posts related to new publications in Chinese studies
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>
NEW PUBLICATION
I Love Bill and Other Stories, by Wang Anyi
Translated by Todd Foley
Foreword by Xudong Zhang
Cornell East Asia Series
ISBN13: 9781501771071
ISBN10: 1501771078
Publication date: 09/15/2023
Pages: 260
I Love Bill and Other Stories showcases the work of Wang Anyi, one of China’s most prolific and highly regarded writers, in two novellas and three short stories.
A young artist’s life spirals out of control when she drops out of school to pursue a series of unfulfilling relationships with foreign men. A performance troupe struggles to adapt to a changing China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The head of an isolated village arranges a youth’s posthumous marriage to an unknown soldier, only to have the soldier’s former lover unexpectedly turn up. A fun trip takes an unexpected turn when two young women are kidnapped and sold off as brides. A boy’s bout with typhoid provides an intimate look at family life in Shanghai’s longtang alleys.
Wang Anyi is president of the Shanghai Writers’ Association and professor at Fudan University. She has received the Mao Dun Literature Prize, and her works in English translation include Baotown, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and Fuping.
Posted by: Todd Foley <twf218@nyu.edu>
NEW PUBLICATION
On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China
By Margaret Hillenbrand
Columbia University Press, 2023
$35.00/£30.00 paper $140/£117.00 hardcover $34.99/£30.00 ebook
Enter Code: CUP20 for 20% discount
DESCRIPTION:
Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over.
On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. Continue reading
MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Paul Bevan’s introduction to and translation of “Paris in the Springtime,” by Shao Xunmei. This translation appears in conjunction with the recent publication of One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939, translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. A teaser appears below. For the full introduction and translation, see: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/paris-in-the-springtime/.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
By Shao Xunmei 邵洵美
Translated by Paul Bevan
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September 2023)
Introduction: Shao Xunmei, a Chinese Poet in 1920s Paris
By Paul Bevan
Portrait of Shao by the artist Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻.
Shao Xunmei (1906-68) was a poet, essayist, and publisher. Today, he is best known for his poetry, which mostly belongs to the period when he was a young man in his twenties inspired by the Decadent poets of nineteenth-century Europe. His lesser-known essays, written during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, cover all sorts of different topics, from the poetry of Sappho to the art of the woodblock print, from Shanghai in wartime to Chinese philately. Arguably his greatest contribution to the culture of the Chinese Republican Era (1912-49) was in publishing. During the 1920s and 1930s, Shao Xunmei published an array of pictorial magazines, so important that they did nothing less than define the era, in their celebration of the unique culture that developed in China’s most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai, at a time of great change. In addition to his own magazines, Shao was also responsible for the publication of many other periodicals, in his capacity as printer and editor. The essays translated in the book One Man Talking were all published in Shao’s own magazines between the years 1929 and 1939, and give a good idea of the breadth of his interests.
This short prose piece, “Paris in the Springtime” 巴黎的春天 (which does not appear in the book and was translated specially for MCLC), was published in 1929, three years after Shao Xunmei returned from Europe to China. It describes his movements whilst in Paris on a brief visit from Cambridge, where he was studying towards the university entrance exams. The cover of the book One Man Talking shows a portrait of Shao taken in a Parisian photographic studio in 1926, which was almost certainly posed for at the time of this visit. It has a handwritten greeting in Chinese to his friends and landlords in Cambridge, Rev. A.C. Moule and his wife, and was sent to them from Paris.[1]
Cover of One Man Talking.
In Shao’s poetic introduction the sun drips like honey; the warm breeze has audible footsteps; the tree is female, and she expresses herself in a variety of different ways, depending on who passes beneath her vast green canopy of leaves and branches.
Shao was a young man of his time, and in his writing we sometimes find references to women that do not read well today. This short essay is no exception. The tree giggles when young women pass beneath it, but is dismissive of middle-aged women because they are no longer young. Shao’s description of the artists’ model, though brief, typically objectifies the sitter, and the naïve, even childish ending to the essay brings in the rather self-conscious and unimaginative reference to the “amorous feelings of spring.” Despite these shortcomings, the essay as a whole displays much charm, and is written in a style that is typical of his writings of the time, with a nod towards the use of a descriptive language that shows his poetic aspirations. Above all, the essay provides an excellent indication as to what Shao Xunmei’s pastimes were during the time he spent in Paris as a man of leisure. It also gives an impression of his interests more broadly, interests with which he was able to fully indulge himself while he lived in Cambridge. [READ THE FULL PIECE HERE]
NEW PUBLICATION:
Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell
By Xuelei Huang
Cambridge University Press, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009207065
DESCRIPTION:
In this vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history, Xuelei Huang documents the eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period. Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the ‘smellscapes’ of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction. The cesspool and the rose garden
Part I. A Sniff of China
Dear MCLC members,
My new Open Access article, Boxed within the Frame: Tibetan masculinities in transformation in Pema Tseden’s Jinpa, has recently been published in the New Cinemas journal. I think anyone with an interest in Tibetan and Chinese (and indeed world) cinema was shocked and saddened to learn of Pema Tseden’s untimely passing in May of this year. He was a pioneer in so many ways and his death is a great loss to us all. The article looks at Jinpa (2018), which I think is one of his best and often overlooked works.
Abstract: The Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden is renowned for using the road movie as a means of interrogating the relationship between his characters and society in the Tibetan areas of the PRC. As his protagonists travel, the natural settings become an integral part of the journey through the Tibetan lands. The amalgamation of movement and landscapes enables the emergence of a Tibetan subject whose complex and heterogenous self-representation defies the dualism of tradition and modernity. In this article, I argue that Pema Tseden’s recent feature Jinpa (2018) marks an aesthetic and thematic departure from his earlier work. Rather than looming large over the characters, the landscapes serve as an underlying framework for a heightened emphasis on the interaction between the characters. At the heart of the film is the notion of Tibetan masculinity in crisis. Whilst portraying the ways that history, culture and tradition haunt the men in the film, Pema Tseden also turns his attention to the female characters. Proposing a new take on Tibetan masculinities who assume the previously women-only roles of carriers of culture, he offers a unique perspective on and in New Tibetan Cinema.
All the best,
Zoran Lee Pecic (zoran.l.pecic@ntnu.no)
New Publication
For a Splendid Sunny Apocalypse
By Jiang Tao; Translator Josh Stenber
In these melancholy and self-mocking poems — populated with youths and elders, cellphones and televisions — Jiang Tao presents and dissects a discontent with the state of the world. He employs his profound wit and poetic mastery to explore the passage of time, rural-urban migration, change and impermanence, and the difficulties of human communication and connection. Jiang Tao’s verse is, as translator Josh Stenberg has written, “a quintessential expression of urban malaise in contemporary China.” This is his first book to appear in English and is presented bilingually on facing pages.
Jiang Tao’s poetry is laid back, ironic, and human above all. … This book is a beautiful new chapter in the story of Chinese poetry in English.—Maghiel van Crevel
Jiang Tao is a Beijing-based poet, literary critic, translator, and historian, known as much for his wry, cerebral verse as his ground-breaking studies of Republican (1911-49) literature. An Associate Professor at Peking University, he has held literary residencies in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. His first collection Bird Sutras was published in 2005, and he has since published Four Poems and Mourning for Sometimes. He won the Liu Li’an Prize for Poetry in 1997.
Translator Josh Stenberg is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney and a holder of a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council. He is the author of Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display (2019) and Liyuanxi: Chinese ‘Pear Garden’ Theatre (2022) as well as the translator of five books of contemporary Chinese literature.
New Publication
Questioning the Chinese Model: Oppositional Political Novels in Early Twenty-First Century China
By Zhansui Yu
University of Toronto Press, 2022
DESCRIPTION
In the early twenty-first century, the Chinese literary world saw an emergence of fictional works – dubbed as “oppositional political novels” – that took political articulation as their major purpose and questioned the fundamental principles and intrinsic logic of the Chinese model. Based on close readings of five representative oppositional Chinese political novels, Questioning the Chinese Model examines the sociopolitical connotations and epistemological values of these novels in the broad context of modern Chinese intellectual history and contemporary Chinese politics and society.
Zhansui Yu provides a sketch of the social, political, and intellectual landscape of present-day China. He investigates the dialectic relationship between the arts and politics in the Chinese context, the mechanisms and dynamics of censorship in the age of the Internet and commercialization, and the ideological limitations of oppositional Chinese political novels. In the process of textual and social analysis, Yu extensively cites Western political philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and references well- regarded studies on Chinese literature, politics, society, and the Chinese intelligentsia. Examining oppositional Chinese political novels from multiple perspectives, Questioning the Chinese Model applies a broad range of knowledge beyond merely the literary field. Continue reading
New Issue of positions: asia critique (31:3) Available Now Online
We are pleased to announce the publication of positions: asia critique 31:3!
The contributors are Tim Shao-Hung Teng, Giorgio Strafella, Daria Berg, Nora Hui-Jung Kim, Kenny K. K. Ng, Jay Ke-Schutte, Gerda Wielander, Tani Barlow, and Suzy Kim.
Browse the table of contents and read the Editor’s Introduction at https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/issue/31/3. The issue is available for purchase at https://www.dukeupress.edu/positions.
Posted by: Dale Booth positionsjournal@alc.rutgers.edu
Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee’s memoir, 𝑀𝑦 𝑇𝑤𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑡ℎ 𝐶𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑦: 𝐴 𝑀𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑖𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝐿𝑒𝑜 𝑂𝑢-𝐹𝑎𝑛 𝐿𝑒𝑒, was published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in July, 2023:
https://cup.cuhk.edu.hk/MyTwentiethCenturyAMemoir
The English translation of the preface to this memoir was published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and is available here:
https://chajournal.blog/2023/08/05/twentieth-century/
Heidi Huang <heidihuang@ln.edu.hk>
NEW PUBLICATION
Mei Niang’s Long-Lost First Writings: Young Lady’s Collection
By Norman Smith. Routledge, 2023.
In 1944, the novel Xie (Crabs) by Mei Niang (1916-2013) was honored with the Japanese Empire’s highest literary award, Novel of the Year. Then, at the peak of her popularity, Mei Niang published in Japanese-owned, Chinese-language journals and newspapers in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (1932-1945), Japan, and north China. Contemporaries lauded her writings, especially for introducing liberalism to Manchuria’s literary world. In Maoist China, however, Mei Niang was condemned as a traitor and a Rightist with her life and career torn to shreds until her formal vindication in the late 1970s. In 1997, Mei Niang was named one of “Modern China’s 100 Writers.” The collection that is translated in this volume, Xiaojie ji (Young lady’s collection), was published in 1936, when she was 19 years old. Long thought forever lost in the violence of China’s civil war and Maoist strife, the collection was only re-discovered in 2019.
This is the first book-length, English-language translation of the work of this high-profile, prolific New Woman writer from Northeast China. Mei Niang’s Long-Lost First Writings will appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, the Japanese Empire, historic fiction, history, women’s/gender history, and students in undergraduate and graduate level courses. To date, English-language volumes of translated Chinese literature have rarely focused on Manchukuo’s Chinese writers or centered on those who left the puppet state by 1935. This volume fills an important historical lacuna – a teenaged Chinese woman’s views of life and literature in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
The Global Storytelling journal is happy to announce the publication of our special issue, “East Asian Serial Dramas in the Era of Global Streaming” (edited by Tze-lan Sang, Lina Qu, and Ying Zhu), which has gone live:
https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/gs/issue/214/info/.
The featured articles in the special issue include —
“The Therapeutic and the Transgressive: Chinese Fansub Straddling between Hollywood IP Laws and Chinese State Censorship,” by Ying Zhu
“Japanese Dramas and the Streaming Success Story That Wasn’t: How Industry Practices and IP Shape Japan’s Access to Global Streaming,” by David Humphrey
“Transmedia Adaptation, Sonic Affect, and Multisensory Participation in Contemporary Chinese Danmei Radio Drama,” by Yucong Hao
“The Nostalgic Negotiation of Post-TV Legibility in Mom, Don’t Do That!,” by Eunice Ying Ci Lim
“How Pachinko Mirrors Migrant Life: Rethinking the Temporal, Spatial, and Linguistic Dimensions of Migration,” by Winnie Yanjing Wu
Regards,
The Editorial Team of Global Storytelling
We are pleased to announce that the next issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no. 1 (Summer 2023), has now been published, with printed issues going out shortly. Please find the table of contents and links to abstracts below. The journal’s online repository provides access to full articles for subscribers.
Natascha Gentz and Christopher Rosenmeier, Editors
Volume 35, Number 1 (Summer 2023)
Articles
NEW PUBLICATION: Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan, by Robin Visser
I’m pleased to announce that my new book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023), is now available at https://cup.columbia.edu/book/questioning-borders/9780231199810.
Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. It comprises 7 chapters:
Introduction: Ecoliteratures Inhabiting Borders
1. Beijing Westerns and Hanspace Elixirs in Southwest China
2. Grassland Logic and Desert Carbon Imaginaries in Inner Mongolia
3. Sacred Routes and Dark Humor in Grounded Xinjiang
4. Cosmic Ecologies and Transcendent Tricksters on the Tibetan Plateau
5. Island Excursions and Indigenous Waterways in Activist Taiwan
Epilogue: Indigenous Entanglements in Techno Hypersubjectivity
Robin Visser <rvisser@email.unc.edu>
The First Prism Monograph Supplement Book Launch
We are delighted to announce the publication of Prism’s first supplemental issue At Home in Nature: Technology, Labour, and Critical Ecology in Modern China authored by Prof. Ban Wang at Stanford University. The first Prism monograph supplement launch, hosted by Prism’s editor-in-chief Prof. Zong-qi Cai, will be held online at 6-9 PM (Pacific Time)/ 9-12 pm (EST) on August 3, 2023. The ZOOM meeting ID is 948 4417 6786, and the password is 62236914.
From the eco-critical perspective, this book critiques anthropocentricism, technoscientific hubris, and ecologically destructive modes of production. Examining modern discourse, literature, film, and science fiction, it views the domination of nature and labor under capitalism and technocrats as the culprit of ecological crises and human alienation. Alternatively, utopianisms of nonalienated labor keep alive the ideals of resonance between humans and Earth. The Table of Contents is listed below:
Introduction
Chapter One. Confucianism and Nature: Ecological Motifs in Kang Youwei’s Great Community
Chapter Two. Lu Xun’s Mytho-ecological Refutation of Technocrats
Chapter Three. Romancing Landscape and Human Animal: Shen Congwen
Chapter Four. We Are the Dragon King: Labor and Happiness
Chapter Five. Farewell to the God of Plague: The Revolution in Medicine
Chapter Six. Dignity and Misery of Labor
Chapter Seven. Art and Labor in Han Song’s Regenerated Bricks
Chapter Eight. Toxic Colonialism, Alienation, and Posthuman Dystopia in Chen Qiufan
Chapter Nine. Artificial Intelligence, Affective Labor, and Death in Life
Chapter Ten. Critical Ecotopia in Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds
Epilogue Continue reading