MCLC: Reimagining a Field 2.0--cfp

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MCLC LIST
Reimagining a Field 2.0–cfp
Call for Papers (ACLA Proposal, March 2016, Harvard University)
Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Re-imagining a Field 2.0
Organizer: Calvin Hui (College of William and Mary; Email: kchui at wm.edu)
Co-organizer: Darwin H. Tsen (The Pennsylvania State University; Email: darwin.tsen at psu.edu)
It has been more than fifteen years since the publication of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Re-imagining a Field, in which Rey Chow explored the ramifications of post-modernism and post-structuralism in the research of modern Chinese literature and culture. Two decades following the linguistic and cultural turns in the humanities, we have entered a “post-theory” age in which critical and cultural theory has become even more omnipresent and embedded in our thinking. If theory, as Rey Chow expresses, can be conceptualized as a form of speculative intellectual labor whose presence is characterized by a plasticity that can bypass the cumbersome gravity of ironclad boundaries, the ways in which theory cultivates the intersecting of knowledge concerning political economy, social class and ideology, geopolitics, ethnicity and language, as well as hetero-normativity, gender and sexuality, continue to warrant rigorous investigation and critique.
Our panel revolves around three salient poles of theoretical knowledge and their mutual constitutions within what we call modern Chinese literary and cultural studies 2.0. They roughly correspond to inquiries on the ideologies of cultural Marxism (Fredric Jameson), the geographies of ethnicity and language, and the identities of gender, queerness, and sexuality (Rey Chow). The first pole focuses on cultural Marxism. While Marxist criticism has always held a prominent place in the study of literature and culture, the now fruitful tradition in Chinese studies was born after young Chinese scholars encountered western Marxism in the U.S. academy. The research of Wang Hui, Xudong Zhang, Ban Wang, Xiaobing Tang, Jason McGrath and Hongsheng Jiang represent cultural Marxism's solid foothold in Chinese literary and cultural studies 2.0. How have their efforts, as well as that of others, expanded and deepened our knowledge of social class and ideology as it is applied to the study of “China”? How has this in turn influenced the shape of Marxist theory as we know it today?
The second pole tackles the emergence of the Sinophone and its tension with the Chinese diaspora. Supported by post-colonialism's intense geographical awareness of China’s uneven developmental trajectories, the Sinophone sets out to examine the linguistic dimension of Chinese-ness and its cultural politics on a global scale: a project often conducted by exploring the interactions between that which is marked as Chinese with what is particular to the local. The Sinophone, pioneered by the work of Shu-mei Shih, Jing Tsu and Andrea Bachner, have created ripples in the conceptualization of “China” everywhere. How has such a cultural-geographical construct transformed the ways in which one tackles the complex relationships among ethnicity, language, and cultural production in the field? What is gained when one approaches the objects of study through the Sinophone, and what could have been lost or abandoned? Brand new possibilities and yet-unseen limits to the use of the Sinophone (and what Rey Chow calls “languaging”) are waiting to be discovered and discussed.
The third pole revolves around issues concerning sexuality and queerness. The question of gender was omnipresent in every strain of modern Chinese thought, with “woman” as a central query, her figure ever-morphing in literature, film, and media, her centrality recognized and debated by those who labored to shape the contours of Chinese literary and cultural studies 1.0. However, our 2.0 version is mostly concerned with the latest innovation in queer studies and theories. Contributions by Petrus Liu, Fran Martin and Song Hwee Lim have demonstrated the urgency of including queer perspectives in the field. How does the idea of queerness interrogate and deconstruct both Eurocentric and Sinocentric conceptions of sexuality – including masculinity, femininity and gender normativity – as social constructs? In what ways does queerness challenge, resist, or reinforce the ways in which one investigates Chinese film and media? What kinds of reading, viewing, or political practices can be gained by pairing economic, social, psychic, and geographical theories through a queer perspective?
We welcome proposals that address any of the theoretical issues above. Please send proposals to Calvin Hui (kchui at wm.edu) and Darwin Tsen (darwin.tsen at psu.edu).
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 14, 2015
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