Transcultural Lyricism

In Transcultural Lyricism, Jane Qian Liu discusses the extent to which modern Chinese writer-translators borrowed from foreign literary works to create new ways to express emotion and by extension radically transformed the lyrical modes of modern Chinese literature.

This book examines how China’s new generation of avant-garde writers and artists are pushing the boundaries of vernacular culture, creatively appropriating artistic and literary languages from global cultures to reflect on reform-era China’s transformation and the Maoist heritage. It explores the vortex of cultural change from the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 to Xi Jinping establishing his leadership for life in 2018. The book argues that China’s new avant-garde adopt transcultural forms of expression while challenging the official discourse of Xi Jinping’s regime, which promotes cultural nationalism and demands that cultural production in China embodies the essence of the "Chinese nation". The topics range from body art, women’s poetry and boys’ love literature to Tibetan fiction and ceramic art. The book shows how the avant-garde use the new digital media to bypass government censorship, transcending China’s virtual frontiers while breaking new ground for an emerging public sphere. Overall, the book provides a rich picture of the nature of China’s avant-garde art and literature and the challenges it poses for the Chinese government. The introduction and chapter 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Focusing on transculturality, this edited volume explores how the role of translation and the idea of (un)translatability in the transformative complementation of different civilizations facilitates the transcultural connection between Chinese and other cultures in the modern era. Bringing together established international scholars and emerging new voices, this collection explores the linguistic, social, and cultural implications of translation and transculturality. The 13 chapters not only discuss the translation of literature, but also break new ground by addressing the translation of cinema, performance, and the visual arts, which are active bearers of modern and contemporary culture that are often neglected by academics. Through an engagement with these diverse fields, the title aims not only to reflect on how translation has reproduced values, concepts, and cultural forms, but also to stimulate the emergence of new possibilities in the dynamic transcultural interplay between China and the diverse national, cultural-linguistic, and contexts of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. It shows how cultures have been appropriated, misunderstood, transformed, and reconstructed through processes of linguistic mediation, as well as how knowledge, understanding, and connections have been generated through transculturality. The book will be a must read for scholars and students of translation studies, transcultural studies, and Chinese studies.

This book, Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950, celebrates the life and work of Chiang Yee (1903–1977), a Chinese writer, poet, and painter who made his home in London, England during the 1930s and 1940s. It examines Chiang’s relationship with his circle of friends and colleagues in the English capital, and assesses the work he produced during his sojourn there. This edited volume, with contributions from eleven distinguished scholars, tells a story of a Chinese intellectual community in London that up to now has been largely overlooked. It portrays a dynamic picture of the London-based émigré life during the years that led up to the war and during the conflict that was the catalyst for many of them moving on. In addition, the book broadens our understanding of cultural interactions between China and the West in Hampstead, one of the most vibrant artistic communities in London. ‘The collected essays convey a striking portrait of a community of Chinese intellectuals in England during World War II and how it interacted with cultural elites in London and elsewhere both as artists and as anti-fascist activists. As a whole, the volume makes significant points about how people claim status as “authentic” interpreters of a cultural tradition, a process that can pit friends against each other.’ —Kristin Stapleton, The University at Buffalo, SUNY ‘In this delightful collection of essays, a team of experts in literature, history, and the arts bring to light a world of literary interconnectedness and wartime collaboration seldom explored in scholarship. The perfect resource for anyone who values the humanistic common ground between the East and the West.’ —Jenny H. Day, Skidmore College

Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.

Winner, 2023 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association Beginning in the late Qing era, Chinese writers and intellectuals looked to India in search of new literary possibilities and anticolonial solidarity. In their view, India and China shared both an illustrious past of cultural and religious exchange and a present experience of colonial aggression. These writers imagined India as an alternative to Western imperialism—a Pan-Asian ideal that could help chart an escape route from colonialism and its brutal grasp on body and mind by ushering in a new kind of modernity in Asian terms. Gal Gvili examines how Chinese writers’ image of India shaped the making of a new literature and spurred efforts to achieve literary decolonization. She argues that multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections empowered Chinese literary figures to resist Western imperialism and its legacies through novel forms and genres. However, Gvili demonstrates, the Global North and its authority mediated Chinese visions of Sino-Indian pasts and futures. Often reading Indian literature and thought through English translations, Chinese writers struggled to break free from deeply ingrained imperialist knowledge structures. Imagining India in Modern China traces one of the earliest South-South literary imaginaries: the hopes it inspired, the literary rejuvenation it launched, and the shadow of the North that inescapably haunted it. By unearthing Chinese writers’ endeavors to decolonize literature and thought as well as the indelible marks that imperialism left on their minds, it offers new perspective on the possibilities and limitations of anticolonial movements and South-South solidarity.

A pioneering cultural history of smell in China from the High Qing to the Mao period.

Modern Chinese literature has been flourishing for over a century, with varying degrees of intensity and energy at different junctures of history and points of locale. An integral part of world literature from the moment it was born, it has been in constant dialogue with its counterparts from the rest of the world. As it has been challenged and enriched by external influences, it has contributed to the wealth of literary culture of the entire world. In terms of themes and styles, modern Chinese literature is rich and varied; from the revolutionary to the pastoral, from romanticism to feminism, from modernism to post-modernism, critical realism, psychological realism, socialist realism, and magical realism. Indeed, it encompasses a full range of ideological and aesthetic concerns. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.