New publications

posts related to new publications in Chinese studies

On Tsui Hark’s ‘The Taking of Tiger Mountain’

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Source: Association for Chinese Animation Studies (5/5/2024)
What Happens to the Index in Animation? The Case of The Taking of Tiger Mountain
By Cassandra Xin Guan

In the opening sequence of The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu Weihushan 智取威虎山  2014), an overseas Chinese student, “Jimmy,” walks into a karaoke parlor in Manhattan’s Chinatown trailing a suitcase. He mingles with a noisy group of young Asians, until the incongruous sound of Peking opera and the vision of a fur-clad actor gesturing before a painted snowy landscape interrupts the karaoke program. It is reconnaissance officer Comrade Yang Zirong astride an invisible horse in the 1970 film adaptation of the revolutionary model opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. [1]The room erupts into hilarity at the embarrassment of the singer, taken aback by this prank. Jimmy alone is entranced by the apparition on the flatscreen TV. Someone asks, “It’s your hometown, isn’t it?” Next, we see the young man sitting in a yellow cab en route to the airport. While the driver curses Yuletide traffic, Jimmy begins to watch a YouTube video of the model opera on his phone. The operatic soundtrack swells while the camera zooms intently into his face. Snow is falling in America and in the deciduous forests of Northeast China. Over aerial vistas of the hyperborean landscape, the title of the film appears followed by the name of the director and source material: The Taking of Tiger Mountain, a film by Tsui Hark 徐克, adapted from the 1955 novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Linhai xueyuan 林海雪原) by Qu Bo 曲波. Continue reading On Tsui Hark’s ‘The Taking of Tiger Mountain’ →

Subtitled version of ‘The White-Haired Girl’

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The Chinese Film Classics Project is delighted to announce the publication of a subtitled version of the film The White-Haired Girl 白毛女 (Wang Bin 王濱 and Shui Hua 水華, dirs., 1950), translated by Pete Nestor and Thomas Moran:

https://chinesefilmclassics.org/the-white-haired-girl-1950/

My thanks to Pete Nestor and Thomas Moran and the MCLC Resource Center for granting the Chinese Film Classsics Project permission to use their translation, and to Tamar Hanstke for doing the subtitling.

ABOUT THE FILM:

The White-Haired Girl 白毛女 (1950) is a seminal work of New China cinema. A musical film adapted from a stage production, which in turn was claimed to have been adapted from a popular folk legend, The White-Haired Girl is an ideologically-freighted story of liberation and rejuvenation. A fresh young country girl is subjected to inhuman suffering by a despicable landlord, before being rescued when the communist Eighth-Route Army liberates her village and sees justice done. Xi’er’s new lease on life became symbolic of the rebirth of China, whose history the film divided into two distinct periods with the slogan: “The old society forced humans to become ghosts / The new society turns ghosts into humans.” Continue reading Subtitled version of ‘The White-Haired Girl’ →

‘Home’ series from Paper Republic

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“Home”, new Paper Republic series of shorts in English translation

A refuge, a recollection, a promised land, a prison; the arms of family, or four concrete walls in the sky… Home means something different to each of us, but it means something to all of us.

Paper Republic’s newest Read Paper Republic series of online short story and poem translations, themed around HOME, will commence publication on June 6, 2024. Read the pieces, completely free, online at https://paper-republic.org/pubs/read/series/home/.

The tenth series since Read Paper Republic was first published in 2015, HOME includes four short stories and two poems, each adopting a different point of view on the all-important question of belonging. At a time when Chinese society is wrestling with generational gaps, real-estate crises, and the outfall of pandemic, these meditations on love and security (or lack thereof) deliver a powerful testament to the variety of human experience.

We’re giving away brand-new novels translated from Chinese completely free to people who help us grow our mailing lists with the most names. What you have to do to win a novel (or collection of short stories or poetry):

  • Send this email to any friends you think would be interested.
  • Ask if they will agree to have their names added to our mailing list. (They’ll get a couple of emails and a couple of free newsletters from Paper Republic per year, no more.)
  • Send us their names and emails by 31 July 2024.
  • Wait to hear from us! We’ll ask you for your mailing address if you’re one of the lucky winners

Continue reading ‘Home’ series from Paper Republic →

Chinese Literature and Thought Today 55.1-2

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Dear colleagues,

I’m pleased to announce that Chinese Literature and Thought Today (CLTT) v55, n1-2 is now online at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/mcsp21/current.

Routledge has stopped offering a free access period for the entire issue. If your institution subscribes to CLTT, you should be able to read and download the full contents. Additionally, the following two pieces in this double issue will be available for free access until the end of August 2024.

“Crafting an Imaginary World of Her Own: A Conversation with Hong Kong Author Wong Yi” by Jennifer Feeley

 “Affective Chinese Socialist Realism: A Reading of Zhao Shuli’s Sanliwan Village” by Daniela Licandro

best,

Ping Zhu <pingzhu@ucsd.edu>

positions: asia critique 32.2

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New Issue of positions: asia critique (32:2) Available Now Online

We are pleased to announce the publication of positions: asia critique 32:2!

The contributors are Inhye Han, Katherine G. T. Whatley, Junnan Chen, Jennifer Dorothy Lee, Pun Ngai, Qiaoyun Zhang, Guanli Zhang, Wen Huang, Yun Tang, Chang-Min Yu, and Yuqing Yang.

Browse the table of contents and read the Editor’s Introduction at https://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/issue/32/2. The issue is available for purchase at https://www.dukeupress.edu/positions.

Posted by: Dale Booth <positionsjournal@alc.rutgers.edu>

The Translational Turn and the Dual Pressures on Chinese Literary Studies

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List members may be interested in my review essay, “The Translational Turn and the Dual Pressures on Chinese Literary Studies,” recently published by the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and available via open access.

Here’s the abstract:

Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a “translational turn” in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books—Carla Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy’s The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang’s Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter (2018)—risk taking for granted the longevity of China’s participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.

And here’s the first paragraph: Continue reading The Translational Turn and the Dual Pressures on Chinese Literary Studies →

Comparative Literature and China

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NEW PUBLICATION
Comparative Literature and China: Methods and Perspectives, special issue of Journal of World Literature guest edited by Zhang Longxi and Sheldon Lu, Volume 9 (2024): Issue 2 (May 2024).

Table of Contents:

Introduction, by Zhang Longxi and Sheldon Lu

Facing Challenges and Opportunities: Chinese-Western Comparative Literature and Poetics, by Zhang Longxi

Some Under Heaven: World Literature and the Deceptiveness of Labels, by Haun Saussy

East-West Cross-Cultural Encounters of the Lyric: Horace (BCE 65-8) and Tao Yuanming (CE 365-427), by Elisabeth Harper

The Early Modern Period, Dream of the Red Chamber, and World Literature, by Sheldon Lu

Confrontation and Withdrawal: The Literature of ‘Denitiation’, by Jian Guo

Understanding ‘World Literature’ in China Today, by Liu Yan

Comparative Literature in Taiwan in the Age of World Literature, by Chung-An Chang

Manipulated Translation, Politicized Canon: Reception of The Gadfly in China, by Zhen Zhang

A Re-deliberation of Minzu Literature and World Literature: The Literary World in Alai’s Writing, by Haomin Gong

Chasing Traces

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This rich collection of essays on history and anthropology in China/SE Asia is out from Hawaii:

Chasing Traces. History and Ethnography in the Uplands of Socialist Asia, edited by Pierre Petit and Jean Michaud. University of Hawaii Press, 2024. (Don’t understand why the publishers would have a website w/o the ToC? But one can buy the book at the above link. )

My own chapter in it is on the Wa people, whose ancient land was cut up by Burma and China, “Wa History: Agency and Victimization”

For chapter abstracts, and all contents, see JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.6505269

Sincerely,

Magnus Fiskesjö

Ming Qing Studies 2023 and cfp

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Call for Papers: Ming Qing Studies
edited by Paolo Santangelo (Sapienza University of Rome)

Ming Qing Studies is a blind peer-reviewed international publication edited by Paolo Santangelo. We are pleased to announce that proposals are being accepted for the 2024 and following issues. We invite the submission of original articles, research notes, and book reviews from any field of study related to the history of late imperial China and East Asian cultures (14th-early 20th centuries). Contributions on social history, collective imageries, representations of emotion and gender, borderland management and innovative approaches to art history, cartography, and imperial ethnography are particularly welcome. All the submitted articles must be written in good English and revised according to our editorial rules. Please e-mail an abstract of 300-500 words, together with a preliminary bibliography and a short-bio of yourself in Microsoft Word or pdf attachment to the following address. Make sure to specify your full name, academic title, affiliation and contact details in your e-mail. Submissions of novel research for inclusion in our brand-new spin-off series, Ming Qing Studies – Monographs, are also encouraged.

Deadlines for submission

Ming Qing Studies 2024     Abstract and bibliograph. notes: May 15, 2024
Full article: July 10, 2024

Ming Qing Studies 2025     Abstract and bibliograph. notes: July 31, 2024
Full article: December 31, 2024

Monographs: December 31, 2024 Continue reading Ming Qing Studies 2023 and cfp →

Chinese queer poetry collections

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Dear MCLC members,

It is my great pleasure to announce the publication of my poetry pamphlet Dream of the Orchid Pavilion (Big White Shed Press, 2024) and poetry collection The Passion of the Rabbit God (Valley Press, 2024). The two books draw on classical Chinese texts such as the Rabbit God story and the Orchid Pavilion Gathering to develop a creative narrative of queer Chinese identity and migrant experience. They also rewrite classical Chinese texts about Chang’e, Qu Yuan and Liangzhu as well as modern English texts about Fu Man-chu from a contemporary feminist, queer and anti-racism lens.

The two books will be launched in Five Leaves Bookshop (Nottingham) in May and The Carousel (Nottingham) in June 2024. They can be purchased in-store from Five Leaves bookshop and online from the Big White Shed Press and Valley Press websites.

Thank you and all the best,

Hongwei Bao <renebao@gmail.com>

Untamed Shrews talk

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Book Talk–Untamed Shrews: Negotiating New Womanhood in Modern China
Shu Yang (Western Michigan University)
LRCCS Noon Lecture Series at Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan
Tuesday, April 16, 12 pm
First floor of Weiser Hall, Room 110-120
500 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI

Talk page

Zoom registration

Posted by: Shu Yang <shu.yang@wmich.edu>

Self-kidnappings

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Source: The Diplomat (4/8/24)
Self-kidnappings by Chinese Students Abroad: Mystery Solved
The puzzle presented by these incidents can only be understood in the context of China’s police brutality and growing transnational repression.
By Magnus Fiskesjö

Self-kidnappings by Chinese Students Abroad: Mystery Solved

Credit: Depositphotos.

One of the most baffling news items in recent years has been the cases of Chinese students abroad who effectively kidnap themselves for ransom. They leave home, even tie themselves up with ropes, all on the orders of Chinese cyber-criminals – who are not even there with them.

They may be asked to put bags on their heads, or to cry on camera. They are invariably made to take kidnapping selfie pictures or videos of their suffering. The criminals then use these to blackmail their parents into depositing ransom money to bank accounts in China. Occasionally, the criminals mix in threats of pending arrest, or extradition back to China, as would-be punishment for alleged fraud or other crime said to have been committed by the students or their families. Invariably, the victims are told to cut off all contact with their family and the outside world, and to perform for the camera. Sometimes this is framed as necessary to help the consulate or the police with their “investigations.” There is no logic – except that of perceived power.

During the last few years, a long series of incidents along these lines have involved Chinese students in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States – all destinations where Chinese parents with a lot of money send their children to study.

It’s easy to see that this creates an opportunity for criminal fraudsters. The basic scheme of the student kidnappings forms part of a wider array of phone scams, and the peculiar niche of student scams seem to have perpetrators moving from country to country, perhaps as media attention disrupts their chances of success.

But why do all these Chinese students allow themselves to be kidnapped by telephone, and even go on to stage the crime themselves? How should we understand this phenomenon? Continue reading Self-kidnappings →

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality

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We are pleased to share the publication of the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality coedited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao, which may be of interest to some in this group.

The ebook is available for purchase via Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality. A free preview of the book’s introduction is also available on its T&F page (T&F page for Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality). A 20% DISCOUNT (using the code EFLY01) IS CURRENT AVAILABLE. A flyer for promotion is also attached to this email. Please help widely share and order the Handbook with your local/university libraries. Please kindly find its description and TOC below:

This Handbook offers a rich survey of topics concerning historical, modern and contemporary Chinese genders and sexualities. Exploring gender and sexuality as key dimensions of China’s modernisation and globalisation, this Handbook effectively situates Chinese gender and sexuality in transnational and transcultural contexts. It also spotlights nonnormative practices and emancipatory potentials within mainstream, heterosexual-dominated and patriarchally structured settings. It serves as a definitive study, research and resource guide for emerging gender and sexuality issues in the Chinese-speaking world. This Handbook covers interdisciplinary methodologies, perspectives and topics, including: Continue reading Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality →

JCLC 10.2

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The new issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 10.2 is now available in print and online. All articles are ready to be downloaded via Duke University Press Journals Online (subscription needed)

Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 
Volume 10 Issue 2   November 2023
Editors Yuan Xingpei and Zong-qi Cai

Table of Contents

The Philosophical Proposition “A Piercing Glance Elevates the Mind” and the Buddhist Thought in Zong Bing’s “A Preface to the Painting of Landscape”
By ZONG-QI CAI and STEPHEN RODDY

Horse Language and Improvised Memorials: Gong Kai’s Equine Paintings and Song Loyalism
By NAJUNG KIM

Unquiet Qing: The Course of Lovesickness in the Modernization of Chinese Literature
By LIU ZIYUN and YUEFAN WANG

Demon-Immortal Monkey: Categories of Being in the Cosmos of Journey to the West
By KEITH MCMAHON

How Should the Dragon King Memorialize the Jade Emperor? Margins of Political Thought in Late Ming China
By SHOUFU YIN

Emperor Qianlong’s Literary Aggrandizement in the Eighteenth Century
By YAN ZINAN

Review Essay

On Translating Mountains & Seas: A Review Essay
By NEWELL ANN VAN AUKEN Continue reading JCLC 10.2 →

Drama Box and the Social Theatre of Singpore event

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Dear colleagues,

It gives me great pleasure to invite you to the panel discussion commemorating the launch of my book, Drama Box and the Social Theatre of Singapore: Cultural Intervention and Artistic Autonomy 1990-2006.

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Founded in 1990, Drama Box is a socially-engaged theatre company known for creating works that inspire dialogue, reflection and change. Published thirteen years ago in Chinese, Drama Box and the Social Theatre of Singapore: Cultural Intervention and Artistic Autonomy 1990-2006 received critical acclaim for its “comprehensive insight” into cultural policies and “excellent analysis” of the company’s theatre practice which “amplifies the voices of marginalised communities.” Now available in English, it has been updated and edited for a wider readership. To commemorate its publication, you are invited to join us for the live streaming of the book launch and panel discussion as speakers working in theatre, education and academia explore the nexus between theatre and crisis.

Online event:
Title of Panel Discussion: THEATRE AND CRISIS
Date: 9 March 2024 (Saturday)
Time: 0800 to 0930 (UK time)
Language: English Continue reading Drama Box and the Social Theatre of Singpore event →