I had a lovely time with friends old at new at this years meet-up for the Nordic Association of Chinese Studies (NACS) at the University of Copenhagen organised by Bo Ærenlund Sørensen and Elena Meyer-Clement — in particular the literary panel we put together!

• Pamela Hunt: Travel Reading and Travel Writing in Contemporary Chinese Literature
• Federica Ceccarelli: A Bathtub of One’s Own – Objects as Symbols of Liminality in Queer Sinophone Literature
• Astrid Møller-Olsen: Metafictional Rainforests – Multilingual More-than-Human Ecologies in Mahua Literature
• Nick Stember: Humans into Gods – The Bio-Politics of Power in Contemporary Adaptions of the Ming Vernacular Novel Canonization of the Gods

“This panel brings together four literary scholars who analyse how cross-cultural connections are made across borders, bodies, and genres. By reading travelling texts intertextually, Pamela Hunt connects practices of reading and writing just as Astrid Møller-Olsen does in her study of the more-than-human rainforest as a metafictional figure. Federica Ceccarelli is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s thoughts on empowering women writers to connect two Sinophone authors as they probe the possibilities of a queer “room of one’s own” and Nick Stember probes the Bio-Politics of Power in Contemporary Adaptions of a Ming Vernacular Novel. In short, we adopt a position “between” in ways that connect contemporary Chinese literature to other periods, languages, and literatures.”