Our panel asks the following timely questions: Why do contemporary Sinophone authors retell old stories? Does the remobilization of those premodern narratives and imageries solidify a civilizationist and orientalist imagination of a global China, or rather destabilize it? How do the non-PRC Sinophone authors in Hong Kong and Taiwan complicate our understanding of nationalism by rewriting the traditional, central Chinese literary lineage with their own localized material experience? To answer these questions, this panel session will engage with the current scholarly debate on techno-orientalism (first proposed by David Morley and Kevin Robins and extensively discussed by David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu), the idea of nostalgia in postmodernism and national cultural reproduction (Fredric Jameson, Erin Huang), the fantasy genre in Sinophone novels (Mingwei Song), and the Civilizationism Project at Stanford.
To allow ample time for discussion, we will have only three presenters, with each presentation strictly limited to 15 minutes in this panel. The presider, Professor Carlos Rojas, will moderate the presentations and ensure a productive discussion for at least 15 minutes. The panel will start with “Transplanted and Translated Archive: Undoing Nationalism and Cyborg Modernity in Kongkee’s Warring States Cyberpunk” by Shao-Chi Ou. Shao-Chi Ou examines issues of techno-orientalism and the archive in Malaysian-Hong Kongese visual artist Kongkee’s comic Dragon’s Delusion (離騷幻覺, 2017) and his subsequent 2022-2023 collaboration with the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco titled “Warring States Cyberpunk.” Shao-chi Ou argues that the juxtaposition of this project with objects from the Warring States Period at the museum and Qu Yuan’s poetry with the contemporary urban landscape of Hong Kong challenges the newness of the media practices used by the artist himself and relativizes the nationalist category of Chinese culture as heavily mediated by and curated through the material world.
The second presenter Yuting Hu takes up the questions of gender, postcoloniality, and geopolitics in reimagined Chinese mythological figures. Building on the existing scholarship that traces the ever-transforming Monkey King, Sun Wukong, from its original novel Journey to the West, to Maoist China theatre and contemporary Asian American novels, this paper offers an up-to-date investigation of new meanings that have accrued to the figure of Sun Wukong in the current global geopolitical order. Focusing on the remobilized figure of Sun Wukong in Kuang Chaoren (Superman Kuang, 匡超人, 2018), a less discussed recent experimental novel by Taiwanese writer Luo Yijun, Yuting Hu interprets Luo’s remobilization of Sun Wukong in a postmodern and postcolonial Taiwanese context as a cultural critique of how gender, diaspora, and hegemony are reconfigured through the negotiation between Chinese literary traditions and global capitalist discourse. Yuting Hu explores how Luo’s remobilization associates the following three motifs to the figure of Sun Wukong: the gender queerness in Chinese Confucian homosocial politics and literary traditions; an anti-patriarchal postcolonial diasporic subjectivity; and a critique of U.S. hegemony in the cultural industry as well as the economic and geopolitical impacts.
Lastly, following up on her work in Religion and the Arts in The Hunger Games (2020) and a book manuscript on Chinese web fantasy and the transformation of fictionality, Professor Zhange Ni offers an investigation of Infrastructure (Jijian 基建) fiction, a popular sci-fi subgenre in contemporary China. These novels typically feature protagonists who travel to pivotal moments in Chinese history, bringing with them scientific knowledge and technological devices. They build physical, cultural, and institutional infrastructures to pursue economic transformation and establish imaginary regimes. Zhange Ni analyzes how women writers’ Infrastructure fiction texts negotiate the entanglement of women’s liberation with state-led modernization, the place of sexual desire in a culture of quantification and optimization, and the relationship between the Han Chinese and the internal ethnic minorities and the foreign others in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Euro-American West. Zhange Ni argues that these texts reveal the gendered, sexualized, and racialized tensions underlying contemporary articulations of Chineseness.
This panel is made up of academics ranging from young scholars to senior faculty with different genders and ethnic backgrounds. L.A., the fallen city in cyberpunk narratives and a center for Asian immigrant history, will be the perfect location to discuss cyborgs, Sinophone texts, diaspora, and techno-orientalism.