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.
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.
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 themed cluster of PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, we encounter wandering flats, ghostly spaces, and nostalgic fantasies that foster an interpretation of space and time as fundamentally entangled in the city.
Sensory perception, identity, and time: Yesterday, I was part of an amazing paper-session discussing ominous sounds (Bo Ærenlund Sørensen), representations of gender (Zhou Danxue), and chronopolitics (Erik Mo Welin) in contemporary Chinese SF.
I talked about the oceanic origins and possible futures of life – and about how astro-nautical realms are used as fruitful settings for narratives that explore postcolonial ecocriticism and posthuman understandings of being (see full abstract below).
Space Oceans: Astro+nautical convergences in Chinese SF
Since the beginning of the space age, the universe has been envisioned as a huge, mysterious ocean upon which the vessels of human explorers could continue their expansion of the known world into the future. Indeed, one of the most influential writers of 20th century science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, wrote just as captivatingly of earth’s oceans as of outer space, and compared the two as frontier regions of knowledge and resources.
In both Chinese and English, nautical terminology is used to describe interstellar travel: spacecrafts are flying ships (飞船), with the wind-sails of ocean vessels exchanged for solar sails, and the people who pilot them are star sailors (astronauts) or universe-boat attendants (宇航员), while the Chinese name for the Milky Way, Silver River (银河), highlights the connection between the vast aquatic realm and the galactic void. This maritime vocabulary has spilled over into literary criticism, when Darko Suvin describes how science fiction contains “a curiosity about the unknown beyond the next mountain range (sea, ocean, solar system…)” and “the planetary island in the aether ocean,” or when historical periodization of both American and Chinese science fiction is being described as “waves.”
In this paper, I look at how contemporary Chinese writers tackle themes of colonialism and exploitation of natural resources, humanoid aliens and space-dwelling humans, as they explore the oceans of outer space. First, I look at how Hu Shaoyan 胡绍晏 imagines the universe itself as an intergalactic ocean. I read the human encounter with astro-jelly fish in her story “Submerged in a Flame Sea ” 火海潜航 as an example of what Astrida Neimanis calls the “hydrocommons of wet relations” albeit on an interstellar scale. Second, I turn to Chi Hui’s 迟卉 “Deep Sea Fish” 深海鱼 and the alien seascapes of Titan composed not of water but of methane. Here, I analyse colonialism of terrascaping and how the environment shapes the mind of the inhabitants even as they try to shape their environment. Finally, Regina Kanyu Wang’s 王侃瑜 “Return to Mi’an” 重返弥安 highlights the problematic notion of the frontier itself, with its violent ignorance and erasure of earlier inhabitants. I read the return of the surgically humanized protagonist to her own original ocean planet as an expression of human space travel as both a search of new frontiers and a longing for a homecoming to the ocean that spawned us.
In this episode, Hua Li relates how modern Chinese SF was popularized as a transmedial practice in the 1980s. She explains the key role played by a kind of graphic novel format known as lianhuanhua 连环画 and gives examples from the illustrated works of Ye Yonglie 叶永烈. We then move on to fan culture before the internet age and end by discussing how early environmental SF from the 1950s presents a different perspective from today’s writings on the Anthropocene.
Transmedial Guest: Hua Li is Professor of Chinese and the coordinator of Chinese program at Montana State University. Her primary research field is modern and contemporary Chinese literature. She has published two monographs, Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times (Brill, 2011), and Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw (University of Toronto Press, 2021). She has also authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on various topics in contemporary Chinese literature, cinema, and science fiction.
Host Fan: Astrid Møller-Olsen is international research fellow with the Universities of Lund, Stavanger, and Oxford, funded by the Swedish Research Council. She has just published her first monograph Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria Press, 2022). Other publications include analyses of fictional dictionaries, oneiric soundscapes, digital chronotopes in SF, ecocritical temporalities, and sensory urban spacetime. Her current research is a cross-generic study of plant-human relationships in contemporary Sinophone literature from science fiction to surrealism: https://xiaoshuo.blog/
小说 XIAOSHUO 小說 