Global Sinophone Classicisms: Hybridity, Agency, and Critical Challenges
Workshop Dates: May 10–11, 2024
Location: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Goethe University Frankfurt, Bad Homburg, Germany
Organized by: Zhiyi Yang (Frankfurt) & David Der-wei Wang (Harvard)
“Drinking Tea,” © Lei Xue
From fashion to music, from digital art to avant-garde poetry, in recent years and across all fields of literary and artistic creativity, a hybrid style that simultaneously evokes China’s classical past and is innately cross-cultural has become increasingly notable in global Sinitic language spaces and cyberspaces. While in mainland China this trend is often known in popular parlance as “national style” (guofeng), this overtly nationalistic term arguably obscures its hybrid character and in many cases non-PRC origins. We have therefore proposed to call this trend “Sinophone classicism” (Yang 2022; Yang and Wang 2023). It refers to the reinvention, redeployment, reconfiguration, and appropriation of cultural memories harking back to Chinese aesthetic and intellectual traditions for local, contemporary, and vernacular uses. By stressing the dimensionality of Sinophone culture rather than its substantiality, this paradigm also proposes to redefine Chineseness as a temporal and mnemonic experience instead of ethnic or cultural “essence” evolving around a geopolitical center. In June 2022, we jointly convened a Harvard-Frankfurt-Lingnan (online) workshop “Classicism in Digital Times: Textual Production as Cultural Remembrance in the Sinophone Cyberspace” to address the question of digitality in the production of Sinophone classicism. Papers announced on this workshop are coming out as a special issue in Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature (20.2, forthcoming September 2023).
While our previous and collective efforts have preliminarily outlined a novel paradigm to investigate an emerging field, the continuous transformation of the field has also brought forth new questions and challenges. They range from Sinophone/Xenophone transculturation (Wang 2018), shifting dynamics in traditional and digital media, and above all conceptual and ideological interventions by various actors, including those from political and academic arenas. Furthermore, we sense the need to look back and beyond the contemporary to observe the past and future of Sinophone classicisms. Lastly, the expanded use of the traditional Eurocentric term “classicism” also entails critical challenges, for instance that of envisioning a kind of “cross-cultural classicisms” to address various traditions with the self-regard as being “classical.” This workshop hereby invites contributions to investigate the diverse range of phenomena that may deepen, expand, or modify the conceptual framework of “Sinophone classicism,” with particular attention on questions of hybridity, agency, and critical challenges.
Travel costs may be partially or entirely subsided, depending on the result of the funding application to be submitted later this year. For interested participants, please submit a title and an abstract (ca. 150 words in English) of your paper to z.yang@em.uni-frankfurt.de, by August 1, 2023. Selected papers announced on this workshop may be invited to contribute to a research volume coedited by the organizers.
Works Cited:
Yang, Zhiyi and David Der-wei Wang. 2023. Introduction to special issue “Classicism in Digital Times: Textual Production as Cultural Remembrance in the Sinophone Cyberspace,” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 20.2 (forthcoming).
Yang, Zhiyi. 2022. “Sinophone Classicism: Chineseness as Temporal and Mnemonic Experience in the Digital Era,” The Journal of Asian Studies 81.4: 1–15.
Wang, David Der-wei. 2018. “Sinophone/Xenophone Studies: Toward a Poetics of Wind, Sound, and Changeability” 華夷之變：華語語系研究的新視界, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue 中國現代文學 34: 1–28.