Author: denton.2@osu.edu

Affective Betrayal

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Affective Betrayal: Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China
By Jean Tsui
SUNY Press; Hardcover : 9781438498782, 342 pages, September 2024

Description

Affective Betrayal uses “affect” as an analytical category to explicate the fragility and fragmentation of Chinese political modernity. In so doing, the book uncovers some of the unresolved moral and philosophical obstacles China encountered in the past, as well as the cultural predicament the country faces at present.

At the turn of the twentieth century, China’s leading reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) presented modern political knowledge in musical and visual representational formats that were designed to stimulate readers’ bodily senses. By expanding the reception of textual knowledge from “reading” to “listening” and “visualizing experiences,” Liang generated an epistemic shift, and perhaps an all-inclusive internal intellectual, philosophical, and moral transition, alongside China’s modern political reform. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in China’s incipient democratic movement, Affective Betrayal examines how his attempts to conjoin Confucian morality and liberal democracy expose hidden anxieties as well as inherent contradictions between these two systems of thought. These conflicts, besides disrupting the stability of China’s burgeoning modern political order, explain why the import of modern concepts led to China’s continued political impasse, rather than rationality and progress, after the 1911 revolution.

Jean Tsui is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the College of Staten Island, the City University of New York. Continue reading Affective Betrayal →

HKUST positions

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The Hong Kong University of Science and Technnology has announced the following new positions:

(1) Faculty Positions at All Ranks in the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

The Division of Arts and Machine Creativity (AMC) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology envisions being a leading cross-disciplinary center where technology, art, and humanities converge to foster innovative and impactful environments, talents, and works that shape the future world.  We especially encourage applicants for faculty positions at all ranks (Professor/Associate Professor/Assistant Professor) who have proven experience in research and teaching of the following focus areas:

  • Machine-assisted Art Practice (visual, sound, performing, installation, cinematic arts, etc.);
  • Critical Studies on Arts and Machine Creativity (art history, media theory, philosophy of technology, etc.); and/or
  • Art Management (managerial, legal, and business topics related to AI arts, NFT, etc.).

Preferences will be given to candidates with research experience in fusing new technologies (e.g., generative AI) with arts.

Appointees are expected to (i) teach art-related courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, (ii) develop a vigorous research program in their areas of interest, and (iii) provide service to the Division/Academy/University governance and professional communities.

Applicants should have a PhD degree in art, design, or other related fields by the time of employment.  The candidates should have a strong research record of publications and/or creative works (e.g., performances, exhibitions, productions, etc.) in one of the Division’s focus areas of research and teaching and a demonstrated ability to work in interdisciplinary teams.  Candidates to be considered for the rank of Associate Professor and above should have proven teaching and advising experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels and evidence of securing research funding. Continue reading HKUST positions →

Goodness Me

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Source: China Media Project (9/19/24)
Goodness Me
Good Me, one of China’s largest tea store chains, had a hard lesson in public relations this week after internet users decided its punchline video about workplace discipline was not funny, not at all.
By David Bandurski

On Wednesday, one of China’s largest tea chains found itself at the center of an online storm after a video emerged of employees for the company apparently wearing cardboard signs and makeshift cardboard handcuffs to enforce workplace discipline — public displays of shame that had disturbing echoes of the country’s political past.

The offending post, made on September 17 to the official Douyin and Xiaohongshu accounts of the Guangdong operations of Good Me (古茗茶饮) — a tea chain with more than 5,000 locations across the country — showed several employees on site at a Good Me shop standing with their heads cast down, their hands bound in front with what appeared to be cardboard cup holders. Handwritten signs around their necks read: “The crime of forgetting to include a straw”; and “The crime of knocking over the teapot.”

The meme the Good Me account seemed to be riffing on was not a contemporary, social media derived one, but rather an extremely painful episode from China’s past. In the midst of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, millions of Chinese branded as “class enemies” were persecuted in brutal public spectacles known as “struggle sessions” (批斗大会).  In many cases, they had their heads shaved, and were forced to wear dunce caps and signs identifying their supposed crimes as they were subjected to physical and verbal attacks by crazed mobs. Continue reading Goodness Me →

The Typesetter

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Ping Zhu’s translation “The Typesetter,” by Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writer Shen Yuzhong. The translation appears below and at its online home (which also includes the Chinese original): https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/the-typesetter/. My thanks to Ping Zhu for sharing her work with the MCLC community.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Typesetter 排字人

By Shen Yuzhong 沈禹鐘 (1889–1971)[1]

Translated by Ping Zhu

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2024)

The first page of the Chinese original in Red Magazine.

This story is a satire of the concept of “literature of blood and tears” (血和泪的文学) proposed by Zheng Zhenduo 郑振铎 in 1921. Instead of representing the blood and tears of the proletariat, Shen Yuzhong, a Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies author, wrote the story from the perspective of a worker who observes the literal “literature of blood and tears” produced by a writer. The Chinese original follows the translation.–Ping Zhu

The clanging of the bell in the printing factory wakes Wang Qin from his morning slumber. Rubbing his tired eyes, he knows it’s time to go to work at the factory again. He gets up grudgingly, puts on his clothes, grabs a basin, goes downstairs to fetch some water, and returns to his room to wash his face and neck. He lives in a small back room on the second floor, rented from a sub-landlord for five silver dollars a month. If you compare them to those of others in society, his living expenses are at the lowest level. However, Wang Qin’s earning capacity is quite weak; he only earns fifteen silver dollars a month at the factory. One-third of that goes to rent, the rest goes to food and clothing, leaving him perpetually worried about his hard life. Sometimes he thinks about changing his life, but that seems impossible. People’s lives are all assigned by capital, deeply oppressed by its forces. No matter what abilities you have, it’s difficult to struggle against capital.

The factory work starts every morning at seven, not long after the bell rings to wake the workers living nearby. Hearing the bell, everyone hurriedly bids farewell to their morning dreams and goes to obey its call. After washing up, Wang Qin also quickly goes out. He takes two copper coins from his pocket and buys some street food to eat along the way. This is his daily routine, not a one-off. When he arrives at the factory gate, he sees many of his coworkers streaming in. They’ve known each other for so long that they no longer bother with greetings or small talk. Once inside the factory, the workers take off their coats and start working amid the clatter of the machines. Continue reading The Typesetter →

Sedition in Hong Kong

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Source: NYT (9/27/24)
This Is What Can Land You in Jail for Sedition in Hong Kong
Three men were the first to be convicted under the city’s recently expanded national security law, which has greatly curtailed political speech.
By David Pierson and Tiffany May

Visitors in a museum look at a screen where Xi Jinping is speaking in front of microphones.

Visitors watching a video of Xi Jinping at the National Security Exhibition in Hong Kong Museum of History in August. Credit…Anthony Kwan for The New York Times

Wearing a T-shirt with a protest slogan.

Scrawling pro-democracy graffiti on public bus seats.

Criticizing Xi Jinping on social media.

Three men in Hong Kong were sentenced to prison last week for these acts of protest, which in another era probably would have drawn little notice — showing the power of a newly expanded national security law aimed at muzzling dissent.

The rulings, rendered over two days by a judge whom Hong Kong’s leader handpicked, highlight the political transformation that has taken place here.

A financial center and a city accustomed to freedom of political expression, Hong Kong now more closely resembles mainland China, where criticism of the ruling Communist Party is rarely, if ever, tolerated. Continue reading Sedition in Hong Kong →

Renditions valedictory issue 100

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It is with great pride that we write to announce the publication of Renditions no. 100, a landmark that follows fifty full years of publishing our journal. That we have continued to play an important role in literary communication between the Chinese-speaking realm and the world of letters in English is testified to by the extensive collection of pieces we have assembled for this 300-page valedictory issue, which includes masterly translations of a playful anthropomorphic biography by Su Shi, a celebrated classical poem by Lu Xun, and contemporary song lyrics about a post-industrialist China by the rock band Omnipotent Youth Society. A full table of content can be found here.

Orders of the issue can be placed at our e-bookstore, where readers can also purchase past editions or access out-of-print issues for free. We thank you humbly for your support over the years, and we hope that you will continue to support the Renditions Books and Renditions Paperbacks series, with Robert E. Hegel’s superb translation of the late-Ming epic novel Forgotten Tales of the Sui to appear soon.

Sincerely,

Renditions editorial team

Mother Tongues and Other Tongues

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With great pleasure and excitement, Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi announce the publication of their edited volume Mother Tongues and Other Tongues. Creating and Translating Sinophone Poetry https://brill.com/display/title/69613

How do self-translation and other translingual practices mold the Sinophone poetic field? How and why do contemporary Sinophone writers produce (new) lyrical identities in and through translation? How do we translate contemporary Sinophone poetry? By addressing such questions, and by bringing together scholars, writers, and translators of poetry, this volume offers unique insights into Sinophone Studies, while sparking a transdisciplinary dialogue with Poetry Studies, Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Conventions
List of Figures
About the Contributors

Introduction: Sinophone Poetry as an Interlingual Space
Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi Continue reading Mother Tongues and Other Tongues →

East Asian ‘Amateur’ Media Practices–cfp

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Call for Papers: The East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices Conference
May 10/11, 2025
Harvard University
Keynote Sessions Featuring: Susan Aasman (University of Groningen) and Jamie Zhao (City University of Hong Kong)

We invite proposals to the East Asian “Amateur” Media Practices conference at Harvard University. The conference aims to provide a venue for presenting research on historical and contemporary amateur media practices in East Asia and for discussing the current state and possible futures of this rapidly expanding field of inquiry.

Broadly, we hope to collectively address questions such as the following:

  • How do differing media situations require different theorization of “amateur” practices – or make other terms and frameworks more productive?
  • As “amateur” media practices take place across media forms / genres / channels, which methodologies are useful to map them and their significance – and which specific questions are they geared to address?
  • Do amateur media practices – past and present – present useful different models of economy, sociality, politics, or topography (i.e. planetary, global, transnational etc.) that can be made productive today?
  • What kind of larger historical trajectories come into view once one takes more than one amateur media form into account? Does the significance of amateur media practice change with their relationship to specific media forms and expressions?
  • Not only recent amateur practices are networked well beyond national contexts; how do amateur media practices and their networks help us track an interaction with imaginaries of nation, or of geopolitics?
  • How do we think beyond what is the focus of much work on amateur media practices: production? How would that history look different if we additionally focused on distribution?

Continue reading East Asian ‘Amateur’ Media Practices–cfp →

The Lure of Information in China Studies–cfp

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CFP—Dissertator Workshop: “The Lure of Information in China Studies”

Date: Ongoing from November 1st, 2024 to May 1st, 2025
Venue: Online via Zoom
Contact Person: Yuzhe Li (yli2232@wisc.edu)
Deadline for Proposal Submission: October 20th, 2024

AIM AND FORMAT

This program is a part of the Borghesi-Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support from Nancy and David Borghesi and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In recent years, the concept of “information” has garnered substantial scholarly attention within the field of China studies, appearing as an analytical framework in disciplines such as history, literature, and cultural studies. For literature scholars, information forms a vital dimension of literary practice by shaping the form, meaning, and even the aesthetics of creative works  (Chen et al. 2021; Liu 2019). Meanwhile, historians have begun to explore dynamic transformations in the “information order” of various eras  (Kuzuoğlu 2023; Harrison 2021; De Weerdt 2016).We believe the time is ripe to reflect upon and reassess this analytical framework and its leverage within China studies. To this end, we are convening a workshop for a group of dissertation-stage PhD students to collectively investigate the following questions in the context of participants’ individual research:

  • Why has the adoption of “information” as an analytical lens lured the interest of so many scholars in recent years?
  • What new insights and approaches has this lens contributed to China studies, so far?
  • And what risks does the lure of information potentially pose, perhaps in the form of methodological blindspots or the reading of source materials?

Continue reading The Lure of Information in China Studies–cfp →

Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant 2024

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The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to award the 2024 Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant in China Studies to the project Diversifying Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms.

The newest competition in the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies is designed to support the development of effective strategies for long-term change in the field of China studies through working groups that will design and pilot activities to solve specific, pressing challenges in the field.

The first winning project addresses a lack of consideration of ethnic diversity in the current Chinese literary and cultural curriculum at institutions of higher education in North America. The project team is composed of faculty from diverse ranks and institutions in the US, as well as collaborators in China:

  • Yanshuo Zhang (Principal Investigator), Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures, Pomona College
  • Mark Bender, Professor of Chinese, The Ohio State University
  • Li Guo, Professor of Asian Studies, Utah State University
  • Robin Visser, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Jiajun Wang,  Founder of the Taoping Qiang Culture Museum, Sichuan, China
  • Jingui Zhang, Artist and educator

Continue reading Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant 2024 →

CUHK position

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The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Assistant Professor / Associate Professor (Substantiable-track) – (240002GQ)
Department/ Unit: Centre for China Studies
Closing Date: November 15, 2024

The Centre for China Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) seeks to appoint a faculty member to help further strengthen the study of modern and contemporary China in a global context. An interdisciplinary research and teaching unit that directly speaks to one of the University’s strategic areas for development, the Centre offers degree programmes at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Applicants trained in humanities disciplines with a focus on modern and contemporary China, especially those from the fields of anthropology, history, cultural and media studies, are encouraged to apply. The successful candidate should be able to teach courses in English to a diverse student body and is committed to interdisciplinary research and innovative pedagogy.

Applicants should have (i) a PhD degree in a relevant academic discipline; (ii) a clear research profile that contributes to and extends the existing strengths of the Centre; (iii) a strong record or potential of quality publications and grant applications; (iv) a strong dedication to teaching and student engagement. To be considered for appointment at the rank of Associate Professor, applicants should have achieved a high standing in the relevant research field and demonstrated academic and international professional leadership. Continue reading CUHK position →

Middlebury position

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Assistant Professor of Chinese Language, Literature, and Culture
Middlebury College, MIDDLEBURY, VT

The Greenberg-Starr Department of Chinese invites applicants for a tenure-track position in Chinese language, literature, and culture to begin in fall 2025. Candidates may be specialists in any historical era and any genre of Chinese literature or other form of Chinese cultural production, but priority will be given to candidates who can teach courses on traditional Chinese literature and culture, including poetry, prose, and drama, as well as topical courses not confined to a single historical period. Candidates with experience and demonstrated success teaching Chinese language, literature, and culture to undergraduate students are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants must have the Ph.D. in hand or expected by September 2025. Appointment is expected to be at the rank of Assistant Professor. Candidates must be committed to high quality undergraduate education, including language education and the mentoring of a diverse student population, and they also must be willing to dedicate themselves to participation in a department with a tradition of teamwork and team teaching. Candidates must have native or near-native proficiency in Modern Standard Chinese (“Mandarin”) and English and be eager to teach both Chinese language courses and courses in English on Chinese literature and culture. The typical teaching load will be 2 fall semester courses and 2 spring semester courses plus 1 Winter Term course in every other year, with Winter Term off in the alternate year. When teaching in Winter Term, the new colleague will join the three-instructor team that teaches our four-week intensive continuation of beginning Mandarin Chinese. In each fall and spring semester the new colleague will typically teach 1 Mandarin language course and 1 course in English on Chinese literature or culture. In some semesters the new colleague may also be asked to teach a 1st- or 2nd-year Chinese drill class. The new colleague will have the opportunity to contribute to the college-wide curriculum, including the first-year seminar program and the programs in Comparative Literature and Literary Studies, and will have the opportunity to propose courses to be cross-listed with other departments and programs, including, for example, Film & Media Culture, and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. Candidates should provide evidence of commitment to excellent teaching, potential for excellence in scholarship, and the ability to innovate in the design and teaching of courses both in English and in Chinese. Continue reading Middlebury position →

Revolutionary Taiwan

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Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order
by Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison
Hardcover ISBN 9781638571957  •  Paperback ISBN 9781638573227 • 222pp.
Use coupon code SAVE15 for 15% off print editions at http://cambriapress.com/RevolutionaryTaiwan (Ends October 10, 2024, at midnight EST)

In the early 1990s, the people of Taiwan gained the right to vote for their executive and legislature. In building a democratic society, they transformed how they saw themselves and their homeland. The outcome of democratization was nothing less than revolutionary, producing a new, de facto nation and people that can be justly called “Taiwanese.”

Yet this revolution remains unfinished and incomplete. In an era of increasing US-China rivalry, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) claims sovereignty over Taiwan and insists that “reunification” is the historic mission of all peoples on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The PRC threatens war with and over the island, inviting a crisis that would engulf the region and beyond.

Common ideas about Taiwan—that it “split with China in 1949” or “sees itself as the true China”—fail to explain why the Taiwanese withstand pressure from the PRC to relinquish their democratic self-governance.

Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order  sheds light on this. Each chapter shows how democratization in Taiwan constituted a revolution, changing not just the form of government but also how Taiwanese people conceptualized the island, coming to see it a complete nation unto itself. At the same time, however, Beijing has blocked the “normal” endpoint of this revolution: an open declaration of statehood and welcome into the global community. Continue reading Revolutionary Taiwan →

Toward a New Cultural Materialism–cfp

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Call for Papers: Toward a New Cultural Materialism
2025 ACLA annual meeting (May 29–June 1, 2025, held virtually)
https://www.acla.org/node/47762

Organized by Xuesong Shao (xshao@nus.edu.sg) and Ross Hernández (rsshernandez@ucdavis.edu)
Paper abstract submission portal: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper
Deadline: Oct 14, 2024

Seminar abstract:

This seminar investigates material conditions and contradictions in and as cultural processes. In the mid-twentieth century, Raymond Williams argued for understanding culture as a process that operates within the means of production in relation to specific social relations and historical conditions. Over the past decade, emerging scholarship on print culture, media archaeology, and material culture has also propelled comparatists to think with objects and things. In light of this material turn, it is critical to revisit and revamp the discourse of cultural materialism, to periodize the tensions between the base and superstructure on the one hand, and on the other, to ground the entanglement between culture and its material aspects at our current moment of capitalist development. Rather than capitulating to technological determinism or its negative–markets that produce and prey upon nostalgia–we propose that these transformations call for a new cultural materialism. This approach would critically engage with the base-superstructure dialectic across literature, art, and media. Continue reading Toward a New Cultural Materialism–cfp →