A photograph shows a Chinese-built railway raised on stilts above Nairobi National Park, so the giraffes can pass beneath. A Nigerian novel appears in Chinese translation on a Beijing shelf. A film about a Sudanese brickmaker unfolds in the shadow of a dam built by Chinese contractors. Each is Chinese globality taking a form. Few can be read with the instruments Chinese literary studies has spent two decades sharpening for work across borders, above all under the sign of the Sinophone.

This is not a complaint about Sinophone studies. It is a debt. In arguing against diaspora and for the Sinophone as place-based practice, Shu-mei Shih gave the field a way of reading that no longer needed China to answer every question about Chineseness. That achievement is the condition of this seminar. But the Sinophone was theorized for an object that has since changed shape. Its archive was migration, memory, settlement, script; its criterion was language. China's globality now also arrives as capital and contract, concrete and code—as railways, ports, platforms, finance, norms, and the labor regimes that lay them down. Its cultural record falls outside that criterion in both directions: much is not in Chinese at all, and much of what is in Chinese has little to do with Chineseness. The social sciences named this formation Global China and built a field around it in two decades. What they have barely begun to produce is a poetics, and the politics only a poetics makes legible.

Hence the title, and its ambiguity, which we intend. After names sequence: what follows once the Sinophone has done its work. It names homage: a debt to its place-based spirit. And it names pursuit—still running after what the Sinophone reached for and has not yet caught. Can a mode of reading built to dissolve a center describe a formation organized by one? Can a field built on ports and payrolls read a poem? What genres has Chinese globality generated: the extraction narrative, the infrastructure elegy, the labor memoir, the technothriller? The field has no compact terms for these shapes. This seminar is an attempt to supply a few.

We welcome papers from literary, film, media, art historical, environmental, and digital humanities scholarship, and from any regional field. Possible directions:

•    Place-based reading after the Sinophone
•    Literary and cultural archives of China in Africa, Latin America, Southeast and Central Asia, the Pacific
•    The reverse vector: the Global South in Chinese-language fiction and film
•    Translation as infrastructure: publishing circuits, prize economies, state programs
•    Cold War inheritances: Bandung, the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau, socialist cosmopolitanism
•    Dams, railways, mines, ports, and grids as aesthetic objects and environmental archives
•    Platforms and speculative futures: web fiction, short video, science fiction
•    Language politics, area studies, and the shape "China" takes across fields