but also complex relationships between humans and nature, cultural identities and environmental narratives, ecofeminism, and ecology’s implications in the age of globalization.

We seek to foster a dialogue that connects Asian comparative literature and film with the broader fields of environmental humanities, migration and refugee studies, medical humanities, and reflections on the post-COVID world. We encourage submissions that explore the intersections of ecological crises with human health, displacement, environmental activism, and migration narratives, offering new insights into the challenges and opportunities these intersections present.

Highlighted topics for exploration include but are not limited to: Continue reading

‘Shawshank’ in China

Source: NYT (2/16/24)
‘Shawshank’ in China, as You’ve Never Seen It Before
A stage adaptation of the film featured an all-Western cast, was performed in Chinese and raised questions about translation, both linguistic and cultural.
By Vivian Wang and Vivian Wang reported from Beijing, and Claire Fu from Seoul)

Two women pose for pictures in front of a promotional billboard for the stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption.”

A stage production of the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” cast with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese, opened in Beijing in January. Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

When a stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption” opened recently in China, it was cast entirely with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese. But that may have been the least surprising part of the show.

That the show — an adaptation of the Stephen King novella that became one of the most beloved movies of all time — was staged at all seemingly flew in the face of several trends in China’s cultural sphere.

Chinese audiences’ interest in Hollywood films is fading, with moviegoers turning to homegrown productions. China’s authoritarian government has stoked nationalism and cast Western influence as a political pollutant. Censorship of the arts has tightened.

Yet the production reflects how some artists are trying to navigate the changing landscape of both what is permissible and what is marketable in China. And its success shows the appetite that many Chinese still have for cultural exchange. Continue reading

Disoriented Disciplines

New book: Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature (2023, Northwestern University Press, FlashPoints Series)

An urgent call to think on the edges, surfaces, and turns of the literary artifact when it crosses cultural boundaries

In the absence of specialized programs of study, abstract discussions of China in Latin America took shape in contingent critical infrastructures built at the crossroads of the literary market, cultural diplomacy, and commerce. As Rosario Hubert reveals, modernism flourishes comparatively in contexts where cultural criticism is a creative and cosmopolitan practice.

Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature understands translation as a material act of transfer, decentering the authority of the text and connecting seemingly untranslatable cultural traditions. In this book, chinoiserie, “coolie” testimonies, Maoist prints, visual poetry, and Cold War memoirs compose a massive archive of primary sources that cannot be read or deciphered with the conventional tools of literary criticism. As Hubert demonstrates, even canonical Latin American authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Haroldo de Campos, write about China from the edges of philology, mediating the concrete as well as the sensorial.

Advocating for indiscipline as a core method of comparative literary studies, Disoriented Disciplines challenges us to interrogate the traditional contours of the archives and approaches that define the geopolitics of knowledge.

Full PDF of the book at the FlashPoints open access platform

Rosario Hubert is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Trinity College. Her book Disoriented Disciplines. China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature (2023) was recipient of the ACLA Helen Tartar First Book subvention award and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Posted by: Rosario Hubert <rosario.hubert@trincoll.edu>

Echoes of Harbin

NEW BOOK: Dan Ben-Canaan, Echoes of Harbin – Reflections on Space and Time of a Vanished Community in Manchuria (Lexington Books) is being published and will be available in early March 2024.

Echoes of Harbin: Reflections on Space and Time of a Vanished Community in Manchuria deals with Harbin, a Chinese city that was established by Russians in 1898 and was a home for more than 38 different national ethnic communities for over 60 years. Among the communities, and second in size, was the Jewish community. This book exposes several areas that have contributed to the Jewish experience in China, particularly in Harbin, and paints a revealing picture of what a Jewish community in an alien land was and how it functioned in a space that was shared with other communities. While it starts with a unique space called Manchuria that had its mark on the town of Harbin, it uncovers the active and productive life of a community that wished for a haven but found unrest and hostilities and had to look for it elsewhere.

A blurb on the back cover:

“While much international attention has been focused in recent years on China’s northwest (Xinjiang and the Uyghurs), the study of modern northeast China, which was a considerably more important historical and strategic arena, has been somewhat marginalized. Focusing on Harbin, this book provides a vertical and horizontal analysis of northeast China since the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, underlying the role of Jews in comprehensive, virtually encyclopedic details never discussed before. As such, it is an outstanding lifelong achievement.” —Yitzhak Shichor, professor emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Posted by: Dan Ben-Canann <canaan@inter.net.il>

So Long, My Son review

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of “The Two Versions of So Long, My Son,” by Thomas Chen. The review–of a Wang Xiaoshuai film–appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/so-long-my-son/.

Enjoy,

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Two Versions of So Long, My Son

By Thomas Chen


MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright February 2024)


Advertising poster for So Long, My Son.

Wang Xiaoshuai’s 王小帅 So Long, My Son (地久天长; 2019), now available to stream for the first time in the U.S. on Mubi, is a tour de force of epic proportions. Ostensibly about the human costs of China’s one-child policy, which was implemented around 1980 to curb population growth, the story of the 185-minute film spans over thirty years from the early 1980s to the 2010s and is centered around two families. Liyun and Yaojun—played by Yong Mei 咏梅 and Wang Jingchun 王景春, respectively, in Silver Bear-winning roles—are factory workers in a fictionalized city in the northern province of Inner Mongolia. They are close friends with Haiyan and Yingming, the former the supervisor of family planning at the same factory. Liyun and Yaojun lose their son, Xingxing, in a drowning accident involving Haiyan and Yingming’s son, Haohao. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Liyun and Yaojun flee and eventually settle along the coast of Fujian province in the south. The film’s nonlinear narrative crisscrosses the three decades and two locales.

So Long, My Son is Wang Xiaoshuai’s twelfth fictional feature. Born in 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began, Wang is frequently dubbed a member of Chinese cinema’s “Sixth Generation” that started making films in the 1990s outside the state studio system. Like others of his “generation,” most notably Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯, he eventually reentered the system, his films screened by censors in order to be then screened in theaters. Not coincidentally, Wang first conceived So Long, My Son in 2015, when the one-child policy—replaced by a two-child policy—effectively ended. Although popular films such as Dearest (親愛的; 2014, d. Peter Chan 陳可辛) and Wrath of Silence (暴裂无声; 2017, d. Xin Yukun 忻钰坤) have dealt with the loss of the only child, Wang’s is the first film widely released in China to broach the policy explicitly. Continue reading

Nothing News screening

Join us Tuesday, February 20th at 4:30 pm in Cobb 307 at the University of Chicago for a screening of Nothing News (庚子新年) (2023, 63 min.), followed by a discussion with Director GU Xue (顧雪) who will be in attendance.

Part of the Adaptation and Genre in Chinese Film: Reinventing the Cinematic film series, Nothing News is a portrait of the filmmaker’s family during the 2020 Chinese New Year, when they had to quarantine at home and spent time reading the news on their cellular phones. While Gu Xue’s family was reading about the pandemic, she turned on her camera, and a discussion about news and truth began. A surprising twist occurs at the end, when the director raises the question of which news one should trust.

This screening is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies (with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education), the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Film Studies Center, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Department of Cinema and Media Studies.

Click HERE to REGISTER for this FREE IN-PERSON event!

Posted by: Paola Iovene <iovene@uchicago.edu>

RMMLA Work and Poetry–cfp

CFP: Chinese Poetry: Work and Poetry
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 77th Annual Convention
Conference Date: October 10–12, 2024
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, China’s status as the world’s factory has given prominence to work and/or labor in Chinese language cultural production broadly, and to Chinese poetry and poetics specifically. This has given the Chinese working class a means both of distancing themselves from labor and of making social intervention. Written and read in moments of leisure, poetry distances from labor, but when intervening in society poetry can underline, for instance, possible directions for transformation in healthcare or developments in legal actions for workers’ rights. This panel invites papers that will discuss modern and contemporary Chinese language poetry along the line of this double-paradigm of work and poetry. Paper topics can include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Poetry and work/labor
  • Poetry and interaction with society
  • Poetry and the words of labor
  • Poetry and “lying flat” (tangping) or “letting it rot” (bailan)
  • Poetry and humor/wordplay
  • Conceptualization around poetry and work
  • International resonances

Prospective participants should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words along with a short (2-3 sentence) biography through this google form by March 30, 2024. The language of the session is English.

Please direct any inquiries to:

Giusi Tamburello (giuseppa.tamburello@unipa.it) (co-chair)
Wei Zeng (wzeng4@ualberta.ca) (co-chair)
Lucas Klein (Lucas.Klein@asu.edu)
Sofiia Zaichenko (szaichen@ualberta.ca)
Fay Zhen (fzhen2@asu.edu)

Posted by: Giusi Tamburello giuseppa.tamburello@unipa.it

Genetics journal retracts 19 papers from China

The new announcement described below, of the retraction of multiple articles involving scientist’s abuse of ethnic minority people in China, comes right after Nature published a damning review of how slow the retraction process has often been, despite some scientists’ and editors’ recent awakening to the abuse:

“Unethical studies on Chinese minority groups are being retracted — but not fast enough, critics say. Campaigners who want scrutiny of biometrics research on Uyghurs, Tibetans and other groups are frustrated by slow progress.” By Dyani Lewis. Nature 625, 650-654 (2024). [24 January 2024 ]. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00170-0

See below for the latest batch of retractments of such abusive studies, mostly by scientists targeting Tibetans and Uyghurs; the scientists themselves being mostly Chinese and sometimes joined by Western collaborators, all of whom are now waking up to the absence of ethics in Chinese science in the era of China’s genocidal policies against Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: The Guardian (2/14/24)
Genetics journal retracts 18 papers from China due to human rights concerns
Researchers used samples from populations deemed by experts and campaigners to be vulnerable to exploitation, including Uyghurs and Tibetans
By Amy Hawkins, Senior China correspondent

A genetics journal from a leading scientific publisher has retracted 18 papers from China, in what is thought to be the biggest mass retraction of academic research due to concerns about human rights.

The articles were published in Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine (MGGM), a genetics journal published by the US academic publishing company Wiley. The papers were retracted this week after an agreement between the journal’s editor in chief, Suzanne Hart, and the publishing company. In a review process that took over two years, investigators found “inconsistencies” between the research and the consent documentation provided by researchers. Continue reading

RMMLA Chinese Poetry: Center and Peripheries–cfp

CFP: Chinese Poetry: Center and Peripheries
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 77th Annual Convention
Conference Date: October 10-12, 2024
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada

For millennia poetry occupied a prized position at the center of literary and cultural production in Chinese. More recently, however, poetry risks being marginalized within the field of Sinitic/Chinese-language literary studies. At the same time, Sinophone studies and modern and contemporary Chinese poetry scholarship have marginalized each other. This panel seeks to draw renewed attention to the range and breadth of poetic styles, themes, social groupings, and discourses at work in Chinese-language poetry over the past long century, and to the issue of centrality and how poetry has responded to this issue. This includes but is not limited to papers addressing the following:

  • Canonization and modern/contemporary poetry
  • Classical-style poetry
  • Poetry and decolonial aesthetics
  • Poetry and dialects/topolects
  • Poetry and femininity/masculinity
  • Poetry and fiction or film
  • Poetry and translingualism
  • Sinitic poetry from outside China
  • Sociologies of poetry

Prospective participants should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words along with a short (2-3 sentence) biography through this google form by March 30, 2024. The language of the session is English.

Please direct any inquiries to:

Lucas Klein (Lucas.Klein@asu.edu) (co-chair
Sofiia Zaichenko (szaichen@ualberta.ca) (co-chair)
Fay Zhen (fzhen2@asu.edu)
Giusi Tamburello (terenziat@hotmail.com)
Wei Zeng (wzeng4@ualberta.ca)

Posted by: Lucas Klein lucas.klein@asu.edu

RMMLA Chinese Literature: Translatability and Untranslatability–cfp

CFP: Chinese Literature: Translatability and Untranslatability
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 77th Annual Convention
Conference Date: October 10-12, 2024
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada

Considered as both a written language and spoken language, in both its modern and premodern forms, Chinese is quite different from many if not most other languages prominent around the world. Because of this, many have theorized that translation between Chinese and other languages is rare, if not impossible. Is it? How have translators working either into or out of Chinese (or both) confronted or worked around the challenges that might lead others to claim “untranslatability”? How much impact have such translations had? This panel invites papers on the intersection of translation studies and Chinese literary studies, with specific attention to topics including but not limited to the following:

  • The art of translating poetry
  • The art of translating prose
  • Corpus approaches to translation studies
  • History of translation into Chinese
  • History of translation out of Chinese
  • Self-translation
  • Translation and gender
  • Translation and power
  • Translation and religion
  • Translation and the Sinophone
  • Translation ethics

Prospective participants should submit an abstract of approximately 250 words along with a short (2-3 sentence) biography through this google form by March 30, 2024. The language of the session is English.

Please direct any inquiries to:

Lucas Klein (Lucas.Klein@asu.edu) (co-chair)
Fay Zhen (fzhen2@asu.edu) (co-chair)
Sofiia Zaichenko (szaichen@ualberta.ca)
Giusi Tamburello (terenziat@hotmail.com)
Wei Zeng (wzeng4@ualberta.ca)

Posted by: Lucas Klein lucas.klein@asu.edu

The Peony Pavilion in HK

Experience the entire kun opera classic The Peony Pavilion the way author Tang Xianzu originally intended. After years of planning, the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe is presenting the Hong Kong debut of the faithfully restored, complete 55-scene saga at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Structured into three parts and performed over two days, this jewel of the kun opera genre reveals renewed perspectives into the wider social landscape of the Song dynasty, transforming the familiar love story into an unforgettable tale of oppression and emancipation.

A Rotating Poetic World

Explore the ethereal world of The Peony Pavilion through a rotating set design that seamlessly transports the audience from one scene to the next. This unique design also heightens the dreamy landscape of the production, filled with innovative visual effects.

Continue reading

Hollywood and the Asian American Imagination symposium

Symposium (hybrid): Hollywood and the Asian American Imagination
February 20 & 22 (Tuesday, Thursday): 12:00-4:15PM

Keynote lecture #1: “A Thousand Deaths”: Anna May Wong’s Death Acts
Yiman Wang, Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz

Keynote lecture #2: “Cinematic Representations of East Asian Women”
Alexa Alice Joubin, Professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures, George Washington University

All keynote lectures and panels are in a hybrid format at the Humanities Commons, University of Richmond (in person) and on Zoom (virtual).

Symposium schedule: https://as.richmond.edu/tucker-boatwright/2023-2024/hollywood-asian-american-symposium.html

Register here for zoom link: https://urichmond.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eLPPCsagRi2bVJ0_fc5bIg#/registration

Posted by: Jessica Chan <jchan@richmond.edu>

Youth in Chinese History project

Youth in Chinese History: bibliography and video-papers

The research project ‘Youth in Chinese History: Education and Representations of Young People in Chinese Sources between Tradition and Modernity,’ coordinated by Giulia Falato (University of Parma, former Oxford University) and Renata Vinci (University of Palermo), included the organization of the Youth in Chinese History Workshop at the China Centre, University of Oxford, in September 2023. From this rich moment of exchange and dialogue, the idea arose to create digital resources to make the research of project participants available to the academic community and a broader audience.

On the project’s website, you can consult a thematic bibliography and a video-papers series produced by project participants on topics related to education and the representation of young people in imperial times. Both resources are constantly updated, so we invite you to visit the website and subscribe to the Youtube channel. You will already find the first four video-papers, and by subscribing to the channel, you will receive a notification whenever a new video is uploaded.

Project website: www.youthinchinesehistory.com

Direct link to the thematic bibliography: https://www.youthinchinesehistory.com/bibliography/

Direct link to the video-papers series: https://www.youthinchinesehistory.com/ych-video-series/

Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@YouthinChineseHistory

For further information, you can contact the coordinators at info@youthinchinesehistory.com

THIS RESEARCH PROJECT IS SUPPORTED BY THE BRITISH ACADEMY AND LEVERHULME TRUST SMALL RESEARCH GRANT.

Posted by: Renata Vinci renata.vinci@unipa.it