News in the field

Free Speech and Academic Freedom signature campaign

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Dear all,

Please note the signature campaign, titled “In Defence of Free Speech and Academic Freedom — Support Conscientious Scholar Professor Benny Tai” (捍衛言論及學術自由　支持良心學者戴耀廷) has been launched.  A copy of the statement is provided herein for your easy reference. Please visit this link (https://sites.google.com/site/hksaaf/academic-freedom-freedom-of-speech-ch) for details, including the names of initiators and signatories.

Please join and help spread this among your colleagues. This signature campaign targets at local and international academics only instead of students or administrative staff.

Regards,

學術自由學者聯盟
Scholars’ Alliance for Academic Freedom
(On behalf of the initiators) Continue reading →

Women and Gender in China blog

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MCLCers might be interested in this new blog.–Kirk

Welcome to WAGIC: Women and Gender in China
https://www.wagic.org

A dedicated space for discussing gender, sexuality and feminism(s) in China past and present.

Launched in September 2017, WAGIC is a collaborative (hopefully soon bilingual) blog project that aims to provide a dedicated and accessible space for commentary about all aspects of gender, sexuality and feminism(s) in China (incl. contested parts thereof), past and present.

Each month we publish a series of original blogs focused on a single theme. We engage with a wide range of topics relating to gender, sexuality and feminism(s) in China, past and present. We welcome submissions from academics, activists, journalists, writers and those with personal experience of these issues.

We hope this blog project will promote better understanding and awareness of the social, cultural, political and historical dynamics that underpin and inform gender, sexuality and feminism(s) in China today, and create new opportunities for international feminist and queer solidarities.

Chinese Poetry Festival 2017

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Source: China Daily (9/5/17)
Poetry for all ages
By Chen Nan | China Daily

More than 30 Chinese artists, including renowned TV host Chen Duo and actor Han Tongsheng, will gather in Yichang city of Central China’s Hubei province on Sept 12 to mark one of the country’s key contributions to humanity-－Chinese poetry.

The artists will recite poems in an opening gala for the fifth Chinese Poetry Festival, billed as the biggest poetry event in the country.

The event also opens with singing, dancing and instrumental performances.

The festival, which runs through Sept 17, is organized by the Ministry of Culture and the China Writers Association. It aims to celebrate the power of poetry in all its forms and will treat the public to traditional and contemporary works, along with forums and other related activities. Continue reading →

Boycott petition against censoring content

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Hi all, please consider signing this boycott petition I just started on Change.org calling for a boycott of peer review service to any non-China-based academic publication that censors content in China. Please also disseminate widely to colleagues and relevant institutions.

For maximum impact, when you sign, please leave the box checked for ‘Display my name and comment on this petition,’ and include your academic affiliation in the comment box for ‘Reason for signing’.

Peer Review Boycott of Academic Publications Censoring Content in China

Thanks for your support!

Charlene Makley <makleyc@reed.edu>
Professor of Anthropology
Reed College
Portland, OR USA

Teaching Global Community in an Age of Anti-Immigration

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PODCAST: Teaching Global Community in An Age of Anti-Immigration, with Eileen Chengyin Chow

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/fairbank-center/teaching-global-community-in-an-age-of-anti-immigration-with-eileen-chow

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/teaching-global-community-in-age-anti-immigration-eileen/id1255938359?i=1000390848201&mt=2

What role is there for storytelling and roleplay in teaching about Chinatowns and Chinese diasporas?

The “Harvard on China” podcast talks to Eileen Chengyin Chow, Professor in Duke University’s Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Co-Director of Duke’s Story Lab, director of the Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University, and Harvard alum. She is the author of the forthcoming “Chinatown States of Mind,” as well as the co-translator with Carlos Rojas of Yu Hua’s two-volume novel “Brothers” and the co-editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas.”

The “Harvard on China” podcast is hosted by James Evans at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

You can subscribe to the “Harvard on China” podcast on iTunes, or listen on Soundcloud, Stitcher, and other podcast apps.

LARB China Channel

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Dear MCLCers,

The Los Angeles Review of Books will launch its new China Channel this fall. The China Channel will host a broad range of writing and multimedia about China and the Sinophone world, with an emphasis on literature and culture, and will be accessible to a general audience.

As a commissioning editor, I invite you to pitch and submit essays, book reviews, and multimedia content. Please send your ideas and work to larbchinachannel@gmail.com.

Feel free to email me as well at anne.henochowicz@gmail.com. I look forward to reading/seeing/hearing your submissions. Continue reading →

Anthologized without being told?

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I recall a discussion in this list about translated books—books of literature, even—being reviewed without any mention of the translator.

Well, this is a little different.  I was getting my usual dose of enjoyment and enlightenment from a great book review by Perry Link in the New York Review of Books—in this case, a review of Yunte Huang’s The Big Red Book of Modern China Literature (along with a new book of Mao poems). It was from April 7, 2016.  I’m a little behind in my reading…  The Huang book has a generous assortment of authors and works, so out of curiosity I brought up the table of contents on Amazon.  I confess I am drawn to mentions of Shen Congwen—I’ll leave it to your imagination to guess how often I do Kinkley searches.  The anthology has excerpts from Border Town!  Wow, I thought, so there’s a fifth translation of that great work, so soon after mine?  Nope, Jeffrey Kinkley is acknowledged as the translator at the end.  Who knew?  Not me!  (W. W. Norton was the publisher of both books.) Well, I was listed as the translator, so I guess I should be grateful for small favors.

–Jeffrey Kinkley <jeffreykinkley@gmail.com

Theodore de Bary dies at 97

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Source: NYT (7/17/17)
Wm. Theodore de Bary, Renowned Columbia Sinologist, Dies at 97
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Wm. Theodore de Bary in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University. He was an internationally esteemed scholar of China with a bevy of academic awards and honors. Credit Arnold Browne

Wm. Theodore de Bary, a venerable Columbia University educator and distinguished scholar of China who was credited with broadening the way colleges nationwide study Asia, died on Friday at his home in Tappan, N.Y. He was 97.

His death was announced by Robert Hornsby, a spokesman for the university.

Professor de Bary was an internationally esteemed Sinologist with a shelf of at least 30 books to his credit, either written or edited by him, and a bevy of academic awards and honors, including the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama.

More locally, on the university campus in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, he was the consummate Columbia man — “one of the towering figures of modern Columbia history,” as Columbia College Today declared in 2013, a courtly figure “with the bow-tied elegance and comportment of a seasoned ambassador.” Continue reading →

Burton Watson, 1925-2017 (3)

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The NYT has finally published an obituary for Burton Watson.–Kirk

Source: NYT (5/3/17)
Burton Watson, 91, Influential Translator of Classical Asian Literature, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Burton Watson produced indispensable English versions of Chinese and Japanese literary, historical and philosophical texts. Creditvia Columbia University Press

Burton Watson, whose spare, limpid translations, with erudite introductions, opened up the world of classical Japanese and Chinese literature to generations of English-speaking readers, died on April 1 in Kamagaya, Japan. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by his nephew William Dundon.

For nearly six decades, Mr. Watson was a one-man translation factory, producing indispensable English versions of Chinese and Japanese literary, historical and philosophical texts, dozens of them still in print. Generations of students and teachers relied on collections like “Early Chinese Literature” (1962), “Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry From the Second to the Twelfth Century” (1971), “From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry” (1981) and “The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry: From Early Times to the 13th Century” (1984). Continue reading →

The Age of Irreverence wins Levenson Prize

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Source: China Heritage (nd)
幽默: You Having a Laugh? The Birth of Humour in Modern China

Christopher Rea’s The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (University of California Press, 2015) was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize (Post-1900 China) at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in March 2017. The prize is given in recognition of books that offer ‘the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics, or economy of China’ during the preceding year.

The citation for Chris Rea’s award reads, in part:

The Age of Irreverence offers a fresh perspective on the late Qing and early Republican era, focusing on the use of humor. The book balances with levity the better-known accounts of this period as steeped in ponderous intellectual debates. Rea taps into previously ignored sources, honing on parodic verses and essays, fantastic novels, cartoons, amusement halls, and photography, to show how these and other materials produced “cultures of mirth.” As the book demonstrates, the discourse of irreverence, manifested in specific practices, took part in forming and challenging claims to modernity.

Christopher Rea is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and former director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. Among other things, he was also in the first group of Post-doctoral Fellows at the Australian Centre on China in the World, founded in 2010, and during his time in the Centre he pursued work on this book project. Chris also contributed generously to China Heritage Quarterly and, with William Sima, was the co-guest editor of the last issue of that journal, the focus of which was The China Critic. He is also the editor of China’s Literary Cosmopolitans: Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, and the World of Letters (Brill, 2015) and Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu (Columbia, 2011), as well as being co-editor, with Nicolai Volland, of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900-60 (UBC Press, 2015). Continue reading →

Burton Watson, 1925-2017 (2)

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Thanks for the links, Magnus. I’m glad to see an official obituary, finally.

I’ve been collecting remembrances from Watson’s friends, students, and fans—scholars, translators, and poets—on my blog, and so far have put up pieces by Victor Mair, Jesse Glass, Jeffrey Yang, John Bradley, Jonathan Chaves, Sam Hamill, J. P. Seaton, Chloe Garcia Roberts, Deb Wallwork and Mike Hazard, and  John Timothy Wixted. You can see them all here: http://xichuanpoetry.com/?cat=1774

Lucas Klein <lklein@hku.hk>

Burton Watson, 1925-2017 (1)

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More notes on Burton Watson, the great translator and scholar, who just passed away.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=burton-dewitt-watson&pid=185123075&

http://www.cupblog.org/?p=20964

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=32126

I myself only spoke to him once. But I have enjoyed his work tremendously over the years, and also used it in teaching. It shines with the same generosity that came across in his voice that one time.

— Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Interview with Mark Bender

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Dear Colleagues,

The following is an interview with Professor Mark Bender (The Ohio State University) about his new book, The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry, which was released last month at the 2017 AAS conference in Toronto. This unprecedented volume presents important cultural works from the borders, margins, buffer zones, transitional areas, and frontiers from within and around the megastates of China and India, subsumed within the larger geopolitical constructs of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Many are from communities of poets or individuals writing within the watersheds of the Eastern Himalayas, an area encompassing Northeast India, Myanmar, and Southwest China. A number are from farther north in Western China and the steppes of Inner Mongolia and the nation of Mongolia. This book is a rare collection that brings together the works of poets of diverse cultural backgrounds located in places that are only beginning to be recognized globally as sites of intense poetic work. Major themes that penetrate these works are rapid environmental change and subsequent effects on traditional culture and challenges to ethnic and personal identity. These concerns are often framed within imagery of the local folk culture and local geographic environment, which are under increasing pressures of development by local and international governments and business enterprises. You can also watch Professor Mark Bender’s speech about his book at the AAS Cambria Press reception (or read the transcript of his speech). The Borderlands of Asia is part of the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Professor Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania). Continue reading →

Remembering Wang Xiaobo

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Source: LA Review of Books Blog (April 11, 2017)
Commemorating and Anti-Authoritarian Provocateur: Reflections on Wang Xiaobo (May 13, 1952-April 11, 19997)
By Sebastian Veg

Wang Xiaobo, an important Chinese literary and intellectual figure who died of a heart attack 20 years ago this week at the age of 44, remains largely unknown to the reading public outside China.  Only a few novellas and one important essay of his have been translated into English.  In China, by contrast, his popularity reached unprecedented heights in the late 1990s, and he was even included posthumously (with five other “emeriti”) on the first list of China’s 50 “most influential public intellectuals” published in 2004. Even now, his books are still reprinted and widely read: Changjiang Literature and Art has just published a new seven-volume selection of his writings to mark the anniversary of his death. Continue reading →

Yu Xiuhua visits Stanford

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Poet Yu Xiuhua Visits Stanford University

Generously sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (the Confucius Institute), and co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Stanford University presents to you:

A Film about and Conversation with POET YU XIUHUA:  诗人余秀华对话斯坦福

Yu Xiuhua has been hailed as “China’s Emily Dickinson,” although she refuses the label, insisting that her singularity defies such comparisons. Having shared hundreds of poems on her blog, Yu rose to fame in 2014 when her poem “Crossing Over Half of China to Sleep with You” went viral online. She has since then published three best-selling books of poetry. Sensual, rebellious, at once lyrical and dark, her poetry often expresses a yearning for human connections. The public reception, however, has relentlessly exploited her disability (cerebral palsy) and rural background, labeling her as a “brain-paralyzed peasant poet.” In 2016, Fan Jian made a documentary film Still Tomorrow that chronicles Yu’s transformation from a farmer living in rural China to a public figure appearing on national TV shows; it also documents her struggle to end her 20-year-long arranged marriage. Still Tomorrow won the prestigious IDFA Special Jury Award for Feature-Length Documentary. Yu and Fan will come to Stanford for a poetry reading and film screening. And a roundtable discussion will look at how multiple minority identities such as gender, class, and disability intersect in Yu’s rise to national fame in the age of social media.

See film trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq3iN2P4toI Continue reading →