Place Making across Media in Chinese Literature

Wang, Mengxiao; Wang, Mengxiao

This session traces place-making as an ongoing process in Chinese literary history from the medieval to the contemporary. In dialogue with the 2027 MLA theme of “Emancipatory Narratives,” it asks how the transmedia practices rework physical space beyond its cartographic limits, transforming geography into contested “place.” We argue that this emancipatory potential lies in writing’s ability to cross boundaries: from medieval epigraphy used for territorial legibility, to early modern fiction as a medium for environmental mastery, and to contemporary fan cultures that loop fiction into reality. In this sense, literature operates as a technology of mediation that renders landscapes readable, battlefields strategic, and fictional realms tangible.

As the “spatial turn” in the humanities continues to evolve, there is a growing need to bridge traditional Chinese modes of place-making with modern digital transformations. This session engages the seminal work of Yi-Fu Tuan, James Robson, and Corey Byrnes, among others. Drawing on Tuan’s distinction between “space” and “place,” it argues that the transformation of abstract geography into lived experience is mediated through historical inscriptions and literary narratives that together shape the environments we inhabit. We also revisit Robson’s account of the “power of place,” showing how this power shifts from religious elites to local communities who mobilize multiple media to redefine sacred spaces. While Byrnes examines how landscape is “fixed” into political and aesthetic monuments, we instead focus on how narratives can also “unfix” these sites by reclaiming them as fluid spaces of subcultural pilgrimage. Taken together, our studies highlight how geography is continually rewritten, decentralized, and destabilized.

The first two panelists explore how writing actively participated in the production of place in premodern China. In “Legible Landscapes: Inscription and the Making of Yanzhou from Tang to Yuan,” Meimei Zhang examines the construction of the Yanzhou landscape through the interplay of inscription, map, and memory in medieval China. By reading the material traces against illustrated gazetteers, she demonstrates how writing was used to moralize and sacralize political and natural spaces. The paper establishes a historical foundation for the panel by foregrounding inscription as a key technology of legibility.

Moving from the historical landscape to the fictional world, Zijing Fan’s paper, “When Rivers Make Stories of War: The Yangtze as Strategic Environment in Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” focuses on the fifteenth-century novel to investigate how geography enables narratives to reimagine warfare. In the novel, the Yangtze River functions both as an informational barrier and as a strategic resource. Military victory thus depends not only on overcoming geographical constraints, but more crucially, on the ability of strategists to interpret the battlefield environment and tactically exploit its spatial features.

Turning to the contemporary moment, the next two panelists examine how fictional imaginaries increasingly bleed into real-world spaces in popular culture. In “Place-Making, Fiction-Reality Loop, and the Transmedia Universe of The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles,” Zhange Ni develops a theoretical framework for the “fiction-reality loop.” She shows how the “fantastic places” of tomb-robbing fiction are mapped onto real geographical locations. This paper highlights the collaboration (and contestation) between fans, corporations, and local governments in building physical sites that blur the line between the imaginary and the material.

In “Sacred Space and Queer Pilgrimage in Contemporary Chinese BL: Heaven Official’s Blessing and Its Afterlives,” Mengxiao Wang examines how sacred space is reconfigured within and beyond a Boys’ Love novel. Within the narrative, religious sites shift from spaces of worship into intimate spaces of affect and desire. Beyond the text, fans have transformed an existing Buddhist shrine into a pilgrimage site tied to the novel’s characters. This reconfiguration reveals tensions between fan-driven devotional economies, the commercialization of pilgrimage, and the literary censorship in contemporary China.

In sum, these four papers approach the Chinese cultural landscape as a dynamic site of remediation spanning two millennia. By tracing practices of place-making across multiple media and historical moments, the panel challenges the divide between the “premodern” and the “contemporary,” while fostering dialogue across literary studies, spatial studies, media studies, and queer studies.

The session is designed to maximize dialogue within the 75-minute slot. The presider will open with a brief framing of “place-making” and introduce each presenter (5 minutes). Each panelist will then deliver a 12-minute paper, followed by an open discussion of approximately 20–22 minutes. The participants in this session represent various career stages, including a graduate student, junior faculty, and established scholars, and bring together expertise from different sub-fields and institutions.

736 Place Making across Media in Chinese Literature: Calls for Papers