China and the World: A Comparative Media Perspective
Virtual Session
Description
Much of modern Chinese studies revolves around the question of China’s place in the world. The specific terms of the debate vary: Chinese literature “and/as” world literature, global “Asias,” notions of the “Sinophone” and “Sinosphere,” and so on. But in each case, the end goal is to demonstrate why and how China should matter to the world outside China—a goal that speaks, in turn, to the continued influence of area studies, its insistence on treating China as the “inflection” of or “exception” to Euro-American norms.
This panel approaches the China/world debate through the lens of comparative media. Such a lens can counteract the literary bias in Chinese studies, a bias evidenced both in the way we do scholarship (e.g., the assumption that we “read” texts) and in the institutions playing host to our scholarship (e.g., the field’s flagship journals, which are all primarily literary). More broadly (and by extension), a comparative paradigm can help us desegregate. Scholars of literature debate China’s contributions to world literature, scholars of film the extent to which Chinese cinema is transnational, scholars of theater China’s place in global theater—yet little dialogue exists between these different mediatic silos, despite the similar questions being asked.
In enabling such dialogue, the question of medium shifts the focus of our scholarship from what to how, from the content of China’s relationship with the world to the means by which this relationship is established. Given that different media can use different tools to represent and convey meaning (words, shots, bodies, etc.), fully answering the question of how requires the very sort of comparative analysis this panel advocates.
We invite papers that address questions like (but not limited to) the following:
- What kinds of technologies, platforms, semiotic tools, and/or representational techniques do different media use to address the question of China, and how exactly do they use them?
- What sorts of methodological challenges would a comparative analysis of different media entail? How would such a comparative perspective interact with the conventional area studies paradigm?
- To what extent does medium impact circulation and reception (whether within or outside China)?
- In what ways has medium shaped the discursive landscape of “China”—a landscape composed, among other things, of longstanding traditions of Orientalism, increasingly heterogeneous conceptions of “Chineseness” as an identity (Sinophone, Global Asias, etc.), and growing perceptions of China as an environmental or geopolitical “threat” (via COVID-19, pollution, conflicts in the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, etc.)?
- How might a comparative media perspective change our pedagogy, the ways in which we teach China in the classroom?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Hangping Xu is an Assistant Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at UCSB.
Speaker Bio
Yingying Huang is a lecturer of Chinese at Lafayette College. Her research interests encompass late Qing literature and culture, travel writing, classical tales, gender studies, post-colonial studies, and science fiction. Her book project, The Alien Eye: Late Qing
Representations of China through a Transnational Lens, examines how
Qing writers and artists depicted China and the Chinese through the
perspectives of foreigners.
Speaker Bio
Ziru Chen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, supported by an Oxford-Kaifeng full scholarship. Her current research project, "The Sensory Aesthetic of Contemporary East Asian Art Cinema,” explores a new model of film aesthetics that centers on the human sensorium, focusing on the films of a major cohort of East Asian art cinema practitioners since the turn of the millennium. Her work is forthcoming or has been featured in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media.
Speaker Bio
Jacob Edmond is Donald Collie Chair and Professor of English at the University of Otago. He is the author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019) and A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham University Press, 2012).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Detwyler is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature at UW-Madison specializing in comparative new media and the cultural history of information.
Speaker Bio
Andrew Emerson is a dual-title PhD candidate in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.
Speaker Bio
Dorothee Hou is an Assistant Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Moravian University, Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCDavis). Her research interests include modern Chinese literature and film, as well as cultural production under globalization and deindustrialization. Currently, she is working on her first monograph on representations of China’s Rust Belt in literature, film, and visual culture. Her recent publications include “Reforging the Rust Belt: China’s Northeast on the Silver Screen,” Journal of Chinese Film Studies (May 2022) and From Rust Belt to Belleville: Two Recent Films on Chinese Migrant Sex Workers in Paris, Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Speaker Bio
Sheldon Lu is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Xinyue Zhang (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Hong Kong, School of Chinese. Her research focuses on contemporary Chinese popular culture, particularly Internet culture, online literature, and fan studies. Using an interdisciplinary approach, she analyzes how these cultural forms reflect and influence societal dynamics.
Xinyue holds a Master of Science in Social and Cultural Anthropology from University College London and a dual undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Edinburgh.
Speaker Bio
Flora Ang Xu is a senior undergraduate student at Duke Kunshan University, majoring in Global Cultural Studies and World Literature. Her research interests include Media Studies, Gender Studies, Comparative Cultural Studies, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Studies, and Transregional Studies.
Speaker Bio
Yishan Jiang is a PhD candidate for Comparative Literature at University College London, UK. Her academic interests span the areas of kinship, translation studies, visual arts, digital media and modernity. She has completed her PhD dissertation, entitled, Rethinking Chinese Modernity: A Comparative Literary Study of Chinese Kinship as Cultural Discourse (1900–1949).
Speaker Bio
Majorca Bateman-Coe (she/her/hers) is a first-year PhD student at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (CSCL) in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. She also holds a Master’s in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City. Her work primarily focuses on technology, internationalism, global cinema, emergent media studies, genre studies, transnationalism, utopia, post-colonial studies, and critical theory.