Chinese, Sinophone and Comparative Literature: narrative spacetime, botanical monsters, literary sensory studies, urban memory, plant-human hybrids, ecocriticism across genres & a hovercraft full of eels
→Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg og Peter Damgård i samtale om bogen.
→Sidse Laugesen og Rakel Haslund-Gjerrild i samtale om Eileen Changs Shanghairomancer
→Fremførelse af Jeg bor på et bjerg af Tangdigteren Hanshan ved Susanne Jorn, Helen Davies på harpe og Poul Høxbro på xun
→Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg i samtale om det erotiske univers i Jin Ping Mei
→Bo Ærenlund og Astrid Møller-Olsen i samtale om nutidig kinesisk litteratur med fokus på science fiction og queer
→Screening af kortfilmen Altid/Aldrig Noget Andet om kinesisk poesi og oversættelse af Sebastian Cordes og Jenny Rossander (Lydmor)
→Pop-up udstilling af Tofu Collective
→Rap på kinesisk ved CXCX Chu Chu
Samtale og moderation ved Tore Leifer, oplæsning fra værkerne ved skuespiller Ellen Hillingsø. Efter arrangementet er der mulighed for at nyde en kinesisk inspireret buffet. Deltagelse i festival og buffet er gratis, men kræver tilmelding:
“The Cultural Logistics of Chinese and Sinophone SF Conference 2024 scrutinizes the current state of the science fiction (SF) genre in China and the larger Sinophone area. Along these lines, we invite contributions that explore the vitality and potential limitations of “Chinese SF”. We welcome analyses of the textual and extra-textual dimensions of SF, the transformations across formats and languages, the literary and aesthetic politics, and the socio-political affordances granted by this form. Moreover, we encourage discussions of this genre as a medium for cultural exchange across linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries in the present and the past, as well as interventions that recognize the value of this genre in unveiling and questioning existing power dynamics and inequalities, and its potential to fuel global discourse against global threats such as the climate emergency and our growing geopolitical instability.”
I’ll be looking at prominent plant characters in novels and short stories from a variety of genres including speculative fiction, eco realism, surrealism, science fiction, and literary fiction. And I’ll be creating a theoretical framework around 3 nodes: critical plant studies, posthuman feminism, and translation studies. Yeah, I’m excited. Here is a short extract from the project plan:
Plant People: Posthuman Ecologies in Contemporary Fiction
Can being more plant-like help us live more sustainably? In recent years, it has become abundantly clear that humans desperately need to rethink themselves not as masters of the universe but as co-inhabitants and carers for planet Earth.
Literature is the perfect trial ground for such radical thought experiments. In my research, I combine a more-than-human perspective on planetary ecologies with a postcolonial approach to world literature to explore how thinking and writing with plants can help us move beyond the Anthropocene.
In the study of literature, plants have traditionally been categorised as poetic metaphors or ambient backdrops for narrative action. Although such passive perspectives may have been adequate in the past, the ongoing environmental crisis demands a more nuanced and theoretically informed approach.
Building on previous aesthetic and ecocritical research on “nature” as a general category often used to criticise human hubris (Chen; Thornber), my project goes one step further than human-nature antagonism and looks at entangled plant-people perspectives on our planet.
By analysing fiction in Chinese –second only to English as a world language– from around the globe, this project aids the much-needed democratisation of world literature (Apter; Nuttall) and highlights environmental humanities as an essential discipline for understanding 21st century planetary realities.
Ref
Apter, Emily. 2019. ‘Untranslatability and the geopolitics of reading’. PMLA 134 (1): 194-200. Chen, Wangheng. 2007. Huanjing meixue 环境美学 [Environmental Aesthetics]. Wuhan: Wuhan University Press. Nuttall, Sarah. 2021. “World Literature as Planetary Literature.” In D. Ganguly (ed.), The Cambridge History of World Literature, pp. 924-941. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Thornber, Karen. 2012. Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Translation is currently being discussed across academic disciplines and recognised as an essential process, performance, and metaphor for 21st-century realities as we engage with people and products from across the globe on a daily basis. My morning coffee has been through several translations: from the literal translation of information on the packaging to the cultural translation of a 15th-century Sufi aid to concentration into an integral part of waking workday rituals across the planet. Finally, it involves a metaphoric translation of substance into sensation, of hot black liquid into a sense of wellbeing and alertness. But such processes are not necessarily benign, and in the moment of coffee-fuelled bliss, the modern slavery taking place on many non-Fairtrade plantations gets lost in translation.
Translation is rarely a simple equal exchange but mostly constitutes, as Yunte Huang and Hangping Xu rightly point out in their introduction to the latest issue of Prism, “a multidirectional and intertextual hermeneutic process” (3). This special issue on Translatability and Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World “troubles the power asymmetry between national and world literatures, or between the Wets and the Rest [by investigating] how Chinese poetry interacts with the world via the criss-crossing routes of translation, dissemination, diaspora, mediation, transmission, reception, reincarnation, return, and so on” (2). It aims to investigate poetic translation from the perspective of a “a polycentric world” (4) and presents a bouquet of 12 diverse chapters on the subject. As such, it forms a rich source of inspiration for both translation scholars, poetry scholars, and all researchers interested in experimental modes of literary comparison. I opened the volume to feed my increasing interest in literary translation and came out more curious than ever and with a new craving for poetry.
I really enjoyed Shengwing Wu’s piece on how modernist poets used classical poetic motifs like wang 望 (looking into the distance) to describe modern technology like the Eiffel Tower or gazing at the moon through a telescope: “playing skilfully with the literal and figurative meanings or words (Buddhist or other culturally loaded terms) and engaging in extensive corporation with tradition and imaginative mediation, these poets also translated their sensory perceptions and emotions, in somewhat different manners, into the classical-style forms” (37). Translating extremely contemporary hi-tech inventions into the language of a poetic past creates a delightful twist that shows just how much translation (between languages, periods, or cultures) adds to a text. Cosima Bruno and Lianjun Yan in their essay likewise highlight poems inspired by poems, and propose to view such instances not as two units in an intertextual comparison, but as entangled poetry with translation as “a medium, an origin, and an afterlife” (171).
While surprising new context can have an artistic effect, Haun Saussy, in his analysis, shows how the extreme decontextualisation of anthologies misrepresents and risks mistranslating poetry. Examples he gives include a series of poems by Wang Wei that were originally published as a poetic conversation with Pei Di and which have since entered world literature as what he calls “pure poems”. Saussy argues that rather than freeing the individual poem, such radical decontextualisation risks freezing it into a synecdoche for an entire nation’s poetry. He concludes that “[c]areful attention to poems and paintings—outside the constricting frames of anthologisation and museum display—reveals their internal multiplicity and provides one form of resistance to the binding force of nationally ordained cosmologies” (22).
In her elegant expose of the immense Russian influence on modern Chinese poetry, Michelle Yeh shows just how little sense such bordered in versions of national poetry make, while Hangping Xu experiments with the notion of “translation as an interpretive performance, positing a translator’s relationship to the source text as akin to an actor’s relationship to their script” (228), proposing that the translator incorporate not only content but also context into their performance.
Through the new contexts and new performances that translation introduces, whole new genres of poetry may arise. Xiaorong Li demonstrates how poems translated by New Style sensual-sentimental xiangyan 香艷 poets “not only attempted to seek a common ground among different cultural expressions but also allowed themselves to be inspired by the source texts and create something hitherto unseen in the target language and culture” (72) such as using wen 吻 as a term for romantic kissing. Nick Admussen suggests that such processes of enrichment and innovation might be beneficial in academia as well as poetry. He explores a current rise of scholar-poets in US universities and argues that the interdisciplinary translation of scholarship into poetry might help admit and acknowledge the personal in the academic—the individual circumstances and accidents that affects what and how we study.
Several of the essays in the special issue deal with the politics of translation, such as Maghiel van Crevel, who analyses contemporary battler poetry (打工诗歌) “written on the flip-side of the MADE IN CHINA label” (203). He criticises the fact that “it is especially in translation that a single author can come to operate as a synecdoche for an entire literary genre” (206) and proposes the term hypertranslatable for a text that “elicits especially high numbers of translations, whose perspectives on the source text and its reproduction may converge but may also differ widely and indeed irreconcilably” (209). Adding a historical dimension to the discussion of the politics of cultural exchange, Chris Song examines the case of Dong Xun and Thomas Francis Wade’s collaborative translation of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” as an instance of diplomacy through poetry with translation as a prime mechanism of early soft power exchanges. Coinciding with Wade’s appointment as chargé d’affaires, the “poetry translation at the time was part of the means to incorporate social activities and cultural exchanges into his diplomatic practice that aimed to exert ‘pressure of inconvenience without hostility’” (80).
Lucas Klein sees translation as an extension of the poem and proposes that the poetics of translation is always political. Inspired by his works on poems from the Angel Island detention center, he writes that “rather than thinking in terms of foreignisation and nativisation, I ask if some translations assimilate their source texts, while other lock their source texts in detention” (101). If a translation locks its poem in detention by being too focused on the politics of content and context, “assimilated translation demands too little room for itself, challenges too little” (101). Klein proposes that multiple translations and translations that pay attention to the political in the aesthetic may be just as relevant and even more powerful.
Rather than an extension of something that is already there, Jacob Edmond seeks to invert our view of translation and invites readers to reimagine their internal literary world maps so that the intercultural, intertextual seas take centre stage and national literatures recede to appear as accidental nodules in a vast ocean of translation. As he posits, translation is “not as something that happens to national literatures but as what constitutes them” (139). Inspired by Bei Dao’s understanding of creative writing as a form of translation whereby a writer translates their thoughts, sensations, and experiences into words, he purports that “translation is not just something that happens to the already fully formed literary work but is frequently interwoven into the fabric of its making” (154).
Read together, this volume is a multifaceted and polyvocal intervention in the current discussion of how thinking in and through translation can help scholars/poets/humans rethink and challenge uneven power relations and understand the complexities and entanglements of contemporary literature in ways that go beyond national canons or elitist world literature anthologies to embrace the creative mess of literary entanglement across space, time, and languages. I wholeheartedly agree with Edmond when he echoes Epeli Hau’ofa and asks: “[i]nstead of seeing isolated islands of national languages and literatures, what if we opened our eyes and ears to the noisy ocean of translation out of which those islands emerge?”
Ta-wei told me about experiences with nosy masseurs that inspired him to write about the skin as a medium for spying on people’s private lives. It makes sense – in classical Chinese medicine, the skin has always been a primary source of information about the health of the body through sphygmology (pulse examination). The skin is a membrane that reveals as much as it conceals.
Another important membrane in the novel is the sea: Due to heavy pollution and a damaged ozone layer letting in UV-rays, humanity has relocated to the sea floor. Here, Ta-wei criticized his younger self for falling into the trap of portraying settler colonialism uncritically – a widespread phenomenon in SF. Today he would have paid much more attention to the lifeforms already inhabiting the sea and questioned what mass human migration would have meant for the indigenous ecology.
Screens are also a type of membrane that the novel explores, a motif that has only become more relevant since the advent of smart phones and more recently remote meetings and video chats during the pandemic.
On a metaphorical level, the novel continuously plays with, and softens, membranes between categories – particularly those pertaining to gender and species. Momo is born in a male body, raised as a girl, and later undergoes medical transition to become female. Such social and physical categories are backgrounded however, as Momos mothers have always raised her as their daughter – albeit a special fairytale daughter, born from a peach.
Momo is also partly artificial. She has one finger replaced with a biological replica and that starts a philosophical inquiry into what it means to be human. In Momo’s society, androids – a type of biological robot – do all the hard and dangerous work. How much of Momo would need to be replaced by bionics before she is more android than human? As we incorporate technology more intimately into our bodies and everyday lives – pacemakers, cochlear implants, glasses and smarts phones – many of us are habitual cyborgs.
Finally, the membrane of language was an interesting topic for me as a translator. The way the novel lives in various languages and the fact that, in each linguistic bubble, Momo and her subsea world looks and sounds slightly different. “Membrane” is not pronounced mo in Danish as it is in Chinese, and so the immediate auditory connection between Momo and the membranes is obscured. On the other hand, mother in Danish (mor) is pronounced exactly like membrane in Chinese –mo – and so another connection is established. As translation takes us through the linguistic membrane of one language and into another, the novel also transitions and changes, becoming something new that is both the same and different.
Translating Chi Ta-wei’s 膜 (The Membranes, Membraner) – an amazing deep sea exploration of the human mind-body – has been a tremendously enjoyable ride with nothing but kindness and support from both Ta-wei and the publishers Korridor (as well as generous funding from Books from Taiwan and the S. C. Van foundation). The amazing cover art and bookmark are by Ida Marie Therkildsen.
This outwardly simple novel elegantly chronicles the story of skin care specialist Momo and her intimate yet alienated relationship with her subsea surroundings. But below the surface, so many of the narrative’s deceptively innocent scenes lead to convoluted and uncomfortably relevant questions about how we perceive, interact with, and take care of our world.
A work of speculative fiction, Chi’s work takes nothing for granted. The novel addresses several personal and societal issues that are easily as relevant today as they were 25 years ago when it was first published in 1996: Here queer identities and non-heterosexual relationships are the norm, humans rely on biochemically constructed androids to survive the environmental disasters they have caused, and giant publishing houses are among the most powerful players under the sea.
At the same time, Chi Ta-wei has created an intimate and sensual reading experience that I have done my best to rewrite with Danish words. A major challenge for me was the way repetition of a single term and its near synonyms works well in Chinese but appear clumsy and annoying in the more limited vocabulary of Danish. So, rather than constantIy repeating phrases like “under havet (under the sea)” and “oppe på land (up on dry land),” I ended up developing the fictional place names Underhavet (The Subsea) and Landjorden (Dryland) for the new futurist world Momo inhabits. Creating and curating a terminology that conveys the stark contrast between the liveable underwater atmosphere and the barren landmasses above was one of the absolute perks of translating Membraner.
Soon Ai Ling’s short stories weave cultural trajectories from Guangdong, Hong Kong, the UK, Malaysia, and Singapore into a rich fabric of personal experiences and artistic passions. Each story centres around a particular craft, from which vantage point it explores the relationships between cultural heritage and innovation, and between past and future homelands. As each story generates its own pattern, the variety of Chinese-speaking diasporas is showcased, as well as the internal diversity of dynastic China and of the PRC today. In Diasporic, cultural influence is not a unilinear movement from an imagined core to a perceived periphery but rather a continuous process of artistic experimentation and cross-cultural inspiration that is inextricably entwined with personal histories of migration.
In the story “Batik Melody”, the protagonist comes to Malaysia to take over the family batik factory now run by his father’s second wife Aisha and her daughters, only to realise that the dreary old family business is actually an innovative cross-cultural playground: “it dawned upon me that they had inherited not only their mother’s cultural heritage, but also learned a lot from Father” (59). The marriage between Aisha and his father is also a symbolic union of two (or rather several) cultural traditions, bringing together a variety of approaches to artisanal work. On the one hand, Aisha—who is of Arab and Chinese descent—stands for the practical approach. She owns and runs the factory with her daughters, who are both highly creative and innovative when it comes to inventing new patterns and techniques. The protagonist’s father, on the other hand, was a craft historian working on a book about the history of batik. From his Miao-Chinese ancestors, he inherited an extensive knowledge of plant dyes and he represents the more intellectual aspects of batik production. Between his father’s historical interests and Aisha’s hands-on approach, the protagonist, who was educated in the UK, struggles to find his own place in the factory until he decides to focus on marketing. Like the colourful cloth they produce, the lives of the characters are coloured by many cultural influences and traditions, coming together to form new patterns and new stories.
Soon’s writing combines the subtle yet powerful pathos and social critique of Eileen Chang with a literary celebration of everyday life, peppered with glimpses of history with a capital H, reminiscent of Xi Xi’s plain leaf literature. Like Xi Xi, Soon foregrounds personal affairs but allows glimpses of momentous historical events slip through, such as the tide of emigration following the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989: “On my way home, the sound of the nightly news wafted through from TV sets behind store windows, reporting that tomorrow the British would announce how many Hong Kongers would receive the permit to be UK citizens” (38). Yeo Wei Wei’s direct translation of wonderful nicknames like “Carefree Yu” and “Frost Liu” also add to the delightfully Xi Xi-esque atmosphere.
Soon’s stories honour the artistic and creative side of artisanal crafts using individual characters with a flair for, and loyalty toward, their work as the red thread through the fabric of the compilation. In “Jade Butterflies”, Soon takes advantage of the close association between craftsperson and crafted object to critique the commodification and exploitation of (often women) workers. By writing about the intangible cultural craft of opera, whose product—song—cannot be separated from the person producing it, she makes her point even stronger, as the protagonist puts it “We are not goods. Buy us out? You think you have so much power. If we don’t agree, you won’t be able to buy us out either” (123). Despite the culturally sanctioned practice of “buying out” singers to become concubines, the protagonist insists that she has, if not absolute choice, then at least the right of veto.
Later in the story, Soon uses the same symbolic identification of craftsperson and artwork to comment on the objectification of women as aesthetic ornaments of pleasure and entertainment. She lets the male protagonist and “philanthropic protector” of young opera singers realise that his singing concubines are not mere ornaments but whole persons: “‘I thought the two of you sang for enjoyment. How did singing a bit of opera lead to all these tears?’ ‘All of you think that opera is fun and entertainment. You don’t realise that our singing comes from our hearts” (111). The pretty face and pleasing voice of the opera singer hides a complex person with a life of pain, pleasure, and hard work. In this way, Soon reverses the objectification process so that the artist is revealed as more than a human knitting machine and the crafted artwork is understood to hold their passions and memories. The emotive power of lovingly crafted objects is a theme that recurs throughout the compilation, like the scene where a handful of jade butterfly buttons given at a lovers’ parting in Guangdong turns up in Singapore half a century later and helps the long-lost lovers reunite: “Ah! Those jade butterflies, those jade buttons, they were like spirits, drawing this relationship, which had spanned half a century, to a satisfying conclusion” (133).
Yeo Wei Wei’s translation combines the softness of the many moving stories with a sense of structural stiffness, like a piece of beautifully embroidered cloth. It also lends the stories a slightly old-fashioned air that is quite charming, like listening to your grandmother reminisce about her youth.
In Diasporic, processes of intercultural exchange are explored through chronicles of craft and reveal the inherent diversity of the misleadingly singular noun culture: “I learnt that embroidery started thousands of years ago. I learnt that the goods we made were sold not only in China, but also in other countries, that they were exported and even sent to competitions abroad. I learnt that apart from Guangdong or Yue embroidery, there is also Xiang or Hunan embroidery, Su or Suzhou embroidery, and Shu or Sichuan embroidery; Guangdong embroidery encompassed the embroidery produced in workshops like ours, as well as that of the women at home in the city and countryside, and the Li tribe on Hainan Island” (97). Like the artisanal crafts it celebrates, the craft of writing that Diasporic embodies is a cross-cultural product of multilingual experiences and multiple mutable translations that continues its journey into new languages and new lives.
How to cite: Møller-Olsen, Astrid. “New Languages and New Lives: Soon Ai Ling’s Diasporic.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 May 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/05/18/diasporic
Landscapes Beyond: Crossing Boundaries in Sinophone SF
This panel examines at how contemporary science fiction stories construct landscapes beyond the real and in doing so cross a variety of boundaries within and beyond the text.
Born out of the creative translation of English and Japanese stories at the turn of the 20th century, Chinese SF has from its inception been a genre between -sometimes published as science writing and sometimes as literary fiction.[1] SF stories have historically been and continue to be, adapted from one medium to another – from novels to lianhuanhua and from online short stories to TV dramas[2] – and the stories themselves habitually explore the boundaries of human perception and knowledge. In short, Chinese SF stories inhabit the spaces between and across categories in terms of content and form, language, and story.
Bringing together a handful of Nordic scholars devoted to studying speculative fiction, this panel approaches boundary-crossing in SF from a variety of different positions including generic hybridity, translation, posthuman perception, and transmediality. By looking at texts that cross from one genre or medium to another, are translated from one language to another, or whose perspective shift from human to machine, this panel exhibit contemporary SF’s ability to challenge and expand our understanding of the landscapes of real on every level.
From thousand-mile lenses to super VR invincible infrared X-ray glasses: A century of machine vision in Chinese science fiction
Technologies of vision – particularly optical augmentations of the human eye and automated sensing machines – are one of the most common ways in which the future of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is represented in Chinese science fiction. For example, in the 2017 animation movie Have a Nice Day by Chinese director Liu Jian, for instance, a suburban scoundrel named Yellow Eye roams around the city wearing his “super VR invincible infrared X-ray glasses”, a pair of DIY spectacles that allow him to peer inside other people’s belongings as well as under women’s clothes. After a series of misfortunes, Yellow Eye’s pursuit of a bag full of banknotes leads him to his demise: ironically, he gets electrocuted while smashing a traffic surveillance camera for fear of having been caught in its augmented field of view. While the centrality of machine vision in sci-fi is not unique to China, it clearly resonates with historical experiences of surveillance and a long genealogy of speculation about the national development of optical technologies. Drawing on a wide sample of Chinese science-fictional narratives from different historical moments, this presentation analyzes the shifting metaphors through which the future of optical technologies and automated vision has been imagined by Chinese sci-fi authors over a century of cultural production.
Gabriele de Seta
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen
“For Every Lonely Childhood, There is a Doraemon”: Alienation, Generic Hybridity and the Vindication of Optimism in A Que’s “Farewell, Doraemon”
In the face of seemingly insurmountable personal difficulties and systemic injustices, is it still possible to believe in a better future? In the 2016 science fiction novella “Farewell, Doraemon” (再见哆啦A梦) by A Que (阿缺, b. 1990), this question is examined through the story of an alienated young man grappling with the harsh social realities of rural China, which are exemplified by the tragic life of his childhood friend and contrasted with the cheerful world of the animation series Doraemon. While the adventures of the series’ time-traveling robot at first seem far removed from the protagonist and his friend’s own circumstances, as the story unfolds the protagonist eventually assumes the mantle of Doraemon and takes action to help change their fates.
Drawing from Cara Healey’s conception of “generic hybridity” between Western SF and Chinese critical realism as a key characteristic of contemporary Chinese science fiction, I will examine how “Farewell, Doraemon” uses the critical realist tropes of the educated narrator returning to his hometown and the long-suffering female character to highlight contemporary social issues in rural China. Moreover, I will illustrate how the novella diverges from realist conventions by including a time travel element, allowing the story to explore the possibility of alternative endings to established narratives. I will also argue that in doing so, “Farewell, Doraemon” challenges fatalistic attitudes towards the suffering of marginalized people and foregrounds the importance of imagination and kindness in creating positive change in our communities.
Eero Antero Suoranta Doctoral Candidate, Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Arts, and Society, University of Helsinki
Chuanyue – Time Travel Tropes: From Chinese Web Literature to Tv or Web Adaptations
This study seeks to investigate themes of historical romance, gender expression, and social mobility in tv and web-serial adaptations of three time-travel (chuanyue 穿越) web novels: Bubu Jingxin 步步惊心 by Tong Hua (2005), The Promotion Record of a Crown Princess 太子妃升职记 by Xian Cheng (2010), and Qing Yu Nian 庆余年 by Mao Ni (2007). Each theme correlates with the main characters’ experiences of certain lacks and failures of modern Chinese society as the protagonists travel back in time to pursue possibilities for seeking romance with multiple choices of partners, for challenging societal gender roles and, lastly, for achieving vertical social mobility by being reborn into a powerful family or gaining special abilities and advancing in an alternative society.
Translating motifs of time-travel from web novels to either tv-series or web-series (where one is aired on television while the other is aired online), requires some level of rewriting to pass censorship (guoshen 过审), especially after the 2012 restriction ban on subgenres such as palace dramas and time-travel dramas. The adaptations chosen for this study, produced before and after the 2012 restriction ban, are interesting examples of how time-travel translates from one medium to another, how adaptation can expand the story world and, in particular, how these expansions and limitations affects and enhance themes of historical romance, gender expression, and social mobility.
Ying Chen
Teaching Assistant / MA stud., Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Productive Ambivalences as World-building in the Work of Liu Cixin
Literary works of science fiction often revolve around investigating the estranging effects of radical technological developments upon individuals and societies; that at least is Suvin’s seminal claim which has produced much enlightening scholarship. This paper takes a related yet still markedly different route by examining the ways in which the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s world-building occurs through the working out of a limited number of productive ambivalences: These include the injunction to remember against the desire to forget; the delights of ocular examination against the paralyzing effects of surveillance; and the longing for sincerity against the fear of betrayal. The paper claims that Liu Cixin’s famous Three-Body trilogy can be considered a world created by transposing these social anxieties, characteristic of contemporary China, onto both plot elements and specific imaginary technologies present in the work. This close reading enables us to gain a clearer grasp of the “generative motor” in Liu Cixin’s works. This reading also illuminates some of the genuine literary strengths of Liu Cixin’s oeuvre, which have so far been underappreciated due to Liu’s somewhat stereotypical representation of (particularly female) characters and his manifest disinterest in serving up ethical or narrative dilemmas for the readers to grapple with.
Bo Ærenlund Sørensen
Tenure Track Adjunkt, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen
Soft Translation: Fluidities of Gender, Language, and Sea in Chi Ta-wei
The emergence of Chinese language SF in the early twentieth century was closely intertwined with translation to the extent that “[w]orks labelled kehuan xiaoshuo [SF] initially included translations and creative adaptations of English works, often based on Japanese translations[.]”[3] In this paper I am inspired by this entanglement of literary creation and translation, epitomised by Lu Xun’s processual approach of “hard translation” (硬译).[4]
Taking my own translation of Taiwanese author Chi Ta-wei’s 紀大偉 sub-sea SF-novel The Membranes (膜)[5] into Danish as my case study, I pursue a strategy of “soft translation” where Lu Xun’s “brutal penetration into the unfamiliar” and forceful “chewing” over of the text[6] is replaced by linguistic exchanges seeping through the porous membrane of the text as it enters and is entered by the translator and tasted by the supple tongues of multiple languages. Inspired by Chi’s novel, I use the image of the membrane to look at the fluidity of boundaries between genders, bodies, and languages that the translation of this underwater tale entails. Finally, I borrow feminist scholar Astrida Neimanis’ posthumanist conceptualisation of a planetary “hydrocommons of wet relations”[7] to situate my own translation within a planetary commons of translated literary relations.
Astrid Møller-Olsen
International Research Fellow, Lund/Stavanger/Oxford Universities
[1] Isaacson, Nathaniel (2017): Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press: 8.
[2] Li, Hua (2021): “7 Fledgling Media Convergence: PRC SF from Print to Electronic Media.” Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. University of Toronto Press: 134-164.
[3] Isaacson, Nathaniel (2017): Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 8.
[4] Wang, Pu (2013): “The Promethean translator and cannibalistic pains: Lu Xun’s ‘hard translation’ as a political allegory.” Translation Studies, 6:3, 324-338.
[5] Chi, Ta-wei 紀大偉 (2011/1995): Mo 膜 [Membranes]. Taipei: Linking Publishing. Translated into English as The Membranes: A Novel by Ari Larissa Heinrich for Columbia University Press, 2021.
In this course, they “explore a range of representations and practices related to “repair” in China,” and “consider literary, philosophical, and artistic works that question the notion that humans are separate from nature or the environment” as well as “the specific means whereby different literary and visual genres call attention to elements—plants, water, air, earth, humans—in need of repair.”
I analysed how botanical characters are used as role models for a more sustainable and interconnected way life as well as monstrous entities that deconstruct the very notion of repair and suggest that despite its benevolent possibilities it still caries remnants of the narratives of human mastery that led to environmental destruction in the first place.
The ancient pages of the book before me are rumpled by water damage, the lower right corner of each page is stained brown and all but torn off, it smells musty and would feel sticky were I allowed to touch it. This object is a product of repeated multisensory reading sessions. It is a volume of choral sheet music from the European Middle Ages and its pages are marked by the audible breath of the singers, as well as by the touch of their fingers, hastily turning the page in time for the next verse. Holding it in their hands, they viewed the sheet music with their eyes and translated it into sound with their brains and vocal cords. The temperature and moisture of the room and the bodies in it merged with the sounds and became a visual imprint, a tactile trace of a melody heard long ago.
As this description of one object from the small but wondrous exhibition “Sensational Books” (2022) at the Weston Library in Oxford shows, the boundaries between sensory categories—and between physical and social aspects of sensation—are as permeable as they are practical. What is “a sense” really? How many are there, and might they not differ between periods, cultures, bodies, and social contexts? These are some of the questions posed by contemporary sensory studies, a field that combines sociological, anthropological, and historical approaches to diversify and nuance our understanding of what sensation means, has meant, and can mean. It is highly fitting that Sensing China, a new and very welcome addition to this cross-disciplinary area of scholarship, begins with a deconstruction of the very term “sense.”
It is this flexible approach to multi- and cross-sensory realms that Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang instill in the reader by beginning the introductory chapter to their edited volume with a quote from Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 that includes the lines “colour can appear to embody temperature, sound embody form, heat and cold have weight and smell solidity” (1). To Qian’s poetic rumination on synaesthesia (通感), Wu and Huang add that their own objective is to “offer a critical investigation of a variety of sensory phenomena, representations, and discourses in Chinese cultural history, and of modern transformations of sensory culture in particular” (3). With a mind firmly focused on sensory collaboration, transformation, and context, rather than sensory systematics, the reader can begin to explore the manifold methodological and disciplinary perspectives in the following eleven chapters.
The volume is chronologically arranged in four parts—Part 1: Understanding the Senses in Traditional Culture; Part 2: Reconfiguring the Senses and Modern Sensibility; Part 3: Socialist Corporeality, Sensorium and Memory; and Part 4: Senses, Media and Postmodernity—covering sensory culture in China from as early as 500 BCE to well into the 2000s (followed by an epilogue). This makes it easier for readers interested in specific periods to find their way. However, when reading all the chapters (and I encourage you to do so, because insights are not limited to historical facts but also include innovative methodologies and inspiring analyses), shared themes surface. Although a cursory inspection of the table of contents seem to reveal that many of the chapters focus on individual senses, most of them end up demonstrating that no sense works in isolation and that sensation is always social and quite often emotional as well. Instead of proceeding through the chapters in order, below I survey the chapters with an eye toward their shared themes and concerns, as well as highlighting key arguments and insights; to save space, I refer directly to the authors rather than the full title of each chapter.
Jane Geaney, author of the pioneering On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought,[1] reminds us that the notion of “a sense” as a universal concept is the first obstacle we need to dismantle to gain a deeper understanding of sensory experiences, thoughts, and transformations across time. She begins by destabilizing any easy translation of the Chinese term 官 guan as “senses that inform and/or confuse the heart-mind (心 xin)” and goes on to “reassess the very idea of an early Chinese concept of ‘sense’” (19). Geaney shows that early texts were not very systematic in their use of the term guan and that although guan sometimes substitutes for specific sensory organs such as the eye or the ear, i.e., the physical forms by which we grasp the world, it is also used for less conventional “senses” such as happiness, form, name, and more, leading her to conclude that “we cannot infer that guan replaces a general category term like ‘sense’” (20). In short, when reading early Chinese texts, we tend to treat guan as a dead metaphor when, as Geaney demonstrates, it was still very much alive and flexible.
Like Geaney, Paolo Santangelo deconstructs the notion of a “sense” and adds an important affective dimension to our understanding of sensation when he notes that the modern term ganjue 感覺 “makes no distinction between mental and physical feelings” and that “social and moral effects of the senses remain the basis of debate on senses” in Ming and Qing sources (43). Sensation, according to Santangelo, is not exclusively physical but inherently social and emotional as well. He employs this position to delve into the social aspects of scent as a marker of cultural and gendered identity that “signals the unity of the physical and social body [and] transfers ideological and social distinctions to a visceral level” (52). Xuelei Huang continues Santangelo’s exploration of the relationship between scent and identity to analyse how specific fragrances not only set social groups apart but can also act as medium through which one may live out a fantasy of belonging to another class, gender, or ethnicity through a kind of “smell-voyeurism” (81).[2]
Staying on the theme of emotions and sensory mediations, Carlos Rojas analyses mediated touch as an enhanced form of intimacy. He notes that because the sense of touch is surrounded and guarded by norms and taboos, visual mediation allows vicarious tactile interchanges where direct touch is not possible due to social convention—as between father and son in Song Dong’s 宋冬 artworks—or because of sexual normativity—as with the male lovers in Wong Kar-wai 王家衛 and Zhang Yuan’s 張元films. Shengqing Wu likewise examines the confluences between visuality and tactility in her study of how Chinese cinemagoers in the 1910s and 1920s learned a new way of kissing from the actors on the screen and went on to savor the smell and taste of the sweet (甜蜜) kiss that was the product of this multisensory mimesis. One could extend this historical survey backwards from the contemporary norms regarding men touching men that Rojas analyzes, through Wu’s description of the visual introduction of new heterosexual kissing standards in the early twentieth century, and on to premodern Chinese medicine, where, as Elisabeth Hsu has shown,[3] rules regarding who could touch the female body required diagnostics on women to be performed through the medium of a silk cord to avoid direct skin contact.
In my own work on literary sensory studies,[4] I have been inspired by the idea of whole-body sensation (身體感) proposed and developed in the anthology Body/Object Nuances: Research on Material Things and Bodily Sensations, edited by 余舜德 Yu Shuenn-Der. [5] It would have been exciting if more of the chapters in Sensing China engaged directly with the broader field of sensory studies, taking up comparisons with findings from other areas, disciplines, and periods as well as with new theories and conceptualizations of sensation.
Jie Li’s chapter stands out for its introduction of a new and radically cross-sensory concept, anchored in her literal translation of 热闹 renao (lively) as “hot noise”—a multisensory term that is “at once visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory, and haptic” (202). This brilliantly conceived analytical fulcrum allows Li to examine the whole-body experience of open-air cinema in Mao-era China from a variety of different and overlapping sensory perspectives. Above all, Li shows that the physical surroundings of open-air cinema were as important as the content of the film being screened. Even when a screening was suspended due to frequent breakdowns in the mobile equipment, the canvas screen itself, blowing in the wind, became a spectacle known as “white cloth film” (205). When in motion, the sensory symphony on screen was coupled with an equally entertaining sensory disharmony off screen, consisting of shouts, bickering, and laughter from neighbors all around. The “phantom commensality” (211) of filmic feasts was accompanied by the festive smells and tastes from homemade snacks and street vendors. As Lena Henningsen shows in her chapter, partaking by proxy is a theme that continues to resurface in the “spiritual feasts” of recalling past meals during times of hunger, which is given permanence through inscription in literary texts (178).
Returning to the hot noise of open-air cinema, Li describes how the film itself was bodily produced by people on manual generators, pedalling to provide the needed electricity, and consumed not only optically (with even the visual impression bracketed by the heads of other spectators) but corporeally and socially by the crowd as well. The very nature of open-air cinema led to an “intense awareness of one’s body between the sky and earth, vulnerable to wind, rain, snow, mosquitoes, heat and cold,” while the social dimension took center stage when film screenings were used for political purposes as well as for matchmaking (215-216). The communal nature of such sensory experiences is not only of academic interest, as Xiaobing Tang argues in his chapter, they have been instrumental in transforming Chinese society. Stressing the need for historians to understand the bodily experiences as well as the material circumstances of historical subjects, he concludes that when it comes to 1930s China, “unless we truly grasp the sensory implications as well as the affective power of mass singing, our understanding of a formative stage of modern Chinese culture may remain incomplete and inadequate” (143).
In open-air cinema, the social, contextual, and collaborative aspects of sensation naturally come to the fore. However, by using a multisensory analytical term like hot noise, other researchers could tease out more subtle but equally somatic dimensions of pursuits usually viewed with a visual bias. After all, even lone reading sessions in quiet rooms are bodily practises, situated in time, space, and language—affected by expectation, mood, paratext, room temperature, hunger, ambient noise, memory, and more.
Celebrating and employing multisensory frameworks, however, is not without hazards, as two of the chapters in this volume point out. In her chapter, Laikwan Pang analyses how Maoist romantic aesthetics, despite claiming to represent the materiality of everyday life, could be “understood as anti-material and anti-corporeal” (166) because of the priority given to the abstract ideological message that the graphic bodies were there to convey. In a similar vein, Kirk Denton cautions that, although involving more senses can help museums become more than “mausoleums,” the immersive quality of sensory exhibitions risk blinding the visitor to the constructedness of the narratives on display, their selectivity, and the things that are absent from them.
Despite such possible pitfalls, the value of Sensing China and its multisensory paradigm is (at least) twofold. First, it adds a new corpus of studies from Chinese languages and cultures to the ongoing global research on sensation and the social; second, the collective method of “(re)thinking through the senses” (3) may form an exciting and fruitful framework for future engagements with material grassroots history, comparative literature, and immersive fieldwork.
Although the Weston Library exhibition did display books chewed by toddlers, most of us have stopped tasting books in such a direct way. Yet there is no denying that books are more than just visual. That is why reading with a cup of coffee on a sunny bench is not the same as reading hungrily in a library sustained only by the musty scent of old pages or reading on a tram full of teenagers because you just have to finish this book you have for review. The Weston exhibition posed the question of what the growth of e-books might do to our reading habits and to the multisensory aspects of reading. Well, a few years ago I saw a young man on a bus in Shanghai flicking at the virtual page edges of his e-reader. Clearly, tactility was still a big part of his reading experience. Our bodies don’t just go away, despite all the screens we surround ourselves with. There is no question that sensory habits transform us just as we transform them, as Barbara Mittler appropriately observes in her epilogue to the volume, but often in inventive and unforeseen ways. There is always more to study, always more to sense.
NOTES:
[1] Geaney, Jane. On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).
[2] The role that odor plays in creating and sustaining cultural hierarchies was emphasized by Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott in their joint monograph Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994).
[3] Hsu, Elisabeth. “Tactility and the Body in Early Chinese Medicine.” Science in Context 18, no. 1 (2005): 7-34.
[4] Møller-Olsen, Astrid. Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2022).
[5] Yu, Shuenn-Der 余舜德, ed., Ti wu ruwei: wu yu shentigan de yanjiu 體物入微/ 物與身體感的研究 (Body/object nuances: research on material things and bodily sensations). (Taipei: National Tsing-hua University Press, 2008).
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