Dear colleagues,

As the incoming chair of the MLA’s forum on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, I’d like to invite you to consider submitting a proposal for the 2022 MLA conference in Washington, D.C. Calls for papers can be submitted now and will be accepted through February 28: submitting a call through MLA brings your session to the attention of potential participants (as described here). CFP are optional: complete special session proposals (described here) are due on April 1. The conference is committed to participant access and was completely virtual this year; I suspect that the risk of coronavirus will make next year’s conference hybrid physical/virtual. I will also point out that the MLA is one of the few conferences which allows for non-English presentations; I am available to revise proposal translations (which must be in English) for MCLC members and people in the field, just contact me off-list.

The forum leadership under outgoing chair Lee Haiyan has made some exciting plans for next year’s program. We would love to see you in D.C. (or online) in January.

Thanks,

Nick Admussen
Cornell University Continue reading →

Happy New Year!

For the MLA members among us, the first or second week after the new year is usually taken up with traveling to someplace very cold to attend the annual MLA convention. This year, as with many things, the conference has gone virtual. The program, however, is not any less exciting and wide-ranging. There are dozens of panels and papers on Chinese literature–you can find them easily with a keyword search through the online program.

Below I highlight the sessions sponsored by the Executive Committee of the Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature LLC (PST times are used here)

• 48 Multiple Temporalities of the Chinese Avant-Garde 7 January 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM
• 217 Metamorphosis of Chinese Science Fiction: Tropes, Concepts, and Theories 8 January 7:15 AM – 8:30 AM
• 463 Problematizing National Cultures in Modern East Asian Literatures 9 January 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
• 523 Eileen Chang as World Literature 9 January 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM

See you on Zoom!

Haiyan Lee
Chair, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature LLC Executive Committee

Dear colleagues,

We live in a society where the nature, definition, and perception of labor are undergoing fundamental changes. The notion of immaterial labor blurs the line between productive and unproductive labor, as well as that between production and consumption, showing the rising weight of the affective, aesthetic, intellectual, and cognitive work in contemporary social reproduction. Digital technologies now allow individualized mass productions (mass personalization), where transnational capital relentlessly pursues creative expression and artistic connoisseurship of the users. This results in the expropriation of the so-called artistic/creative labor and the reduction of the aesthetics to social engineering, as well as the abstraction and commodification of artistic creation (designing) in tune with technological thinking and consumerism. What we witness is an increasingly impoverished and abstracted notion of art and an increasingly broad and ambiguous notion of labor. Continue reading →

Please join the Critical China Scholars for our next webinar!

China’s Capitalism and the World
Thur, Nov. 19, 5-6:30 EST — Register here (free)

The past decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the pace and scale of global capitalist expansion; the rapidity of consequent social transformations is in part due to China’s increasing participation in these processes. The Belt and Road Initiative and its associated infrastructure projects have received a huge amount of attention, but this webinar expands the focus to less understood and less often seen aspects of the reorganization of global capital. Based on extensive research and innovative approaches, the speakers will make visible the ways in which Chinese investment in South America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa is reshaping local and global life, resource extraction, and relations of political domination and resistance.

Co-sponsors: Gongchao; Made in China Journal; The Nation

Moderator: Eli Friedman, Cornell University

Panelists:

• Patrick Bond, School of Government, University of the Western Cape
• Juliet Lu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Atkinson Center for Sustainability & Department of Global Development, Cornell University
• Farai Maguwu, Executive Director, Centre for Natural Resource Governance, Harare, Zimbabwe
• Omar Manky, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Universidad del Pacífico
• Gustavo Oliveira, Global & International Studies, University of California, Irvine

Rebecca E. Karl
History Department

Chinese Literature across the Borderlands
13 November 2020; 13:00-15:00 EST
Convened by David Wang (Harvard), Kyle Shernuk (Yale), and Miya Qiong Xie (Dartmouth)
To register and receive a Zoom link, please click here.

This workshop aims to explore the shifting definitions of the borderland as a territorial gateway, a geopolitical space, a contact zone, a liminal terrain, and an imaginary portal. To this end, participants will explore the intersection of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and ecological dynamics that inform the cartography of the Chinese borderland, from the Northeast to the Southwest, from Inner Mongolia to Tibet, and from Nanyang to Nanmei. We will reflect on the recent, interdisciplinary growth in understanding the characteristics of borders and frontiers, including migration and settlement, cultural hybridity, and transnationalism, as well as take issues with the boundaries of literature as it manifests itself in multiple forms of media and mediation. This workshop is organized around a forthcoming special issue of Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature. Continue reading →

With the deadline for ACLA abstract submissions fast approaching (11:59 PM EST on Saturday), we’d like to invite colleagues to submit proposals to our seminar, “Re-thinking the Chinese Enlightenment.” Here’s the link and description:

https://acla.secure-platform.com/a/solicitations/2/sessiongallery/263

“The Enlightenment discourse of rational humanism has fundamentally shaped modern Chinese culture since the May 4th era. Two major intellectual movements of 20th century China—the New Culture Movement in the 1910s–20s and the “cultural fever” of 1980s—are often referred to as the Chinese Enlightenment. More generally, for most who advocate for the modern transformation of Chinese culture, to be modern means to uphold basic values of Enlightenment humanism.

On the other hand, the Chinese Enlightenment has also faced significant challenges. From within, the liberalist notion of individual freedom is contested by the Marxist conception of the collective. Contrary to Li Zehou’s formula of “the dual variation of Enlightenment and nationalism,” the tension between the individual and the collective is an inherent dimension of the Chinese Enlightenment. From without, while turning their backs against tradition, many modern Chinese intellectuals also cast into doubt the Enlightenment vision of reason and teleological progress. Finally, as a thought system originating from Europe, Enlightenment discourse has to undergo various modifications to take root in Chinese culture. For the Chinese Enlightenment, a paramount challenge is how to negotiate between the two different cultural traditions.

This seminar invites papers to re-think various dimensions of the Chinese Enlightenment. We especially welcome papers that focus on literature, film, art, and intellectual history.”

Wenjin Cui (Univ. of New Hampshire) & Todd Foley (NYU)

The annual Sinopsis workshop on the CCP’s global influence, began on Monday 12 October at 1:30 PM CEST. One more day to go, Tuesday Oct 13, 2020.

Program & website: https://sinopsis.cz/en/workshop3/

On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCOxTS-D0NM&feature=youtu.be

Fwd by: Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu