Due to COVID-19 related concerns and uncertainties, “Spying on East Asia” conference has been postponed until Feb 27 – 28, 2021.  The new CFP deadline is September 15, 2020. Those who have already submitted a proposal do not need to resubmit.

Spying on East Asia: Intelligence and Surveillance in the Age of Information
Feb 27 – 28, 2021
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Washington University in St. Louis

This two-day conference will focus on secret agents and hidden control during hot, cold, and information wars in East Asia throughout the twentieth century to the present. Competition over information formed an invisible yet vitally important battlefield that had paramount effects on the war front in the first half of the twentieth century. Newly invented media technologies, such as radio, telegram, and tape recording, were mobilized to gather, reproduce, and disseminate intelligence. Secret agents and spies crossed institutional, regional, and national boundaries, destabilizing senses of truth and trust. The prevalence of the espionage genre in East Asia reflects the heightened political tension that persisted throughout the cold war, and also contributes to contemporary imaginations of wartime. Today, new technologies of surveillance and information control have largely reshaped people’s social experience and sense of security, raising pressing questions about power, privacy, and identity. Continue reading →

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the Routledge Series “Asia, Europe, and Global Connections: Culture, History, and Trans-Area Studies.” This series, edited by Chunjie Zhang, Stefan Keppler-Tasaki, and Reto Hofmann, aims to publish innovative studies of connections and comparisons between Europe and Asia in all historical periods. We welcome contributions from all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including literary and cultural studies, history, political science, sociology, geography, gender studies. The aim is to provide a platform for the growing scholarship on Asia and Europe in a global context and the emerging field of trans-area studies.

Details about the series can be found at https://www.routledge.com/Asia-Europe-and-Global-Connections/book-series/AEC01

Chunjie Zhang <zhangchunjie2011@gmail.com>

Dear friends,

AAS has been canceled. However, since my panelists and I do not want to miss this rare opportunity of intellectual exchanges we have decided to move our panel “Rearticulating Gender and Class in Postsocialist China: Women’s Literature as Method” online. We invite you to join us via Zoom on Mar 19 (Thursday) at 07:30 PM Eastern Time.

Presenters: Xueping Zhong, Ping Zhu, and Hui Xiao
Discussant: Tani Barlow

[Zoom link: https://oklahoma.zoom.us/j/782700295]
Please see the attached flyer for more information.

best,

Ping Zhu

Call for Papers: MLA Annual Convention, January 7-10, 2021, in Toronto, Canada, “Eileen Chang as World Literature”

Eileen Chang (1920-1995), a Chinese woman writer, won her overnight success in 1940s cosmopolitan Shanghai. She left Shanghai in 1952 for Hong Kong in pursuit of literary freedom. In three years, she departed again for the United States, the center of the world after World War II. The trajectory of her writing career represents a microcosm of a theoretical problem of world literature. Through the Eileen Chang phenomenon in national and/or world literatures, we can investigate encounters, conflicts, and mediations between different cultures. This guaranteed session aims to develop the systematic nature of the relations between Eileen Chang and world literature as these have developed through sociopolitical climates, institutions, cultural migration, and individual intellectual activity on a global scale. Please send an approximately 250-word abstract and 200-word bio by March 15, 2020, to Dr. Sijia Yao (syao4@unl.edu).

Spying on East Asia: Intelligence and Surveillance in the Age of Information
October 31-November 1, 2020
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Washington University in St. Louis

This two-day conference will focus on secret agents and hidden control during hot, cold, and information wars in East Asia throughout the twentieth century to the present. Competition over information formed an invisible yet vitally important battlefield that had paramount effects on the war front in the first half of the twentieth century. Newly invented media technologies, such as radio, telegram, and tape recording, were mobilized to gather, reproduce, and disseminate intelligence. Secret agents and spies crossed institutional, regional, and national boundaries, destabilizing senses of truth and trust. The prevalence of the espionage genre in East Asia reflects the heightened political tension that persisted throughout the cold war, and also contributes to contemporary imaginations of wartime. Today, new technologies of surveillance and information control have largely reshaped people’s social experience and sense of security, raising pressing questions about power, privacy, and identity. Continue reading →

Call for Papers: Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities (ISSN: 1024-3631)
Special Issue: Sinophone Literature in the Global South

Guest Editors:

Min-xu Zhan, Assistant Professor of the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature and Transnational Cultural Studies, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan
Chia-rong Wu, Senior Lecturer of the Global, Cultural and Language Studies, The University of Canterbury, New Zealand

The discourse of Sinophone literature is two-fold in the network of the Global South. First, it is common to see in traditional Chinese history such expressions as “southern barbarians” and “South Seas,” both of which have long been employed to imagine and portray the Chinese south. From a Chinese perspective, Sinophone literature in the Global South refers to the literary production of the South beyond mainland China. To be more specific, the field includes Sinophone writing produced in the southern regions, including Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. In recent years, the horizon of the Chinese literary study has been expanded in response to world Chinese literature and Sinophone literature within the framework of the Global South. Current scholarship not only recognizes the geographical distinctiveness between the north and south in Chinese literary production, but it also highlights the unique features of the literary south with respect to the colonial history, multiethnic exchange, and cultural practices of the local community. Continue reading →

Call for papers: Practices of Reading in the People’s Republic of China
Freiburg (Germany), Dec. 9-11, 2020

Research into literary and intellectual life typically focuses on analyses of texts and their production. The reader, practices of reading and the meanings and interpretations that (ordinary) readers arrive at very often are missing from the picture. This conference aims at filling this gap in research by focusing on practices of reading in the People’s Republic of China.

The conference “Practices of Reading in the People’s Republic of China” is hosted by the ERC-funded project ‘The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China (READCHINA)’. READCHINA investigates into the politics and practices of reading in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), their interpretation and their impact on social and intellectual change. The main objective is a reinvestigation of literary history, intellectual history and cultural policy of the PRC from the perspective of the ordinary reader, who time and again aimed at testing or transgressing the boundaries of the rigid system. READCHINA includes research on fictional figures in popular literature; audiences of entertainment Internet fiction; organized forms and participants’ responses at rituals of collective reading participants; anonymous bookstore frequenters; and second-hand book readers and dealers. We explore reading as a tactic of common readers from the grassroots. Continue reading →

Global Storytelling
January 28 -30, 2020
CVA1022 Communication and Visual Arts Building
Hong Kong Baptist University 5 Hereford Road Kowloon Tong HK

The symposium explores the affect and effect of storytelling across regional borders, platforms, and genres including narrative features and documentaries, serial and series dramas on network TV, Netflix, & HBO, narratives on podcast and radio programs, long narrative video journalism and short format video/personal essays on YouTube, and other online platforms. The symposium serves as a platform for the launch a new academic journal: Global Storytelling: Journal of Film and Moving Image. Housed in the School of Communication at the Hong Kong Baptist University with Professor Ying Zhu serving as the founding editor, the journal will be published by the University of Michigan Press.

Symposium Chair
Professor Ying Zhu
Director, Centre for Film and Moving Image Research FMIR
Academy of Film School of Communication Hong Kong Baptist University Continue reading →