June in Milan was hot and dazzling – so many brilliant speakers and all about Chinese and Sinophone literature! The workshop “Re-Visualizing “The West”: Geo-Literary Images of Europe in Contemporary Sinophone Writings” organised by Simona Gallo (University of Milan, Project PI), Giacomo Zanolin (University of Genoa), and Faye Qiyu Lu (UCLA) was simply amazing.

• “Tell the ‘Good China Story’ by Way of Europe: Four Case Studies” David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University
• “A Stranger in a Strange Land: Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara” Carlos Rojas, Duke University
• “Europe in the Jungle: Minor Referentiality in Li Yongping’s Where the Big River Ends” Andrea Bachner, Cornell University
•  “Out of the Ruins: Imagining European History in Chinese Internet Fiction” Heather Inwood, University of Cambridge
• “A Dragon in Shallow Waters. Guo Ying’s Travelogue of a Space Called Europe” Cosima Bruno, SOAS University of London
• “Three Biographies of Sinophone Sexology” Howard Chiang, University of California Santa Barbara
• “German Lovers and French Cafés: Romanticizing Europe in Late Twentieth-Century Taiwan” Nicolai Volland, Penn State University
• “Mapping Linguistic Intimacies: Taiwan and Europe in Tsai Wan-Shuen’s Poetry” Justyna Jaguścik, University of Bern
• “Translating Topophilia: Mann’s Venice in Taiwan” Astrid Møller-Olsen, University of Copenhagen
• “A Lone Carnivore by the Aegean Sea: The Classicist Poet as a Wanderlust in a Transcultural Urbanscape” Zhiyi Yang, University of Frankfurt 
• “‘Re-mapping’: Leung Ping-kwan’s Poetry of Travels in Europe and His Poetics of You 游” Chris Song, University of Toronto
• “The Criss-crossing Roads of This Village: on Leung Ping-kwan’s Chinese Poetry from Provence” Lucas Klein, Arizona State University
• “How to survive in Germany: An overview of German-Sinophone literary voices” Rebecca Ehrenwirth, University of Applied Sciences/SDI Munich
• “Sinophone Echoes of Venezia 1984 in Blackbird: A Living Song (1987)” Faye Qiyu Lu, University of California Los Angeles
• “Geoliterary and cartographic perspectives on ‘Sinophone’ views of Europe” Giacomo Zanolin, Epifania Grippo and Carlo Giunchi, University of Genoa

I presented a paper on multiple, imaginary Venices across languages (Venedig/Venezia/Wēinísī 威尼斯/Venice). Through the lens of translation and inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s topophilic analyses, I explored how reverberations of Thomas Mann’s fictional cityscape in the novella “Death in Venice” (Der Tod in Venedig 1912) continue to unfold and engender new spaces in Chi Ta-wei’s 紀大 偉 The Membranes (膜 1995) and Chu T’ien-hsin’s 朱天心 “Death in Venice” (威尼斯之死 1997).