#MeToo in China: Media, Activism, Patriarchy, Queer/ing Feminism and Beyond
November 18 (Friday) @12:00–2:00 EST
MW 329, University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus, and Zoom (hybrid)

Following the global #MeToo movement, activists in China have also demonstrated tenacity, #creativity, and strength despite systemic constraints, making the Chinese #MeToo movement one of the most resilient against all odds. More recently, a settlement in the US court between Chinese billionaire Richard Liu/Liu Qiangdong 刘强东 and Chinese graduate student #Jingyao is considered a landmark case for its unprecedented transparency.

This panel draws on some of the latest scholarship as well as activism experience on the Chinese #MeToo movement from the perspectives of media, sociology, feminist and queer studies, and religious studies. It will have comparative value for anyone interested in contemporary feminism, transnational activism, and the global flows of patriarchal politics and populism today. Continue reading #MeToo in China panel →

Professor David Wang is hosting an online workshop on Oct. 28 on Eileen Cheng’s new translation of Lu Xun.

Title: Lu Xun and World Literature: The Task of Translation

Panelists:
Eileen J. Cheng (Pomona College)
David Damrosch (Harvard University)
Theodore Huters (UCLA)
Hu Ying (UC-Irvine)

Moderator:
David Wang (Harvard University)

Date/Time: October 28th, 8-9:30 pm (EDT)

Sponsors:
Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jFdej11VT_qDbHJrcmtdBw

Call for Papers
ACLA Chicago (March 16-19, 2023)
The Politics of Reading and Writing in Chinese and Sinophone Literature
Organized by Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai and Cara Healey

This seminar explores depictions of reading and writing in Chinese and Sinophone literature across time and space. Chinese literary traditions – from Confucian and Daoist canons to Lu Xun’s “madman” reading between the lines to the formal innovations of contemporary authors like Mo Yan and Dung Kai-cheung – draw attention to the dynamics among readers, writers, and texts. Authors mobilize intertextual, metatextual, and paratextual techniques to elucidate the multiplicity and fragmentation of narrative, history, and reality. This seminar probes the politics and ethics of reading and writing, at both the textual level and the levels of literary production, circulation, and consumption. It explores conceptions of truth and challenges creations of meaning through language.

We welcome papers on topics including but not limited to:

• Truth in literature, including unreal truth, unjustifiable truth, truth beyond reality, anti-truth, and more.
• Intertextuality and metatextuality, within and across Chinese and Sinophone literature, broadly conceived, including comparisons with other literary traditions.
• Formal interventions such as allusion, allegory, ambiguity, commentary, self-referentiality, palimpsest, texts-within-texts, unreliable narrators, and self-censorship.
• Reading and writing as means of identity construction across intersections of ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, region, class, and ability.
• Questions of authorship and textual authority, including issues of translation and adaptation.
• Censorship and literary innovation.
• Reading and writing as tools to (re)shape history and memory, including non-human or posthuman memories or ways of being.
• Connections and tensions between written and oral traditions, including issues of language sovereignty.

If you are interested, please submit your paper proposal to this seminar via the ACLA website by October 31, 2022. If you have questions, please contact the organizers, Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai (ytsai@citadel.edu) and Cara Healey (healeyc@wabash.edu).

CFP: Discovering the Subplots: the (De)construction of Gender, History, and Power, ACLA 2023 Seminar

In her 2019 book Ornamentalism, Anne Anlin Cheng looks at the historical relationship of conflation between person and thing and the problematic relationship between Asiatic femininity and its entwinement with commodities and artifacts. Asian bodies, Asian women particularly, have been simultaneously embodied and erased through ornamental objectness. Late imperial Chinese nuns were often portrayed in a hyper-sexualized way by male authors, serving as the spectacle for the voyeuristic gaze upon transgressive women. Similarly, opium smoking women in the nineteenth century who were condemned as the ills of traditional Chinese society further speak to the irony of the addict/viewers’ pleasure-seeking and the disembodiment of women in an empire in its twilight. In the twenty-first century, mingong (migrant peasant workers) migrated to metropolitan cities for better living conditions, only to find a delicately presented promise of urbanization. Likewise, in a media-saturated, online culture young women idealize the lavish city life, dissolving themselves in fashion and consumption. Living in pages, on stage, in pictures, and on screen, these people fade into mainstream discourses of commercial publishing, national salvation, urbanization, and fetishism. What are other subplots depicted in history and literary works? This seminar focuses on past and contemporary Asian women, seeking to envision alternatives to their simultaneously opaque and hyper-visible voices and presences through the analysis of a variety of genres, for instance, drama, newspaper, films, and animation. Ultimately, this seminar hopes to unfold a gendered and nonlinear story about Asian women’s “forgotten genealogy”, which combines their “life and nonlife, labor and style that conditions the modern human conceit” (Anne Anlin Cheng 442).

Please submit a paper proposal to https://www.acla.org/discovering-subplots-deconstruction-gender-history-and-power, and join us for a great discussion on women, gender, literary and performance studies.

We welcome you to contact us (Shu Yang, shu.yang@wmich.edu; Xiaoqiao Xu, xiaoqiao.xu@uconn.edu) if you have any questions/concerns, thanks!

Below, please find the seminar proposal for a panel on “Women’s Literary Production and the Publishing Industry in Modern China” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting March 16-19, 2023 in Chicago. To submit a paper for the seminar, please visit the ACLA website. Please e-mail me (xliu@butler.edu) with questions or for more information. Paper proposals are due by October 31.

Publishing, with its cultures and related activities, and with its changing technicity, is a multifaceted phenomenon in modern China. It is commercial and profit-seeking. Meanwhile, it often carefully maintains its public resistant stance against commercial interests and grooms its long-standing support to various literary and artistic causes. It is patriarchal, as it is mostly male-dominant. Yet, it also shows support in varying forms to women writers and provides space for their literary activities in the changing socio-economic environments and techno-material conditions. These complexities in printing and circulation inevitably play into the writing of modern Chinese women writers. Continue reading Women’s Literary Production and the Publishing Industry–cfpp →

Seminar Proposal, Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, 2023

Martin Guiney (Kenyon College)
Leon Sachs (University of Kentucky)

Literary Studies in the Age of Assessment, or: Must Literature Teachers Justify Their Existence?

Ongoing debates over the practical value of an academic degree pose a direct challenge to the field of literary studies. As a result, justifications for the teaching of literature are increasingly expressed in very concrete terms. We hear, for example, that the study of literature teaches communicative skills that will increase students’ professional opportunities and, consequently, improve their financial stability.  Even quantitative methods have been enlisted in recent years to assess the value of literary study.  Some justifications are more immaterial, but no less utilitarian.  For example, reading literary fiction is said to cultivate “empathy” and therefore promote civic morality, an argument supported by recent experiments in cognitive psychology.

Fears about the future of our profession underlie these practical arguments. What will happen to academic departments of literature if students are free to take only classes that (they think) will make their lives easier, more prosperous, or (in a less selfish vein) of greater benefit to society? This is not simply a question for higher education professionals: the teaching of literature in secondary schools in North America and around the world is subject to similar pressures. Continue reading Literary Studies in an Age of Assessment–cfp →

CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED
First All-Mediterranean Chinese Studies Conference

The deadline to submit abstracts for the First All-Mediterranean Chinese Studies Conference to be held in Valletta, Malta (Feb. 1-3) has been extended to 15 November. Please see the conference website for more information about how to submit an abstract for a panel or individual paper.

Posted by: lehyla heward <lehyla.heward@um.edu.mt>

ACLA Seminar on Diasporic Subjectivity-CFP

https://www.acla.org/between-self-representation-and-ethnography-diasporic-subjectivity-reconsidered

Organized by Anqi Liu and Melody Yunzi Li

In Primitive Passions, Rey Chow theorizes Chinese contemporary film as a new ethnography—“a kind of translation between cultures” (Chow, 1995:x) that bridges one’s native land and the capitalist market. Borrowing Chow’s concept in the context of diaspora literature, when the personal past, present, and the possible future are integrated into the collective history, narrative, and imagination, literary diaspora not only adapts, modifies, and forwards the individual encounter in an ethnographic manner but also plays a key role in the formation of cultural and ethnic identity vis-à-vis multiculturalism and globalization.

As cultural awareness and socio-political engagement among diasporic intellectuals are revitalized and heightened, the primary concern of this seminar is to examine the literary arena where the diasporic intellectual becomes cultural or ethnic spokesperson who projects self into the collective. When the boundary between self-representation and ethnography blurs, how does the literary diaspora internalize the collective displacement, nostalgia, or rootlessness? And how do they attest to their diasporic subjectivity as a cultural or ethnic representative?

Papers that explore a broad spectrum of genres and disciplines will be welcome. Potential topics and themes include (but are not limited to):

• Identities and ethnicities
• The politics of self-representation
• Diaspora and exile
• Spokespersonship
• Ethnographical writing

Please submit your abstract (200-300 words) and a brief bio by October 31, 2022. For queries, feel free to contact Anqi Liu (anqi.liu@uga.edu).

The CU Boulder Asian Studies Graduate Association (CUBASGA) invites submissions for its annual graduate student conference, to be held fully in-person on the CU Boulder campus on February 4 and 5, 2023.

Current graduate students from across the US and around the world are encouraged to submit proposals on any aspect of Asian culture. We invite a broad range of research interests on the region that may include, but are not limited to, the following fields: Anthropology, Art and Art History, Literatures, Economics, Ethnic Studies, Ethnomusicology, Film Studies, Geography, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Sociology, Theatre and Dance, Urban and Regional Planning, and Women’s Studies.

The conference will include keynote addresses from two prominent scholars in Chinese and Japanese studies, Prof. Tina Lu (Colonel John Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University) and Prof. Sabine Frühstück (Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara). Keynote speakers and University of Colorado faculty will be on hand to provide feedback to presenters throughout the conference. Above all, the conference is a forum through which graduate students, researchers, and faculty are able to engage in dialogues of critical importance to the development of our respective fields, providing crucial opportunities for expanding the horizons of academic perspectives as well as the breadth of academic and professional networks. Continue reading CU Boulder graduate conference 2023–cfp →

You are welcome to submit a paper to our panel at ACLA 2023 “Literary Production Under Socialism and Capitalism.” The deadline is Oct 31.

For more details, please see below and here: https://www.acla.org/literary-production-under-socialism-and-capitalism?fbclid=IwAR1U8J16YSfem75k-8XWfktKSRk8U2GiiMjrvhl3P1jj-a4L5L_eu1AB020

Organizer: Sandy Zhang
Co-Organizer: Xianmin Shen

Contact the Seminar Organizers

As Perry Link comments on literature from the Soviet Union, “if works written in opposition to coercion seem wanting as ‘pure art,’ they can nevertheless be very good, as Irving Howe has noted, at filling the special and sometimes intense spiritual needs that tyranny can generate.” It seems literature was subject to the doubleness of richer resource and more severe control in the socialist regimes compared to its being in a capitalist market. How has literature played similar or different roles in capitalism and socialism? How do different socio-economic systems (fail to) impact literary creation and production? In what sense is cultural production an “inversion of the logic of the larger economy of the society” (Bourdieu)? How has literary production changed in an era of global capitalism? Continue reading Literary Production under Socialism and Capitalism–cfp →

Below, please find the seminar proposal for a panel on “Understanding Calligraphy” at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting March 16-19, 2023 in Chicago. To submit a paper for the seminar, please visit the ACLA website. Please e-mail me (cestep@sas.upenn.edu) with questions or for more information. Paper proposals are due by October 31.

Calligraphy is often understood as a literati or religious practice which exists (or did exist) within certain historical social and material networks. But what happens when those networks fall away, or are replaced by new modes of writing and appreciation? In short, when and how does writing become, or cease to be, calligraphy? Much scholarship has been devoted to the ways in which modern modes of inscription, circulation, and consumption, from the typewriter to the periodical, have impacted literary texts, but we do not understand as much about how these modes shifted the boundaries between such categories as “writing” and “calligraphy.” Continue reading Understanding Calligraphy ACLA seminar–cfp →