New publications

posts related to new publications in Chinese studies

Anxiety Aesthetics

by at

NEW PUBLICATION
Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985
By Jennifer Dorothy Lee
University of California Press, 2024

Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978–80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the ’85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists’ engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Dorothy Lee is an associate professor of East Asian art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Anxiety Aesthetics is her first book. Lee’s article on socialist abstraction and the painter Wu Guanzhong will be out in positions: asia critique in May 2024.

Posted by: Jennifer Lee <jlee241@artic.edu>

CLEAR 45

by at

CHINESE LITERATURE: ESSAYS ARTICLES REVIEWS
CONTENTS Volume 45 (Dec. 2023)

EDITORIAL

NECROLOGY
Joseph S. M. Lau (1937-2023)

ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
Robert Ford CAMPANY, “Anecdotes and/as Social Memory: Understanding the Nature of Buddhist Miracle Tales in Early Medieval China”
Yuanqiu JIANG, “The Frame of Criticism: Palace Style Poetry, Xiao Gang, and Yutai xinyong”
Massimiliano CANALE, “Inferior Art or Legitimate Pleasure? Yan Jidao’s and Huang Tingjian’s Contribution to the Defense of the Song Lyric”
Jinsu KIM, “The Material Reconstruction of Rituality in ‘Jiang Xingge Reencounters His Pearl Shirt’”
Peng XU, “Rereading Mingyuan shiwei: Wang Duanshu’s (1621–ca. 1706) Contradictions of Male Poetry Critics of the Late Ming”
Mark S. FERRARA, “On Greensickness Peak: Ghosts, Spirits, and the Supernatural Realm in Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber”
Xiaoyu XIA, “The Necessity of Rhyme: Wen Yiduo, Bian Zhilin, and Modern Chinese Prosody”
Christopher ROSENMEIER, “Wang Xiaoyi and the Literature of Titillation”

REVIEW ARTICLES
Hans VAN ESS, “A Textual Approach to the Problem of the Authenticity of the Historical Text Xinian from the Tsing-hua Collection of Manuscripts”
Rania HUNTINGTON, “Recent Companions and Guides to the Traditional Chinese Novel”
Joseph S.C. LAM, “Thus Spoke the Dashi (Grand Masters): Reading Notes on Two Recent Publications on Kunqu Performance Practices”

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Further details at: https://clear.wisc.edu

Posted by: Masha Kobzeva mkobzeva@gmail.com

Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet

by at

Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet, a translation of ten stories by the queer Chinese writer, filmmaker, and activist Cui Zi’en edited by Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel, is now available for sale on Duke University Press’s website:

https://www.dukeupress.edu/platinum-bible-of-the-public-toilet

Feel free to read and download Liu and Rofel’s introduction there.

Petrus Liu <petrusl@bu.edu>

2023 Roll call of Chinese literature published in English translation

by at

Here is the Paper Republic 2023 Roll Call of Chinese literature published in English translation: https://paper-republic.org/pers/eric-abrahamsen/2023-roll-call-of-chinese-literature-in-english-translation/

… this is an interesting and varied collection of titles, including classics, left-fielders, big names, and small(er) names. The non-fiction in particular is a wonderful spread of current events, political topics, and essays….

Click the link above for more details and our lists.

Nicky Harman <n.harmanic@gmail.com>

Cinematic Guerrillas

by at

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023).

DESCRIPTION

How might cinema make revolution and mobilize the masses? In socialist China, the film exhibition network expanded from fewer than six hundred movie theaters to more than a hundred thousand mobile film projectionist teams. Holding screenings in improvised open-air spaces in rural areas lacking electricity, these roving projectionists brought not only films but also power generators, loudspeakers, slideshows, posters, live performances, and mass ritual participation, amplifying the era’s utopian dreams and violent upheavals.

Cinematic Guerrillas is a media history of Chinese film exhibition and reception that offers fresh insights into the powers and limits of propaganda. Drawing on a wealth of archives, memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, Jie Li examines the media networks and environments, discourses and practices, experiences and memories of film projectionists and their grassroots audiences from the 1940s to the 1980s. She considers the ideology and practice of “cinematic guerrillas”—at once denoting onscreen militants, off-the-grid movie teams, and unruly moviegoers—bridging Maoist iconography, the experiences of projectionists, and popular participation and resistance. Li reconceptualizes socialist media practices as “revolutionary spirit mediumship” that aimed to turn audiences into congregations, contribute to the Mao cult, convert skeptics of revolutionary miracles, and exorcize class enemies. Continue reading →

Made in China 8.1

by at

Dear Colleagues,

I am happy to announce the publication of the latest issue of the Made in China Journal. You can download it for free at this link: madeinchinajournal.com/2023/11/21/out-of-the-fog.

Below you can find the editorial.

Out of the Fog: Looking Back at Covid Governance in China

The year 2023 began with a series of jolts in China, as the government abruptly rolled back its notoriously strict pandemic measures following countrywide protests in late 2022. While external popular perceptions saw China as being uniformly locked down for the first years of the pandemic, the reality was that the country’s pandemic governance was unevenly applied and varied substantially from place to place. The result was mixed—and often even contradictory—attempts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, with vastly differentiated experiences on the ground. While heterogeneous and fragmented governance in China is nothing new—and indeed is the basis of how most scholars understand policy implementation in the country—the pandemic nevertheless produced patterns of governance that were at times surprising, while also reinforcing previous trends. This issue of the Made in China Journal examines patterns of pandemic governance and the subjectivities associated with living through lockdown and the ever-present possibility of quarantine. Continue reading →

Urban Scenes

by at

New Publication
Urban Scenes, by Liu Na’ou; translated and introduced by Yaohua Shi and Judith M. Armory
Cambria Press, 2023

More than eighty years after his death, Liu Na’ou (1905—1940) remains a fascinating figure. Liu was born in Taiwan, but early on he wrote that his future lay in Shanghai and did indeed spend the entirety of his glittering but all-too-brief career in his adopted city, working closely with a small coterie of like-minded friends and associates as an editor, writer, film critic, scenarist, and director. Liu introduced Japanese Shinkankakuha (New Sensationism) to China and made it an important school of modern Chinese urban fiction. Urban Scenes, his slim volume of modernist fiction, in particular, has had an outsized influence on Shanghai’s image as a phantasmagoric metropolis in the 1920s and 1930s. This collection is especially valuable since there are no more works from Liu because shortly after producing this he was murdered purportedly for political reasons.

Like Japanese New Sensationists, who zeroed in on sensory responses to the new technologies rapidly transforming Tokyo after the Great Earthquake of 1923, Liu was fixated on the sights, sounds, and smells of Shanghai, that other throbbing metropolis of the Far East, and these came through in his writings. Liu’s urban romances depict, as he himself put it, the “thrill” and “carnal intoxication” of modern urban life. His stories take place in Shanghai’s nightclubs, race tracks, cinemas, and cafes—sites of moral depredation but also of erotic allure and excitement; therein lies the contradictory nature of his urban fiction, which gives us a vivid picture of early twentieth-century Shanghai.

This complete translation of Liu’s seminal work is available for the first time to researchers, students, and general readers interested in modern Chinese literature and culture. In addition to the eight stories in the original Urban Scenes, this collection includes an introduction by the translators and three additional pieces Liu published separately. The translations are based on the first editions of the Chinese texts. Urban Scenes is a valuable addition to collections in Chinese and Sinophone studies.

Chinese animation at international film fests

by at

Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (11/3/23)
Chinese Animation at International Film Festivals: A Report from the 19th Seoul Indie-Anifest, South Korea, September 14-19, 2023
By Grace Han

The hour strikes; the lights dim. The gentle call of ocean waves washes over the audience.  The 4-note singsong of the school bell rings in the distance. Then, suddenly, a girl, soaked in pastel azure blues, appears on-screen. We follow her rotoscoped form closely, climbing up the stairs to the school rooftop with her. As she opens the door, we spot another girl, clad in school uniform, looking out towards the cerulean seas on the rain-soaked terrace. The schoolgirl leaps over the rooftop’s edge, as does our protagonist from the stairs. Their hands touch, their eyes meet, and – in this extreme long shot – the camera takes a step back (fig 1). The film pauses. As the two remain suspended between the heavens and the earth, silhouetted by a majestic lens flare over the horizon, a voiceover ponders aloud in Korean: “Where are we going? What will we become?”

Fig 1: Two figures framed in the 19th Seoul Indie-Anifest trailer (2023), by Han Ji-won.

These questions seemed to weigh upon the 19th iteration of the Seoul Indie-Anifest, in addition to this festival trailer by Han Ji-won. At the packed opening ceremony, festival director Yujin Choi revealed that the slogan for the festival this year was “Nineteen,” in reflection of the festival’s own coming-of-age. After all, in South Korea, age 19 just precedes the legal age of 20; as such, 19 marks the turning point of adolescence. Moreover, Choi remarked that this year witnessed the festival’s first full-blown return from the COVID-19 pandemic. While the festival operated in-person for the last three years, it did so at reduced capacity. In contrast, the festival completely opened its doors this year at CGV Yeonnam, ushering in international guests and the public alike (fig 2). Continue reading →

The Political Philosophy of Ci Jiwei

by at

New Publication
Thinking the Unthinkable: The Political Philsophy of Ci Jiwei
By Johannes Hoerning
New Left Review 143 (Sept-Oct. 2023)
[DOWNLOAD THE FULL ARTICLE HERE]

In his 1989–92 lecture series On the State Pierre Bourdieu, following Durkheim, proposed a provisional definition of the state as the basis for ‘both the logical and the moral conformity of the social world’. By ‘logical conformity’, Bourdieu meant that the agents of the social world would share the same categories of perception, the same construction of reality; by ‘moral conformity’, their agreement on certain core values. Taking his distance from classical state theory, such as that of Hobbes or Locke—in which the state, occupying a quasi- godlike viewpoint, oversees all and serves the common good—as also from Marxian traditions, from Gramsci to Althusser and beyond, which focus on the function of the state as an apparatus for maintaining public order in the interests of the ruling bloc, Bourdieu emphasized instead the need to grasp the ‘organizational magic’ of the state as a principle of consciousness—its monopoly of legitimate symbolic as well as physical violence. The social theorist therefore needed to be particularly on guard against Durkheimian ‘pre-notions’ or received ideas, against ‘thinking the state with state thinking’. A first step was to conceive the state as what Bourdieu called ‘an almost unthinkable object’.1

If there is one thinker who has met Bourdieu’s challenge to ‘think the state’ without succumbing to ‘state thinking’, it is the Chinese political philosopher Ci Jiwei. Recently retired from the philosophy department of the University of Hong Kong, Ci has devoted most of the past three decades to analysing the nature and evolution of China’s state and soci- ety since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Three of his four books—Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (1994), Moral China in the Age of Reform (2014) and Democracy in China (2019)—amount to a loose trilogy aiming to clarify the ‘logic’ of the Chinese experience and to track the evolution of the CCP regime since Mao. The collapse of Maoist utopi- anism and the liberalization of the economy after 1978 have left Chinese society in a ‘fundamentally unsettled’ condition, Ci argues.2 Each book in the trilogy addresses a different symptom of this situation: existential or social-psychological malaise in Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution, the undermining of moral subjectivity in Moral China and the looming cri- sis of political legitimacy in Democracy in China. In different ways, they are all concerned with how the Chinese party-state might accommodate itself, for its own and the nation’s good, to citizens’ need to act freely and to understand themselves as free, while at the same time preserving its own stability and that of the country at large.3 [DOWNLOAD THE FULL ARTICLE HERE]

HK Lit and the Taiwanese Encounter

by at

New Publication
Jessica Siu-yin Yeung, “Hong Kong Literature and the Taiwanese Encounter: Literary Magazines, Popular Literature and Shih Shu-Ching’s Hong Kong Stories.” Cultural History 12/2 (Open Access)

Abstract

This article examines the ways literary adaptations between Hong Kong and Taiwanese writers shape literary cultures in both places during the Cold War period. The 1950s and 1960s were the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan literary cultures were starting to thrive. An influx of literati into both places collaborated with each other and the locals to experiment with literary forms in literary magazines. The 1950s and 1960s were also the time when Hong Kong and Taiwan cinema experienced the first waves of adapting literary works into film in the postwar period. After the literary magazine culture dwindled in the 1970s, a new generation of writers in both places emerged. In Hong Kong, these new writers may not be native, but they take Hong Kong as their main subject in their writings. The Taiwanese writer Shih Shu-ching is one of them. In studying Hong Kong-Taiwan literary adaptation histories, one may easily overlook the adaptation from fiction to screenplay, as in Shih and the Taiwanese playwright Wang Chi-mei’s case. By understanding the literary relationship between Hong Kong and Taiwan in the Cold War, together with their adaptation histories, we can acquire a clearer sense of how these literary cultures developed.

Posted by: Jessica Siu-yin Yeung <jessicayeung@LN.edu.hk>

Chinese Revolution in Practice

by at

New Publication
Chinese Revolution in Practice: From Movement to the State, by Guo Wu
Routledge, 2023

Description:

This book employs multiple case studies to explore how the Chinese communist revolution began as an ideology-oriented intellectual movement aimed at improving society before China’s transformation into a state that suppresses dissenting voices by outsourcing its power of coercion and incarceration.

The author examines the movement’s methods of early self-organization, grass-roots level engagement, creation of new modes of expression and popular art forms, manipulation of collective memory, and invention of innovative ways of mass incarceration. Covering developments from 1920 to 1970, the book considers a wide range of Chinese individuals and groups, from early Marxists to political prisoners in the PRC, to illustrate a dynamic, interactive process in which the state and individuals contend with each other. It argues that revolutionary practices in modern China have created a regime that can be conceptualized as an “ideology-military-propaganda” state that prompts further reflection on the relationships between revolution and the state, the state and collective articulation and memory, and the state and reflective individuals in a global context.

Illustrating the continuity of the Chinese revolution and past decades’ socialist practices and mechanisms, this study is an ideal resource for scholars of Chinese history, politics, and twentieth-century revolutions. Continue reading →

CLT2 54.1-2

by at

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that Chinese Literature and Thought Today (CLTT) v54 n1&2 (2023) has been published and we are running a free access period of this issue during the next four weeks. All contents of the issue can be viewed and downloaded on the Taylor & Francis website during this period:

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/mcsp21/54/1-2?nav=tocList

In this double issue of CLTT, we celebrate the works of the 2023 Newman laureate Chang Kuei-hisng 張貴興. In addition, we remember the great Chinese philosopher Li Zehou 李澤厚 and the 2019 Newman laureate Xi Xi 西西.

Please take advantage of the free access period to check out our brand new contents!

Ping Zhu
Editor in Chief

Is There a Chinese New Wave in Animation?

by at

Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (9/30/2023)
Is There a Chinese New Wave in Animation? An Examination of Student Animation in China
By Jingyi Zhang

Figure 1. The exaggerated proportion of figures in Fish in the Bus.

The beginning of the millennium was important for Chinese animation. It not only began the rejuvenation of the Chinese animation industry, which embodied “the promise of the modernization of Chinese visual culture,”[i] but also saw the creation of a surprising range of works that can be categorized as independent animation. Additionally, it was a significant period for Chinese animation education. In January 2000, the Beijing Film Academy separated the animation major from the Art School, forming an independent Department of Animation. This change signals the rise of professional animation education in China in the 21st century. Since then, animation departments and institutions have gradually been founded in many universities and provinces, including the School of Animation and Digital Arts at the Communication University of China (CUC). That department in particular has trained and inspired many young animators who contribute to the commercial and independent films in Chinese animation industry. Scholars have conducted many studies in Chinese animation, yet they rarely consider the important field of student films.

In this paper, I investigate student animation created after 2000 in China, focusing on those works directed by the students who graduated from CUC. I argue that student animation reflects the ongoing changes within Chinese animation, changes that will alter the industry, and make important breaks from the characteristics of the 20th century. The student films exhibit a variety of narrative, visual styles, and techniques. They not only are influenced by the development of digital technology and global animation and cinematic culture but also indicate the trend of reviving traditional visual styles and telling indigenous narratives. Moreover, the young generation of filmmakers have gone on to enter the industry, often while keeping their personal, auteur styles. With the new talents, new technology, new producers and a new reputation on the world stage, I keep wondering whether we are witnessing a new wave set off by the young animators in Chinese animation history. Continue reading →

Fear of Seeing

by at

NEW PUBLICATION
Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction
By Mingwei Song
Columbia University Press (2023)

A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of China’s new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China, contemporary science fiction has also attracted a growing global readership.

Fear of Seeing traces the new wave’s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital. Mingwei Song argues that recent Chinese science fiction is united by a capacity to illuminate what had been invisible—what society had chosen not to see; what conventional literature had failed to represent. Its poetics of the invisible opens up new literary possibilities and inspires new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Reading the works of major writers such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as lesser-known figures, Song explores how science fiction has spurred larger changes in contemporary literature and culture. He analyzes key topics: variations of utopia and dystopia, cyborgs and the posthuman, and nonbinary perspectives on gender and genre, among many more. A compelling and authoritative account of the politics and poetics of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Fear of Seeing is an important book for all readers interested in the genre’s significance for twenty-first-century literature.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mingwei Song is a professor of Chinese literature at Wellesley College. He is the author of Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–1959 (2015) and a coeditor of The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia, 2018).

Global China Pulse 2.1

by at

Dear Colleagues,

I am happy to announce the publication of the latest issue of the Global China Pulse journal. You can download it for free at this link: https://thepeoplesmap.net/globalchinapulse/global-china-pulse-1-2023. Below you can find the editorial:

Editorial

The Global China Pulse journal aims to be an open access platform where it is possible to discuss Global China from a more grounded perspective, conscious of, but not consumed by, the geopolitical speculations and abstract and aggregate macroeconomic discussions that often dominate current debates. In line with our sister project, The People’s Map of Global China, here we strive to offer perspectives on how Global China is playing out at the grassroots, focusing on how Chinese engagements overseas impact, for better or for worse, the lived experiences of people in different localities and their environments. We do this through contributions written not only by scholars, but also by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), activists, and journalists.

At the core of this issue is the Focus section, edited by Miriam Driessen, that explores the myriad global connections Chinese health authorities, medical doctors, and pharmaceutical companies have forged over a century marked by increased mobility. Their engagement, passion, care, and labour rendered China genuinely global in the past as much as during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Continue reading →