On Wed 9/27 (3-4:30 EDT), Professor Mark Bender of Ohio State University will have a short discussion with Robin Visser about her new book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023), followed by audience questions. Register here: https://carolinaasiacenter.unc.edu/event/visser-book-launch/
Posted by: Robin Visser <rvisser@email.unc.edu>
The ‘Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative Public Talk Series’ will be hosting the next talk on Monday 18th September at 12: 00 pm to 13:30 pm (BST)
Our speaker, Mr. Ning Yi, Deputy Director of Overseas Chinese History Museum of China, will give a talk on Tracing the History of Chinese Diasporas and Narrating Stories of Cultural Exchange — Explorations and Practices at the Overseas Chinese History Museum of China. The talk will be given in Mandarin Chinese. Simultaneous translation into English is provided.
The event is jointly hosted by HOMELandS (Hub On Migration, Exile, Languages and Spaces) at University of Westminster and the Chinese Heritage Centre of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It is organised as part of the project Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative funded by AHRC.
This is a free event, held online via Zoom. Please register here – Eventbrite link – for access to the meeting on the day.
Best wishes,
Cangbai Wang c.wang6@westminster.ac.uk
Liang Hong and Liu Zhenyun in the UK for the Sinoist Books Chinese author roadshow
Sinoist Author Roadshow 2023
10–18 October
This October join us in for a UK-spanning roadshow featuring two of China’s premier literary authors. Immerse yourself in the art of storytelling with the eminent Chinese authors Liang Hong (梁鸿) and Liu Zhenyun (刘震云). Explore how their books arrived in English translation through a variety of exclusive events.
More details in the weblink here
https://sinoistbooks.com/our-events/2023-sinoist-roadshow/
Schedule
(10 October) Manchester – The Manchester China Institute – Physical
(11 October) Leeds – The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing – Physical/Virtual
(12 October) Newcastle – The Confucius Institute at Newcastle University – Physical
(13 October) Edinburgh – The Confucius Institute for Scotland
(16 October) SOAS – SOAS (NOT PUBLIC FACING) – Physical
(17 October) Oxford – Oxford International Centre for Publishing / Oxford Brookes Confucius Institute – Physical
(18 October) London – China Exchange (CHINESE ONLY) – Physical/Virtual
Posted by: Daniel Li <Daniel.li@alaincharlesasia.com>
Babel of Chinese SF August Event
Lu Hang on “Tongji Bridge:” When Tradition Meets Robotics
To join us, send an email to babelofchinesesf@gmail.com for the event link!
Beijing Time: 20:00, August 11, 2023.
UK Summer Time: 13:00, August 11, 2023.
Fiction: “Tongji Bridge” by Lu Hang
Translated by Li Yi
Chinese Version: https://freewechat.com/a/MjM5OTAxMzMwMA==/2652021465/2
English Version: In Galaxy Awards 1: Chinese Science Fiction Anthology (https://www.amazon.ca/Galaxy-Awards-Chinese-Science-Anthology-ebook/dp/B0BR5Y8Q5Z/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=)
Walk across Tongji, ward off worries.
[……]
I knew that the unison cheering would turn into diverse comments once I took off the Lion Head at the closing of the show. What a miserable imitator and disgrace to the national essence, some might criticize; or, what a genius innovator and ground breaker, others might applaud. However, I did not do this to get their feedback.
But, for my seventh great-uncle to watch a dragon and lion dance show once more.
Or better, if our performance attracted new interest, and new apprentices came to learn the traditional art from us. I would pass it on without reservation to anyone who would dedicate themselves to the art, no matter where that person was from, or rather, no matter that was a person or not. (From “Tongji Bridge” By Lu Hang) Continue reading
Source: Asia Society (nd)
ChinaFile Presents: The Future of Dissent Inside and Outside of China
A discussion with authors Liao Yiwu and Ian Johnson
Liao Yiwu poses during a photo session in Paris, April 2, 2019. Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images
Event Details
IN-PERSON
Wed 12 Jul 2023; 6:30 – 8 p.m.
Asia Society
725 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
Click for directions
BUY TICKETS
$15 Nonmembers; $8 Students and Seniors; Free for Members
Please join us for a discussion with internationally acclaimed Chinese author Liao Yiwu, co-hosted by PEN America. A reporter, novelist, poet, and musician, Liao is best known for The Corpse Walker, his 2008 collection of interviews with laborers, migrants, and other people living at the margins of China’s economic boom, and for For a Song and a Hundred Songs, a memoir of the prison term he served for his writings about the Tiananmen protests. Since 2011, he has lived in exile in Berlin.
In conversation with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ian Johnson, Liao will discuss the role of political dissent in exile, the use of fiction as a means for grappling with history, as well as his recent novels Wuhan, about the outbreak of COVID-19, and Love in the Times of Mao Zedong, set during the Cultural Revolution, and his documentary film on the construction of a Taiwanese memorial to Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo.
The conversation will be conducted in Chinese and English with translation, and is co-hosted by ChinaFile and PEN America. Continue reading
MAY 3 ONLINE EVENT: “Anti-May Fourth Films of Republican China”
Public online lecture by Christopher Rea
Hosted by the Australian Centre for China in the World
EVENT INFO: https://ciw.anu.edu.au/events/anti-may-fourth-films-republican-china
REGISTRATION: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/anti-may-fourth-films-of-republican-china-tickets-628191877817
EVENT DESCRIPTION
Nora should not step out and find her own way. She should stay at home, dress modestly, and be a good wife. Chinese silent films of the 1920s and early 1930s often convey ideological messages strikingly at odds with May Fourth ideals such as equality of the sexes and liberation of the individual. While some films express sympathy for progressive causes and outrage at present inequalities, others are overtly misogynistic and reactionary. This talk will focus on Chinese-made films that May Fourth figures would consider to be on the wrong side of history, and show how they harness the power of the film medium—charismatic stars, special effects, popular Hollywood tropes—to take us back to the good old days. On this May Fourth anniversary, bring your sense of righteousness and film studies sensibilities to a tour through moral dramas such as The Pearl Necklace 一串珍珠 (1926), Don’t Change Your Husband 情海重吻 (1929), Poor Daddy 怕老婆 (1929), Love and Duty 戀愛與義務 (1931), and The Peach Girl 桃花泣血記 (1931). #NoraStayHome
Christopher Rea
Indigenous Taiwan, Transpacific Connections
台灣原住民文化: 跨越太平洋的聯結
Bilingual videos of eight talks with four Taiwan writers and filmmakers about Indigeneity, art, and life in contemporary Taiwan:
Writer Badai 巴代
“Indigenous literary practices in postcolonial Taiwan” (43 mins): https://youtu.be/df48hcX2xCw
“Indigenous culture in modern society” (41 mins): https://youtu.be/z89TuiduB7o
Filmmaker Wei Te-sheng 魏德聖
“The making of the first blockbuster film about Taiwan’s Indigenous history” (43 mins): https://youtu.be/2lfaTFpm5tE
“Representing Taiwan tribes in ‘Warriors of the Rainbow'” (37 mins): https://youtu.be/-wEsvAS0EV4
Writer Ahronglong Sakinu 亞榮隆撒可奴
“Reviving Taiwan Indigenous practices for a new generation” (58 mins): https://youtu.be/vfMpMUpFEqI
“Mountain boars and flying squirrels in ‘Hunter School'” (44 mins): https://youtu.be/ISDPzkXTPrI
Continue reading
The UC Davis History Department invites you to the 2023 Virtual Liu Lecture, which is free and open to the public. It will be delivered by Professor Tani Barlow of Rice University, who will speak on “Instinct, Society, Vitality: Li Zehou’s Farewell to Life Philosophy” at 15:10 to 16:30 on Tuesday, March 14, followed by a Q&A session. Registration information is available here.
Li Shicen’s (1892–1934) evolutionary Bergsonian Marxism exemplifies how Chinese philosophers — Zhang Zhunmai (1887-1969), Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), Zhang Dongsun (1886-1973), Li Jingxi (1857-1925), Feng Youlan (1895-1990) — struggled to resolve the question of “structuration of life,” or human bodily evolution. Evolutionary philosophy is where Chinese modernists debated “life” (shenghuo) and “intuition” (zhijue), meaning insight into organic life, particularly in the debate over “science and the outlook on life” (kexue yu renshengguan lunzhan). Li Shicen, was a radical who incorporated earlier Ruists like Wang Yangming (1472–1529) and Dai Zhen (1724—1777) into his radicalism by fusing sexual difference to political philosophy. Li Shicen, like early Li Zehou, was not iconoclastic. However, Li Shicen and Li Zehou are opposite figures in the historical integration of life philosophy into existing modes of thinking. When Li Zehou superseded “life” and imposed the category of “culture,” he extinguished radical elements in philosophy and masculinized the human: he exsanguinated a vital, sexual, streak in Chinese philosophy and replaced it with an abstract, modernist, neo-Confucian “tradition,” grounded in a masculinist, Kantian-Confucian imaginary. Continue reading
Webinar: Dr. Michel Hockx – China’s Online Literature and the Problem of Preservation
Thursday, March 30, 2023
6:00-7:30p.m. CST
Virtual event held on Zoom.
Please register to attend:
https://kansas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIsfuuhqz4tHNMIRYEJ1dHGDkH_7fvjGM78
Abstract
Since its inception in the late 1990s, websites devoted to the production and discussion of literary work have been ubiquitous on the Chinese Web. Over the years, the study of online literature has become an established field of inquiry within the Chinese academy. General studies and textbooks have been produced, and especially for the first decade or so of online literary production, there appears to be consensus on what were the most important sites, authors, and works. This emerging canon of born-digital works, however, can rarely still be found online in its original location and context. This paper addresses the challenges of preserving early Chinese Internet literature, as well as the opportunities for literary analysis when preservation does take place.
About the speaker
Dr. Michel Hockx is professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely, both in English and in Chinese, on topics related to modern Chinese literary culture, especially early 20th-century Chinese magazine literature and print culture and contemporary Internet literature. His monograph Internet Literature in China was listed by Choice magazine as one of the “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015.”
Posted by: Faye Xiao <hxiao@ku.edu>
Webinar – China’s Path from Poverty to the Gilded Age
Date: Monday, 6 March 2023
Time: 12pm-1.30pm, EST (5pm-6.30pm, GMT)
Register here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/chinas-path-poverty-gilded-age
Abstract
Over the last four decades, China has undergone a great transformation – from impoverishment to a Gilded Age of rapid growth paired with corruption and inequality. What lessons of development should the world learn from this mixed outcome?
Drawing from her books, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016) and China’s Gilded Age (2020), Professor Yuen Yuen Ang underscores three lessons. (1) Learn from both China’s successes and failures: In China, the past success of industrial capitalism under a collective leadership laid the seeds for its problems today, including corruption, inequality, and political fragmentation. (2) Don’t learn the wrong lessons: China’s success does not prove that autocracy is superior to democracy in performance; rather, it reminds us that autocracies must temper its worst tendencies in order to perform. (3) Adapt the right national lessons to different national contexts, rather than blindly emulating and copying. Professor Ang stresses that these lessons apply to China’s rise as much as they apply to lessons we’ve drawn, correctly and incorrectly, from the rise of the West. Continue reading
List members might be interested in Sinoist Books Winter Season of Chinese Literature. We have two events coming up this season:
Shi Tiesheng’s My Travels in Ding Yi
23rd February (7:30pm GMT) (LINK)
With Professor Sarah Dauncey, whose research focuses on disability in China, and Chloe Starr, Associate Professor of Asian Christianity and theology.
Li Er’s Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree
31st March (5pm GMT) (LINK)
With translator Dave Haysom
More details in the Eventbrite below
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/clrcuk-winter-season-feb-and-march-next-up-shi-tiesheng-tickets-540945270867
Daniel Li <danielyangli92@gmail.com>
Webinar – The Rise of She-SF: Chinese Science Fiction’s Next Wave
Mingwei Song
Date: Monday, 6 February 2023
Time: 12pm to 1.30pm, EST (5pm to 6.30pm, GMT)
Register for this webinar here
Abstract
Different from the earlier Chinese Science Fiction authors, the young women writers who emerged recently (all born after 1984 – if this significant year in dystopian fiction can serve as a landmark in a real history of Chinese SF) have mostly enjoyed the privilege of being a global citizen growing up in a new digital age, with their mindset synchronized with the rest of the world. They have developed their distinct literary voices over the past several years when the entire world witnessed the collapse of the new liberal world order, the backfire of a free-market-oriented “universal” version of globalization, and the rises of a series of worldwide social and cultural movements, such as the #Me Too Movement, the Gen Z environmentalist activism, and a new rally call for establishing a planetary consciousness, which implies a new vision of multiplicity and diversity, cohabiting with other species on our already ruined planet.
All these themes, together with less darker visions of technology, a new hope for creating a technologized future while humans and the posthuman can coexist instead of struggling in a “dark forest” scenario ending up in assured mutual destruction, have characterized the politics of She-SF. Correspondingly, a more daring experiment with literary texts—including making the text itself a Möbius continuum or a chimera hybridity, has also begun to change the aesthetics of Chinese SF. Chinese SF readers have long been anxious about what would be the next “miracle” after the success of The Three-Body Problem, and now we have found a clear answer: following the first wave created by Liu Cixin, Han Song, and Wang Jinkang among others, which achieved in illuminating the invisible, darker terra incognita of Sinotopia, the second wave of Chinese new SF is currently being made in a free, nonbinary literary universe created by women (and nonbinary) SF writers. Continue reading
Webinar – Revisiting Women’s Cinema: Feminism, Socialism, and Mainstream Culture in Modern China
Date: Monday, 16th January 2023
Time: 12pm-1.30pm, EST (5pm-6.30pm, GMT)
Register for this webinar here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/revisiting-womens-cinema-feminism-socialism-and-mainstream-culture-modern-china
Abstract
Professor Lingzhen Wang talks about her book Revisiting Women’s Cinema in this webinar, which explores the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. It highlights the Chinese socialist institutionalization of class and gender equality and socialist women’s sociopolitical engagements and mass-oriented artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist feminism and mainstream women’s culture.
The study of socialist feminism and women’s cinema in today’s academy, however, requires confronting three deeply entrenched research paradigms that posit, 1) the political and propagandistic nature of socialist cultural practice; 2) the patriarchal character of socialist revolution; and 3) women’s cinema as a marginalized practice, subversive of mainstream patriarchal culture. Continue reading
The University of Zurich has put online two lectures that may be of interest to the MCLC community.
Maghiel van Crevel, “Poetic Tightrope Walks. Time, Space, Bodies and Things in Contemporary Sinophone Poetry,”
Konferenz, Donnerstag, 29. September bis Samstag, 02. Oktober 2022
https://www.aoi.uzh.ch/de/institut/events/conferences/poetictightropewalks.html
We also have a podcast of Song Hwee Lim’s TRCCS lecture (also Oct. 2022) based on his new book: Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power: Authorship, Transnationality, Historiography.
https://www.aoi.uzh.ch/de/institut/events/series/trccslectures/lim.html
Andrea Riemenschnitter
Presented by Center for Film and Moving Image Research, Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University
Global Sinophonia 2: Five Guys who made a Hong Kong historical drama movie: “Hong Kong 1942”
“Hong Kong 1942” is a World War II feature film filmed entirely in Hong Kong with all local actors and film crew. This movie is a small, independent production with a very limited budget and was created with just 5 film crew members during most of the 20-day filming schedule. Filmmaking is like putting together a puzzle, a thousand pieces needed to be assembled to create the final product. Money is not the biggest limitation on a production, it is the ability of the filmmakers to understand how to plot a pathway forward of doing the possible. We will reveal the production process of making Hong Kong 1942, the tips and tricks that every filmmaker should know before rolling into production.
ZOOM ID: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://hkbu.zoom.us/j/95560798929__;!!KGKeukY!zX1sU6oE8DC4Zj0qbLt16swUx_6VLbxYBRQ7Rez-v3zKmDomL0oK6L_2VVs24IeBvyPiyfF8H3GaU068t19wZJU$
LINK: 955 6079 8929
Speakers:
Grace Yan-yan Mak (Producer), Craig McCourry (Director)
Discussant: Kenny Ng Continue reading