Antipodean China

Antipodean China is a collection of essays drawn from a series of encounters between Australian and Chinese writers, which took place in China and Australia over a ten-year period from 2011. The encounters could be defensive, especially given the need to depend on translators, but as the writers spoke about the places important to them, their influences and their work, resemblances emerged, and the different perspectives contributed to a sense of common understanding, about literature and about the role of the writer in society. In some cases the communication is even more direct, as when the Tibetan author A Lai speaks knowingly about Alexis Wright's novel Carpentaria, and the two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan and J.M. Coetzee, discuss what the Nobel meant for each of them. The collection also includes writing by some of the best Chinese and Australian writers: novelists Brian Castro, Gail Jones, Julia Leigh, Yu Hua, Sheng Keyi and Liu Zhenyun, poets Kate Fagan, Ouyang Yu, Xi Chuan and Zheng Xiaoqiong, and translators Eric Abrahamsen, Li Yao and John Minford. In the current situation of hostility and suspicion between the two countries, this collection presents what may be seen, in retrospect, as an idyllic moment of communication and trust.

This book delves into the Chinese literary translation landscape over the last century, spanning critical historical periods such as the Cultural Revolution in the greater China region. Contributors from all around the world approach this theme from various angles, providing an overview of translation phenomena at key historical moments, identifying the trends of translation and publication, uncovering the translation history of important works, elucidating the relationship between translators and other agents, articulating the interaction between texts and readers and disclosing the nature of literary migration from Chinese into English. This volume aims at benefiting both academics of translation studies from a dominantly Anglophone culture and researchers in the greater China region. Chinese scholars of translation studies will not only be able to cite this as a reference book, but will be able to discover contrasts, confluence and communication between academics across the globe, which will stimulate, inspire and transform discussions in this field.

Comprising 11 countries and hundreds of languages from one of the most culturally diverse regions in the world, the chapters in this collection explore a wide range of translation issues. The subject of this volume is set in the contrasted landscapes of mainland peninsulas and maritime archipelagos in Southeast Asia, which, whilst remaining a largely minor area in Asian studies, harbors a wealth of textual heritage that opens to inquiries and new readings. From the post-Angkor Cambodia, the post-colonial Viantiane, to the ultra-modern Singapore metropolis, translation figures problematically in the modernization of indigenous literatures, criss-crossing chronologically and spatially through different literary landscapes. The peninsular geo-body gives rise to the politics of singularity as seen in the case of the predominant monolingual culture in Thailand, whereas the archipelagic geography such as the thousand islands of Indonesia allows for peculiar types of communication. Translation can also be metaphorized poetically to configure the transference in different scenarios such as the cases of self-translation in Philippine protest poetry and untranslatability in Vietnamese diasporic writings. The collection also includes intra-regional comparative views on historical and religious terms. This book will appeal to scholars and postgraduate students of translation studies, sociolinguistics, and Southeast Asian studies.

This book presents a range of new research on British-Chinese relations in the period from Britain’s first imperial intervention in China up to the 1960s. Topics covered include economic issues such as fi nance, investment and Chinese labour in British territories, questions of perceptions on both sides, such as British worries about, and exaggeration of, the ‘China threat’, including to India, and British aggression towards, and eventual withdrawal from, China.

A sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history, Antipodean America identifies the surprising affinites between Australian and American literature.

A study that uses critical theory to investigate the history of how people have thought about the antipodes - the places and people on the other side of the world - from ancient Greece to present-day literature and digital media.

China has arguably the largest community of Australian studies in the world. However, not much is known about this phenomenon, including its emergence, rationale, interests, influences, and the implications for strategic Australia-China engagement in a region of increasing challenge and uncertainty. This volume unpacks how Australia is taught, learnt, researched, communicated, and promoted in the Asian giant as well as its largest trade partner. In doing so, it penetrates the representation and essence of this phenomenon to seek both the ‘Australianness’ and the ‘Chineseness’ in it. This volume collects contributions from a group of leading and emerging Chinese and Australian scholars—who are members and insiders of this community—to jointly debate on this intellectual entity and its significant influences and implications. Produced at a critical moment of commemorating half a century of China-Australia diplomatic relations and four decades of formalised Australian studies in China, this volume provides an up-to-date, comprehensive, and insightful examination of this Australia-China engagement. It will be of interest to scholars, students, policymakers, and general readers in areas of Australian studies, Chinese studies, Asia-Pacific studies, China-Australia relations, and international relations.

First published in 1996, Australia's China explores the multifaceted and dynamic Australian encounter with China from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 through the Cold War to the Australian recognition of the PRC in 1972. Going beyond conventional policy studies, it traces the patterns in Australian reactions to China from the grass-roots to official circles, highlighting the centrality of images concerning the exotic, disease, sexuality, the frontier, and China as a paradise/anti-paradise. In responding to China, Australians revealed something of themselves, and this book maps the formation of Australian conceptions of identity in the context of a cross-cultural encounter which was variously cooperative, enriching, baffling, and antagonistic. But there was no single Australian conception of China. Rather, competing perceptions jostled in a shifting dialogue.