News in the field

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2)

by at

The Prince Claus Fund web page on Mu Cao includes a beautiful short video on Mu Cao, made by the Fund in September 2024 and first shown during the award ceremony for this year’s Prince Claus Impact Awards: https://edu.nl/wj6y4. (The video is right below the photo at the top; the play button is not clearly visible, but it sits in the middle of the burgundy rectangle.) In the video, Mu Cao explains what writing means to him. Below the video, there’s a brief profile of the poet in English.

Crossing, a book produced by the Prince Claus Fund on the occasion of the 2024 Impact Awards, includes laudations for each of the six laureates. After Mu Cao was nominated (in 2023), the Fund approached me for information on his life and work, to support the jury as it made its way from close to two hundred nominees to six awardees. In this capacity I had the privilege of writing the laudation for Mu Cao, for which I drew on an essay I co-authored with Hongwei Bao that is forthcoming in 2025. The text of the laudation is below.

Maghiel van Crevel

MU CAO: AN INIMITABLE VOICE
In Crossing (Amsterdam: Prince Claus Fund, 2024): 96-98.

Mu Cao is a poet and fiction writer whose life and work defy social convention in every respect. He is the author of a literary oeuvre that has emerged against the odds, carried by an inimitable voice that blends indignation and imagination to address a fiercely personal experience as well as overarching issues of social justice.

Born and raised in a village in rural China, Mu Cao was expelled from school at age fifteen and has since sustained himself with precarious labor, mostly in Zhengzhou and Beijing. One of three hundred million labor migrants who have flocked from the Chinese countryside to the cities since the 1980s, he has held dozens of jobs, from assembly line worker to web salesperson and from noodle-maker to barbershop attendant. Living on a shoestring, he works in order to save money so he can quit and write. When the money runs out, he looks for work again. Continue reading Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2) →

Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide

by at

Source: BBC News (12/4/24)
Top Chinese language novelist dies in apparent suicide
By Fan Wang, BBC News

Getty Images Chiung Yao attends a press conference on July 10, 2007 in Taipei.

Getty Images

Chiung Yao [瓊瑤], arguably the world’s most popular Chinese language romance novelist, has died in an apparent suicide.

The 86-year-old’s body was found in her home in New Taipei City on Wednesday, local media report. Emergency services said she took her own life, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.

Chiung Yao started writing at 18 and published more than 60 novels, many of which were adapted into movies and TV series and remained popular for decades.

She was also a successful screenwriter and producer. One of her most famous works was the TV drama My Fair Princess, which launched the careers of big name stars.

She was born Chen Che in Sichuan, China in 1938. Chiung Yao is her pen name.

A post on her Facebook account on Wednesday read: “Goodbye, my loved ones. I feel lucky that I have met and known you in this life”. It was not immediately clear if the post was published before or after her body was found. Continue reading Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide →

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award

by at

Chinese poet and fiction writer Mu Cao 墓草 (1974) has received one of the 2024 Prince Claus Impact Awards, as one of six biennial laureates in art and cultural practice worldwide (https://edu.nl/x8bjf). The Prince Claus Fund is an independent foundation dedicated to culture and development. The Impact Awards honor groundbreaking artists and cultural practitioners whose work inspires positive social change. The 2024 laureates received their awards on 3 December in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Mu Cao is known as China’s first openly gay poet. He is also one of China’s earliest migrant worker poets (aka battler poets 打工诗人) and writes with uncompromising candor on life on the underside, in his poetry and his fiction alike. Both queerness and socioeconomic inequality count as sensitive topics in China and Mu Cao has only published through unofficial channels there. An official, two-volume survey anthology of his poetry and short fiction came out in Taiwan in 2023 (https://edu.nl/fdg79). Five books of his poetry and two multiple-author anthologies produced under his editorship can be freely accessed at the Leiden University Library digital collection of unofficial poetry from China (https://edu.nl/k4d4d).

For scholarship, media, and translations on/of Mu Cao’s work, see the MCLC Resource Center bibliographies on literary studies: Author studies > M (https://u.osu.edu/mclc/h-q/#M) and Translations (author) > M (https://edu.nl/q6qc6).

Posted by: Maghiel van Crevel

Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award

by at

Source: Radio Taiwan International (11/21/24)
Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award
By Amanda Ruth Stephens

Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award

Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi’s “Taiwan Travelogue ” won the U.S. National Book Award Wednesday. In her acceptance speech reflecting on the theme of Taiwanese identity, she said, “[I] wrote about the past to move on to the future.” (Photo via YT/@NationalBook)

The English translation of the novel Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄) made history Wednesday as the first Taiwanese novel to win the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature since the award was founded in 1967. The award is among one of the most prestigious literature awards in the world, mentioned alongside the Man Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature.

Written by author Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子), the book tells the story of a Japanese travel writer Chizuko, and her Taiwanese translator Chizuru traveling along Taiwan’s railway system on a “culinary journey” during the period of Japanese occupation. During the journey, Chizuko is faced with confronting the layered power dynamics in an intimate story that the New York Times praises as “a nesting-doll narrative about colonial power in its many forms[…] of translations, [and] of empires”.

The author, Yang Shuang-zi, is actually a pen name for twin sisters Yang Jo-tzu (楊若慈) and Yang Jo-hui (楊若暉) who worked as collaborators focusing on narrative creation, and historical research and translation. While Yang Jo-hui passed away in 2015, her sister has continued to use the pen name in her honor. Continue reading Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award →

ACCL 2024 election result

by at

Dear List Members,

We are delighted to announce that Professor Liang Luo has been elected as the new president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL). We extend our heartfelt gratitude to both distinguished candidates, Professor Liang Luo and Professor Ping Zhu, for their participation in this election. Special thanks go to our former presidents, Professor Nicolai Volland and Professor Carlos Rojas, for volunteering to oversee the vote counting process.

Professor Luo will assume her role as the new ACCL president in December. We warmly congratulate Professor Luo and express our sincere appreciation to Professor Zhu. As the outgoing president and program officer, we will complete the transition process by the end of December. Professor Liang Luo will lead ACCL forward for the next two years.

Finally, we thank you all again for your support of the 2024 ACCL Biennial Conference “Behold the Human” in Hong Kong!

Best regards,

Mingwei Song <msong2@wellesley.edu> and Jannis Jizhou Chen Continue reading ACCL 2024 election result →

ACCL 2024 Election

by at

Dear List Members,

The 2024 ACCL Biennial Conference was successfully held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology on June 24-25, with six keynote speeches, sixty-five panels, and nearly 400 participants from Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. I am very grateful to the support of the HKUST faculty, students, and staff, particularly Professor Jianmei Liu and her students. My gratitude also goes to all conference participants and the audiences. The conference program can be found here.

As the current president of the ACCL, my last job is to announce that the election for the next president is now open. We have two excellent candidates. They are:

Luo Liang (University of Kentucky)
Zhu Ping (UCSD)

Their statements can be found here.

If you would like to cast your vote, please click this link, fill in the relevant information and make your choice.

​I am thankful to two former presidents, who will supervise the election and count the votes. Please cast your vote before November 10. Thank you very much!

Yours sincerely,

Mingwei Song msong2@wellesley.edu

Nieh Hualing Engle dies at 99

by at

Source: Focus Taiwan (10/22/24)
Author, int’l writing program founder Hualing Nieh Engle dies at 99
By Yeh Kuan-yin, Wang Pao-er and Matthew Mazzetta

Novelist Hualing Nieh Engle. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature

Novelist Hualing Nieh Engle. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature

Taipei, Oct. 22 (CNA) Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), a Chinese-language novelist and co-founder of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, has died at the age of 99.

Nieh’s death on Oct. 20 was confirmed to CNA by the poet Lin Chi-yang (林淇瀁), known by the pen name Xiang Yang (向陽), who received the news in a text message from Nieh’s daughter Lan-Lan Wang (王曉藍).

Hualing Nieh was born in 1925 in Wuhan, China. She came to Taiwan with her family in 1949, and later began publishing books while holding teaching positions at National Taiwan University and Tunghai University.

In 1964, Nieh moved to the United States after accepting a position as a visiting writer at the University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Three years later, Nieh, along with her future husband, the poet Paul Engle, co-founded the university’s International Writing Program.

In the nearly 40 years since then, the program has offered writing residencies for over 1,600 writers from 160 countries, including Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇) and Taiwanese poets Xiang Yang, Wu Sheng (吳晟) and Cheng Chou-yu (鄭愁予). Continue reading Nieh Hualing Engle dies at 99 →

In Memoriam: Stefan Landsberger

by at

It is with great sadness that I must share the news that Stefan Landsberger has unexpectedly passed away. Our Chinese Studies community here at Leiden University is still shell-shocked by this tragic loss. Stefan had not only a huge influence on the study of contemporary Chinese propaganda and media, but he was also a close and trusted friend.

Our institute has now published an obituary I wrote, along with several anecdotes and recollections that students, colleagues, and friends were so kind to share. These are, of course, only a small slice of the compassionate and heart-warming comments we’ve received this past week. I nevertheless hope these vignettes and thoughts will offer a small impression of how much Stefan meant to us.

Florian Schneider <f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl>

In Memoriam: Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024)

My colleagues and I have been devastated to learn that our good colleague and friend Stefan Landsberger (born 1955) passed away unexpectedly, on 26 September 2024. Stefan had been a fixture of China Studies in the Netherlands, where he had been Associate Professor of contemporary Chinese History and Society at Leiden University, and Emeritus Olfert Dapper Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture at the University of Amsterdam.

Text by Florian Schneider

Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024).

I first encountered Stefan in 1999, though not in person. His beautiful book Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization (The Pepin Press, 1995) was a constant feature at the street book stalls outside Hamburg Uni where I studied, and it became one of the first books about China that made it onto my student shelf. My teachers would also mention him frequently, as an example of what good hermeneutic research about contemporary China looked like. Much of my own fascination with propaganda and political communication was shaped by these early impressions of Stefan’s work.

My second encounter with Stefan was twenty years later, when I found myself sitting across from him during my job interview in Leiden. I must admit I was awestruck, not to mention a bit intimidated, to be asked sharp questions by this famous scholar of Chinese iconography. And it was only much later that I learned how instrumental Stefan had been in hiring me that day: fortunately for me, the idiosyncratic ways in which my background combined traditional philology and contemporary interests spoke to Stefan, who was a staunch defender of the humanities and area studies ethos. For Stefan, scholarship deserved to be societally relevant, but it also needed to keep sight of the complex, deep cultural and linguistic contexts in which people do things with media and communication, in diverse places around the world. Continue reading In Memoriam: Stefan Landsberger →

Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant 2024

by at

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to award the 2024 Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant in China Studies to the project Diversifying Humanistic Pedagogy in China Studies: Incorporating Ethnic Minority Literary and Cultural Productions into North American College Classrooms.

The newest competition in the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies is designed to support the development of effective strategies for long-term change in the field of China studies through working groups that will design and pilot activities to solve specific, pressing challenges in the field.

The first winning project addresses a lack of consideration of ethnic diversity in the current Chinese literary and cultural curriculum at institutions of higher education in North America. The project team is composed of faculty from diverse ranks and institutions in the US, as well as collaborators in China:

  • Yanshuo Zhang (Principal Investigator), Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures, Pomona College
  • Mark Bender, Professor of Chinese, The Ohio State University
  • Li Guo, Professor of Asian Studies, Utah State University
  • Robin Visser, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Jiajun Wang,  Founder of the Taoping Qiang Culture Museum, Sichuan, China
  • Jingui Zhang, Artist and educator

Continue reading Luce/ACLS Collaborative Grant 2024 →

Luce/ACLS 2024 grantees

by at

American Council of Learned Societies Announces 2024 Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies Fellows and Grantees  

Fellowships and Grants Totaling $475,000 Support Research, Writing, and Travel for Early-Career Scholars and Graduate Students in the Field of China Studies

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2024 Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellows and Travel Grantees in China Studies.

The awards are part of the redesigned Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies, which the Henry Luce Foundation has awarded ACLS $1.25 million to continue through 2025. This generous grant will support the next round of Early Career Fellowships, Travel Grants, and a Collaborative Grant, as well as a mapping project to identify archives and collections related to China studies around the world. Additional long-term fellowships are made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

In 2024, the program will support 25 fellows and grantees representing a diverse range of institutions and disciplines, including anthropology, film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, and sociology.

  • Fourteen Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowships in China Studies support emerging scholars whose research focuses on China’s societies, histories, cultures, geopolitics, art, and global impact. This year’s awards include eight long-term fellowships of up to $45,000, which allow recent PhDs to take leave from university responsibilities for research and writing toward a scholarly text, and six flexible fellowships of $15,000, which enable scholars with heavy teaching and service responsibilities to advance their projects.
  • Eleven Luce/ACLS Travel Grants in China Studies provide $5,000 for graduate students in a PhD program to visit research sites in China or China studies-related collections or archives anywhere in the world. The 2024 grantees will visit China, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, and more to research topics, ranging from the nineteenth-century Chilean copper trade and family care in rural Tibet, to displacement and migration at the Kazakh-Chinese border, and the political economies of carbon capture technologies.

Continue reading Luce/ACLS 2024 grantees →

Chi Pang-yuan dies at 100

by at

Source: Focus Taiwan (3/30/24)
Renowned Taiwan writer Chi Pang-yuan dies at 100
By Chiu Tsu-yin and Ko Lin

Renowned scholar, educator and writer Chi Pang-yuan. CNA file photo

Renowned scholar, educator and writer Chi Pang-yuan. CNA file photo

Taipei, March 30 (CNA) Renowned scholar, educator and writer Chi Pang-yuan (齊邦媛), who was instrumental in introducing Taiwanese literature to the Western world through her translations, has died at the age of 100.

Feng Te-ping (封德屏), president of Wenhsun Magazine, said Friday that Chi’s death was confirmed by friends who were familiar with the retirement home where she resided.

Chi was known for her autobiography “The Great Flowing River” (巨流河), which recounts the ups and downs of her eventful life in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and then her relocation to Taiwan. Through the memoir, she addresses the world about the historical past that should not be forgotten. Continue reading Chi Pang-yuan dies at 100 →

David Pollard (1937-2024)

by at

In Memoriam: Professor David Edward Pollard (1937–2024)

Dear all,

It is with a heavy heart that we write to announce the passing away of Professor David Edward Pollard, former co-editor (1989–1997), advisory editor (1998–2007), and Advisory Board member (2007–2023) of Renditions, in the early hours of February 6, 2024.

Professor Pollard was born in Kingston on Thames in 1937 and attended St John’s Primary School and Tiffin Boys School. During national service he was selected for the then secret Chinese Language Course and served in Hong Kong, an experience that changed his life. When he took up his place at Downing College, Cambridge, he switched from Modern Languages to Chinese. On graduation he was offered a scholarship at Stanford. On returning to the UK in 1962, he was appointed Lecturer in Chinese at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London University, where he became Chair Professor of Chinese in 1978.

Professor Pollard joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1989 as Chair Professor of Translation Studies. After his retirement, he served as Research Professor at the City University of Hong Kong, Visiting Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and Renditions Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Continue reading David Pollard (1937-2024) →

Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies

by at

Greetings.

Last year, the generosity of Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione enabled the Modern Language Association to create the Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies, to be awarded annually to an outstanding scholarly work in East Asian literary studies. Works of literary history, literary criticism, philology, and literary theory are eligible, as are works dealing with literature and other arts and disciplines, including cinema.

The inaugural award was conferred at the recent MLA conference in Philadelphia to Edward Mack (U of Washington) for Acquired Alterity: Migration, Identity, and Literary Nationalism (U of California P, 2022). At the same time, Brian Hurley (U of Texas Austin) was awarded Honorable Mention for his Confluence and Conflict: Reading Transwar Japanese Literature and Thought (Harvard U Asia Center, 2022).

The MLA is now inviting authors of books published in 2023 in East Asian literary studies to submit their works for consideration. Membership in the MLA is not required to be considered, but submission of required materials must be made before May 1, 2024. For further information, see the MLA announcement. Continue reading Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies →

Free access January for MCLC

by at

I am writing to let you know that Edinburgh University Press has included Modern Chinese Literature and Culture in our literary studies free access campaign running this January. We’ve opened up all content, for free, for everyone. The free access campaign includes 25 literary studies journals – browse them all here: https://www.euppublishing.com/literarystudies.

Best wishes,

Carla Hepburn
Senior Marketing Manager
Edinburgh University Press