Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere, 2024
This chapter studies science fction’s rise in the post-Tiananmen period by
focusing on the idea o... more This chapter studies science fction’s rise in the post-Tiananmen period by focusing on the idea of history as computer code. It begins with an analysis of Liu Cixin’s cyberpunk novel China 2185 in the context of the late 1980s cultural fever, but then zooms out to consider how the broader science fction field emerged alongside the digitisation of Chinese society and the formation of the discourse of Chinese futurism. While China’s digital industry growth appears to confirm the historical vision of cyberpunk fiction, I argue that science fiction’s continuously diminishing engagement with network technologies is a result of globalised post-digital culture as well as the increased practical and ideological significance of automation to state power.
Sinophone Utopias. Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream, 2023
This book aims to illuminate the minor, often hybrid or opaque responses to the current world ord... more This book aims to illuminate the minor, often hybrid or opaque responses to the current world order with its aggravating material and ideological deficiencies. We argue that while they, too, engage with the dominant local local and Western utopian discourses, their tactics are to fuse, subvert and intersect them with alternative concepts and values. Departing from previous research, we study the ways these minor discourses can destabilize the mainstream utopian projections with their generalizing claims and pompous promises. Scrutinizing counter-narratives that challenge or undermine the grand nationalist Chinese theme, we explore the ways Chinese and Sinophone artists, writers, and other cultural agents reimagine a future (world) society that can be more tolerant of cultural, ecological, ethnic, gender and ideological diversity.
      A green future has become a central promise of... more       A green future has become a central promise of the Chinese state and the environment is playing  an increasingly important role in China’s bid to promote itself as a political alternative to the West. However,  Chinese state environmentalism and its promotion of “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming  ? ??? )  have so far proven more aligned with political interests rather than environmental goals. At the same time,  low -orbit  industrialization  as  a  response  to  the  climate  change  or  the  resurgent  fantasy  of  p opulation  control  as  a  necessity  from  the  standpoint  of  biology  in  environmentalist  discourse  are  increasingly   entangled with anxieties and speculations about Chinese visions of the future. Using Liu Cixin’s short story  The Sun of China  ( Zhongguo  taiyang ???? , 2001) and the 2019 blockbuster science fiction movie  The  Wandering Earth  ( Liulang diqiu ???? ) by Frant Gwo as its point of departure, this paper discusses how  current narratives of the Anthropocene are reflected and negotiated in Chinese science fiction. While both works demonstrate the symbolic and economic importance of science and technology to China’s growth and  self-image, they also reveal that we cannot separate questions of the planetary from the historical contexts, in which they emerge.      Un futuro verde se ha convertido en una promesa central del Estado chino y el medio ambiente desempeña un papel cada vez más importante en el intento de China de promocionarse como una alternativa política a Occidente. Sin embargo, el ecologismo del Estado chino y su promoción de la "civilización ecológica" (shengtai wenming ????) han demostrado hasta ahora estar más en consonancia con los intereses políticos que con los objetivos medioambientales. Al mismo tiempo, la industrialización de órbita baja como respuesta al cambio climático o la renaciente fantasía del control de la población como una necesidad desde el punto de vista de la biología en el discurso ecologista están cada vez más enredadas con las ansiedades y especulaciones sobre las visiones chinas del futuro. Utilizando como punto de partida el cuento corto de Liu Cixin El sol de China (Zhongguo taiyang ????, 2001) y la exitosa película de ciencia ficción de 2019 The Wandering Earth (Liulang diqiu ????) de Frant Gwo, este artículo analiza cómo se reflejan y negocian las narraciones actuales del Antropoceno en la ciencia ficción china. Si bien ambas obras demuestran la importancia simbólica y económica de la ciencia y la tecnología para el crecimiento y la imagen que tiene China de sí misma, también revelan que no podemos separar las cuestiones del planeta de los contextos históricos en los que surgen.&nbsp
This study explores literary representations of ghosts and the spectral in Mainland Chinese ficti... more This study explores literary representations of ghosts and the spectral in Mainland Chinese fiction from the Republican period (1912-1949) to the present. The first two chapters trace the politicization of Chinese ghost culture and literature within intellectual debates and fictional writings from the early 20th century. I argue that ghosts and narratives of haunting provided writers with a powerful metaphor and script to reflect on and negotiate a modernization project caught between the rejection and the strategic appropriation of China's cultural history. Reading ghosts as a fictional space, which challenges normative hierarchies between the past and the present, China and the West, chapter three discusses the phantom romance plot in late Republican Shanghai fiction and the representation of female phantoms as gendered reflections of, and on, Shanghai's commodity culture, cosmopolitanism, and the changing real and symbolic roles of women. Chapter four focuses on the conju...
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2021
A green future has become a central promise of the Chinese state and the environment is pla... more A green future has become a central promise of the Chinese state and the environment is playing an increasingly important role in China’s bid to promote itself as a political alternative to the West. However, Chinese state environmentalism and its promotion of “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming ? ??? ) have so far proven more aligned with political interests rather than environmental goals. At the same time, low -orbit industrialization as a response to the climate change or the resurgent fantasy of p opulation control as a necessity from the standpoint of biology in environmentalist discourse are increasingly entangled with anxieties and speculations about Chinese visions of the future. Using Liu Cixin’s short story The Sun of China ( Zhongguo taiyang ???? , 2001) and the 2019 blockbuster science fiction movie The Wandering Earth ( Liulang diqiu ???? ) by Frant Gwo as its point of departure, this paper discusses how current n...
Ghosts appear in a great number of fictional works from the early modern period to the present. Y... more Ghosts appear in a great number of fictional works from the early modern period to the present. Yet, to this date no systematic study of this very heterogeneous textual corpus has been undertaken. This paper proposes as a useful starting point a review of figures and discourses of spectrality, mainly in Republican-era literary and critical texts, that focuses in particular on the different meanings and usages of the term
Burying realism: Yan Lianke’s Shouhuo as “minor literature”. Realism has come to occupy an import... more Burying realism: Yan Lianke’s Shouhuo as “minor literature”. Realism has come to occupy an important role not only in Chinese literary history but also in contemporary fiction that challenges the positivist assumptions underlying the “realist paradigm”. Yan Lianke, in his novel Shouhuo, tries to re-imagine the role of traditional cultural practices and their primary site of production, the countryside, through his version of a “minor literature”. The political dimension of his writings becomes particularly apparent when viewed in light of the assumptions underlying the neologism “culture slang”, which was coined by the authors of the controversial left-wing manifesto Unhappy China.
Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere, 2024
This chapter studies science fction’s rise in the post-Tiananmen period by
focusing on the idea o... more This chapter studies science fction’s rise in the post-Tiananmen period by focusing on the idea of history as computer code. It begins with an analysis of Liu Cixin’s cyberpunk novel China 2185 in the context of the late 1980s cultural fever, but then zooms out to consider how the broader science fction field emerged alongside the digitisation of Chinese society and the formation of the discourse of Chinese futurism. While China’s digital industry growth appears to confirm the historical vision of cyberpunk fiction, I argue that science fiction’s continuously diminishing engagement with network technologies is a result of globalised post-digital culture as well as the increased practical and ideological significance of automation to state power.
Sinophone Utopias. Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream, 2023
This book aims to illuminate the minor, often hybrid or opaque responses to the current world ord... more This book aims to illuminate the minor, often hybrid or opaque responses to the current world order with its aggravating material and ideological deficiencies. We argue that while they, too, engage with the dominant local local and Western utopian discourses, their tactics are to fuse, subvert and intersect them with alternative concepts and values. Departing from previous research, we study the ways these minor discourses can destabilize the mainstream utopian projections with their generalizing claims and pompous promises. Scrutinizing counter-narratives that challenge or undermine the grand nationalist Chinese theme, we explore the ways Chinese and Sinophone artists, writers, and other cultural agents reimagine a future (world) society that can be more tolerant of cultural, ecological, ethnic, gender and ideological diversity.
      A green future has become a central promise of... more       A green future has become a central promise of the Chinese state and the environment is playing  an increasingly important role in China’s bid to promote itself as a political alternative to the West. However,  Chinese state environmentalism and its promotion of “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming  ? ??? )  have so far proven more aligned with political interests rather than environmental goals. At the same time,  low -orbit  industrialization  as  a  response  to  the  climate  change  or  the  resurgent  fantasy  of  p opulation  control  as  a  necessity  from  the  standpoint  of  biology  in  environmentalist  discourse  are  increasingly   entangled with anxieties and speculations about Chinese visions of the future. Using Liu Cixin’s short story  The Sun of China  ( Zhongguo  taiyang ???? , 2001) and the 2019 blockbuster science fiction movie  The  Wandering Earth  ( Liulang diqiu ???? ) by Frant Gwo as its point of departure, this paper discusses how  current narratives of the Anthropocene are reflected and negotiated in Chinese science fiction. While both works demonstrate the symbolic and economic importance of science and technology to China’s growth and  self-image, they also reveal that we cannot separate questions of the planetary from the historical contexts, in which they emerge.      Un futuro verde se ha convertido en una promesa central del Estado chino y el medio ambiente desempeña un papel cada vez más importante en el intento de China de promocionarse como una alternativa política a Occidente. Sin embargo, el ecologismo del Estado chino y su promoción de la "civilización ecológica" (shengtai wenming ????) han demostrado hasta ahora estar más en consonancia con los intereses políticos que con los objetivos medioambientales. Al mismo tiempo, la industrialización de órbita baja como respuesta al cambio climático o la renaciente fantasía del control de la población como una necesidad desde el punto de vista de la biología en el discurso ecologista están cada vez más enredadas con las ansiedades y especulaciones sobre las visiones chinas del futuro. Utilizando como punto de partida el cuento corto de Liu Cixin El sol de China (Zhongguo taiyang ????, 2001) y la exitosa película de ciencia ficción de 2019 The Wandering Earth (Liulang diqiu ????) de Frant Gwo, este artículo analiza cómo se reflejan y negocian las narraciones actuales del Antropoceno en la ciencia ficción china. Si bien ambas obras demuestran la importancia simbólica y económica de la ciencia y la tecnología para el crecimiento y la imagen que tiene China de sí misma, también revelan que no podemos separar las cuestiones del planeta de los contextos históricos en los que surgen.&nbsp
This study explores literary representations of ghosts and the spectral in Mainland Chinese ficti... more This study explores literary representations of ghosts and the spectral in Mainland Chinese fiction from the Republican period (1912-1949) to the present. The first two chapters trace the politicization of Chinese ghost culture and literature within intellectual debates and fictional writings from the early 20th century. I argue that ghosts and narratives of haunting provided writers with a powerful metaphor and script to reflect on and negotiate a modernization project caught between the rejection and the strategic appropriation of China's cultural history. Reading ghosts as a fictional space, which challenges normative hierarchies between the past and the present, China and the West, chapter three discusses the phantom romance plot in late Republican Shanghai fiction and the representation of female phantoms as gendered reflections of, and on, Shanghai's commodity culture, cosmopolitanism, and the changing real and symbolic roles of women. Chapter four focuses on the conju...
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2021
A green future has become a central promise of the Chinese state and the environment is pla... more A green future has become a central promise of the Chinese state and the environment is playing an increasingly important role in China’s bid to promote itself as a political alternative to the West. However, Chinese state environmentalism and its promotion of “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming ? ??? ) have so far proven more aligned with political interests rather than environmental goals. At the same time, low -orbit industrialization as a response to the climate change or the resurgent fantasy of p opulation control as a necessity from the standpoint of biology in environmentalist discourse are increasingly entangled with anxieties and speculations about Chinese visions of the future. Using Liu Cixin’s short story The Sun of China ( Zhongguo taiyang ???? , 2001) and the 2019 blockbuster science fiction movie The Wandering Earth ( Liulang diqiu ???? ) by Frant Gwo as its point of departure, this paper discusses how current n...
Ghosts appear in a great number of fictional works from the early modern period to the present. Y... more Ghosts appear in a great number of fictional works from the early modern period to the present. Yet, to this date no systematic study of this very heterogeneous textual corpus has been undertaken. This paper proposes as a useful starting point a review of figures and discourses of spectrality, mainly in Republican-era literary and critical texts, that focuses in particular on the different meanings and usages of the term
Burying realism: Yan Lianke’s Shouhuo as “minor literature”. Realism has come to occupy an import... more Burying realism: Yan Lianke’s Shouhuo as “minor literature”. Realism has come to occupy an important role not only in Chinese literary history but also in contemporary fiction that challenges the positivist assumptions underlying the “realist paradigm”. Yan Lianke, in his novel Shouhuo, tries to re-imagine the role of traditional cultural practices and their primary site of production, the countryside, through his version of a “minor literature”. The political dimension of his writings becomes particularly apparent when viewed in light of the assumptions underlying the neologism “culture slang”, which was coined by the authors of the controversial left-wing manifesto Unhappy China.
This study explores literary representations of ghosts and the spectral in Mainland Chinese ficti... more This study explores literary representations of ghosts and the spectral in Mainland Chinese fiction from the Republican period (1912-1949) to the present. The first two chapters trace the politicization of Chinese ghost culture and literature within intellectual debates and fictional writings from the early 20 th century. I argue that ghosts and narratives of haunting provided writers with a powerful metaphor and script to reflect on and negotiate a modernization project caught between the rejection and the strategic appropriation of China's cultural history. Reading ghosts as a fictional space, which challenges normative hierarchies between the past and the present, China and the West, chapter three discusses the phantom romance plot in late Republican Shanghai fiction and the representation of female phantoms as gendered reflections of, and on, Shanghai's commodity culture, cosmopolitanism, and the changing real and symbolic roles of women. Chapter four focuses on the conjunction of Chinese ghost culture and classism in Mao-era literary production and analyzes the socialist adaptation of the anomaly account collection in “Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts” (1961). Lastly, chapter five discusses two urban ghost novels from the post-Tiananmen period (1989-) which reimagine older models of cosmography to reflect on critical issues in China today, such as heritage destruction, migration and air pollution.
Digital China: Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere, 2024
Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscap... more Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscape. With a focus on the creative agency of new media and online communities, this volume examines this development through the notion of the Sinocybersphere - the networked spaces across the globe that not only operate on the Chinese script, but also imaginatively negotiate the meanings of Chinese culture in the digital age. Instead of asking what makes the internet or new media “Chinese,” the chapters situate contemporary entanglements of cultural and digital practices within specific historical, social, and discursive contexts. Covering topics as diverse as live-streaming, AI poetry, online literature, poetry memes, cyberpunk fiction, virtual art exhibitions, cooking videos, censorship, and viral translations, the collection as a whole not only engages with a wide range of Chinese new media phenomena, but also demonstrates their relevance to our understanding of contemporary digital culture.
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focusing on the idea of history as computer code. It begins with an analysis
of Liu Cixin’s cyberpunk novel China 2185 in the context of the late 1980s
cultural fever, but then zooms out to consider how the broader science
fction field emerged alongside the digitisation of Chinese society and
the formation of the discourse of Chinese futurism. While China’s digital
industry growth appears to confirm the historical vision of cyberpunk
fiction, I argue that science fiction’s continuously diminishing engagement with network technologies is a result of globalised post-digital culture as well as the increased practical and ideological significance of automation to state power.
focusing on the idea of history as computer code. It begins with an analysis
of Liu Cixin’s cyberpunk novel China 2185 in the context of the late 1980s
cultural fever, but then zooms out to consider how the broader science
fction field emerged alongside the digitisation of Chinese society and
the formation of the discourse of Chinese futurism. While China’s digital
industry growth appears to confirm the historical vision of cyberpunk
fiction, I argue that science fiction’s continuously diminishing engagement with network technologies is a result of globalised post-digital culture as well as the increased practical and ideological significance of automation to state power.
writings from the early 20 th century. I argue that ghosts and narratives of haunting provided writers with a powerful metaphor and script to reflect on and negotiate a modernization project caught between the rejection and the strategic appropriation of China's cultural history. Reading ghosts as a fictional space, which challenges normative hierarchies between the past and the present, China and the West, chapter three discusses the phantom romance plot in late Republican Shanghai fiction and
the representation of female phantoms as gendered reflections of, and on, Shanghai's commodity culture, cosmopolitanism, and the changing real and symbolic roles of women. Chapter four focuses on the conjunction of Chinese ghost culture and classism in Mao-era literary production and
analyzes the socialist adaptation of the anomaly account collection in “Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts” (1961). Lastly, chapter five discusses two urban ghost novels from the post-Tiananmen period (1989-) which reimagine older models of cosmography to reflect on critical issues in China today, such as heritage destruction, migration and air pollution.