Panel 1

”Gender out of Bounds" 

Short film: "An OutChina Story: Stand by Me"

Yuan Zhang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Suisui Wang, Indiana University Bloomington

 

Yuan Zhang

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"The Geographical imagination of Jiangnan as Lotus-picking Girl during the Six Dynasties"

The name of Jiangnan represents not only a geographical region, but a poetic imagination of beauty, gentleness, even love and sexual allure. In many cases, images of Jiangnan always embody a feminine temperament. Even today, Jiangnan girl is such a prominent figure that Jiangnan man as a “category” is more or less shadowed in similar feminine disposition. Taking a genealogical research, this essay indicates that the geographical imagination of Jiangnan has experienced significant changes, transforming from bird-like man to southern barbarian, and finally after the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the Jiangnan image was centralized on the lotus-picking girl. What were the socio-cultural contexts behind these changes? Specifically during the Six Dynasties, how did this feminine temperament of Jiangnan first came into being? Why did the lotus-picking girl become a suitable carrier to objectify it? 

 

Suisui Wang

Indiana University

“Of Illness and Identity: Scientific Internationalism, Sexual Modernity, and the Demedicalization of Homosexuality in China (1978-2001)”

While the translation of sexual science dates to Republican China, the emergence of sexuality-related clinical diagnosis and taxonomy is a recent phenomenon. In Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (CCMD), homosexuality made an ephemeral presence in 1989 and was declassified in its 2001 revision. Yet the continuous debate surrounding homosexuality’s normalcy/pathology constitutess a site for articulating post-socialist medical authority and global sexual modernity. Although some closeted psychiatrists used disease status to protect homosexual patients from criminalization and treated homosexuality to express their own same-sex desire, gay health activists disregarded such internal complexity of medicalization and asserted pathology as incompatible with modern sexual identification. Activists harnessed the nascent infrastructure of global health to demand demedicalization by evoking the scientific and moral authority of World Health Organization’s International Classification of Disease (ICD). While the ideal of scientific internationalism eventually prevailed, activists’ claim sparked Cold-War-inflected backlash deeming homosexuality as a Western imperialist threat to socialist hygiene. Weaving together historiographies of sexual and hygienic modernity, I argue that postsocialist transitions of homosexuality from pathological diagnosis to sexual identity reflects the shifting foundation of clinical authority from state-sanctioned political psychiatry to global epistemic community.

 

Panel 2

”Transnational Lives"

Xue Ma, Northern Illinois University

Fangheyue Ma, University of South Florida

Yuefan Wang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Zihan Feng, Duke University

 

Xue Ma

Illinois State University

“Exploring ethnic food authenticity in the U.S.: Ethnicity and Authenticity as Tools of Consumerism”

 

Dining in ethnic restaurants is a common practice of eating in American society. It is often taken as granted that the restaurant’s ethnicity is represented by the food’s authenticity of that culture. However, both the ethnicity and authenticity here are of complexities related to consumption. This paper uses examples of a Chinese restaurant and a Japanese restaurant in Midwest region to unravel that the practice of eating in an ethnic restaurant is a form of consuming cultural value produced in ethnic restaurant. The revealed social class distinction of eating ethnic food is a reflection of how cultural value being produced and consumed by people with certain cultural capital. However, the embedded ethnicity of ethnic restaurant and the pursuit of authenticity from consumers encompass a larger cultural force driven by consumerism.

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Fangheyue Ma

University of South Florida
“Seeking Meaning Overseas: Chinese International Scholars’ Conversions to Christianity in the U.S.”

 

Despite the atheist background they were born and raised in, the number of Chinese international scholars who chose to convert to Christianity in the U.S. has increased profoundly in recent years. This paper aims to investigate the reason behind the big number of conversions and what it means for overseas Chinese scholars to convert to Christianity in a foreign country. The paper is based on three types of qualitative data collected between 2013 and 2015: 23 ethnographic interviews conducted with Chinese international scholars who converted, or plan to convert to Christianity in the U.S., a 4-month of participant observation in a Chinese fellowship under an American evangelical church with 16 visits in total; and a content analysis of a magazine in which Chinese international scholars tell their conversion stories. Because of the language and cultural barrier, Chinese international scholars face various types of challenges and uncertainties in their studies, work and intimate relationships in the U.S. During the difficult time, Christianity, as a comprehensive meaning system, not only fills the void caused by a lack of meaning in life but also provides an interpretive scheme to help them decipher the difficult situations, ease anxiety and bring in peace. On many levels, Christianity brings salvation to Chinese international scholars in both spiritual and emotional ways. The findings are consistent with the symbolic meaning model that emphasizes the explanatory power of religions. It also points out that Christianity serves as a tool not only to help people interpret their experiences differently but also to manage their emotions and change how they feel about their life situations.

 

Yuefan Wang

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"History and Memory: The Poetic Odyssey in Luo Fu’s 'Driftwood'"

 

Born in mainland China in 1928, Luo Fu 洛夫 began his life as a poet in early 1940s when he had not yet realized being part of the exodus of millions of Chinese to Taiwan in 1949 meant 40-year-long separation from homeland, nor had he foreseen the immigration into Canada from Taiwan in 1996. Nevertheless, thanks to the two exile experiences which generated abundant poetical nourishment, Luo became one of the most marvellous poets in the field of contemporary Chinese poetry and created “Driftwood,” a 3000-line poem, in his 70s. “Driftwood” was then deemed as a landmark in both Luo’s career and the modern literary world, especially admired by diaspora. This article argues that Luo Fu portrayed three identities—an exile, a poet and a philosopher— in “Driftwood,” and they organically interweave in the fabulous and touching poem. Firstly, an exile. Luo’s personal experience was an epitome of the collective memory of a generation of Chinese people in a specific historical time, and this grand history in return reflected individual’s desire because of the poem’s emotional form of expression. Secondly, a poet. The representation of thoughts requires the appearance of languages. However, languages are the clarification meanwhile the obstruction of meaning. By using symbolic poetic language, Luo approached unspeakable meaning of time and life in ontological philosophy, theology, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The last identity is a philosopher. Luo’s quotation from the works of Quyuan, Nietzsche and himself at the beginning of several sections was to interpret these lines with that of “Driftwood” where he intended to construct a general situation of exiles beyond the boundaries of time and national borders.

 

 

Zihan Feng

Duke University 

“Separation and Connectedness through Travels Towards the Peach Blossom Spring: The Lack of Correspondence Between Diasporic Spaces”

    Originated from Tao Yuanming’s depiction, the peach blossom spring is a household Chinese utopian imagination manifesting the diasporic status. Concerning the significance of the one-time travel in the quest for the peach blossom spring, the diasporic utopia reveals an ideal space of non-place, which is accessible but cannot be integrated. The quasi-peach-blossom-spring narrative frequently emerges in contemporary Taiwan’s cultural productions, which challenges a homogeneous national discourse and manifests the temporal and spatial distortion of the Chinese diaspora, particularly when cross-strait travels were permitted after a long-term forbiddance.

 

    To unravel the diasporic spatial tension between separation and connectedness underlined by the one-time travel, this paper examines Stan Lai’s play Secret Love/Peach Blossom Spring (暗恋桃花源) and proposes to demonstrate that the peach blossom spring is exploited to intervene in the disruptive cross-strait politics and diasporic memories in post-martial-law Taiwan through a theatrical representation of lack of correspondence between spaces. The play delineates two troupes’ encounter on stage for rehearsal, while the hilarious and disordered rehearsal alludes to the traumatic diasporic experiences for mainlanders in Taiwan.

 

    I argue that a threefold connotation of the peach blossom spring unveils in the piece, including a juxtaposed mise en abyme played by a troupe, a utopian symbol for futile searching and status of “Self-oblivion.” Accordingly, the embeddedness and invagination in structural and genre arrangement, the coexisting demarcation and heteroglossia in acting and a mediated politics of memory disclose the lack of correspondences. The lack of correspondences between spaces manifest the tension since rules are simultaneously established and subverted, demarcations are simultaneously drawn and violated, and the spatial and incarnated utopia emerges and meanwhile vanishes, which debunks the ambivalent complicity of utopia and dystopia for the mainlanders in Taiwan when connections across the border recur after decades of separation.

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Panel 3

"Where State Meets Society"

Haochen Wang, Washington University in St. Louis

Lingxiao Zhou, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Aolan Mi, Indiana University Bloomington  

 

Haocheng Wang

Washington University in St. Louis

“The Rise of Red Police: Chinese Policemen in Maoist Movies, 1949-1966”

 

    From the 1949 transfer of power to the 1966 outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Party-state commissioned multiple movies whose protagonists were police officers. Although having become quite sophisticated and capable of simultaneously educating and entertaining the audience by the eve of the Cultural Revolution, these movies were never free of criticism. A consensus of sorts, nevertheless, was eventually reached via multiple compromises. All sides agreed that PRC police ought to possess a long list of characteristics, such as a morally upstanding lifestyle, a strong work ethic, and a delicate balance between loyalty to the party-state and devotion to the people (renmin), or the masses (qunzhong), on the one hand, and professional expertise on the other. 

 

    These values were framed as quintessentially socialist virtues and deployed to exult police characters as heroic builders and defenders of a fledgling, unified Communist state. Comparing them with the official visions and popular depictions of their Republican predecessors, however, reveals a series of resemblances with their pre-1949 counterparts. Instead of proposing a brand-new policing vision, cinematic representations of socialist police fused two distinct pre-1949 policing models in Beijing and Shanghai. Both groups prided themselves on moral integrity, neighborhood knowledge, political loyalties, and a set of professional qualifications based on rationality, science, and technology. By assuming a wide array of responsibilities and serving as meditators between the state and the local community, both strived to improve the welfare of the neighborhoods under their charge and strengthened a powerful, centralized state.

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Lingxiao Zhou

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“Re-envisioning "Community Policing" in Post-Socialist China”

 

    Community policing (shequ jingwu) is not only one of the most influential ideas in global policing activities, but also widely embraced by policy decision makers, practitioners, and police scholars in the People’s Republic of China. Semantically speaking, “shequ jingwu” was directly translated from the English term “community policing”. In this paper I argue that community policing in the PRC was not directly imported from the West, but built on the fundamental ideas and established practices of mass-line policing. In the market reform era, community policing was adopted to address certain problems that mass-line policing was proved ineffective. To address these problems, the discourse on community policing has also made the initiation of certain policing technologies as a necessity. To articulate what those problems are, and how they are addressed by adopting community policing, in this paper I present a case study to show how it is used to carry out social surveillance, promote order and safety in a community. 

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Aolan Mi 

Indiana University Bloomington

“Poetic Machines: Literary Representations of Machines in the 1920s and 1930s China”

 

    This paper investigates the literary representation of machines in the 1920s and 1930s China. Working against the normative assumption of the machine culture, which emphasizes the rivalry between industrial machinery and human creativity, I argue that the writings about machines in the 1920s and 1930s China have created a discursive space that enables the boundary crossing between intellectual and laborer, fiction and action.

 

    Specifically, I examine two works of the prominent leftwing writer and critic Ah Ying, the short story “In the Machine Room” (1926) and the play “A City without Night” (1938), both of which address the identity switch between the intellectual and the worker in the setting of mechanical production. I argue that by imagining themselves as part of the industrial production, Chinese intellectuals aspire to overcome their class background and join symbolically with the workers. Through that union, the intellectual is empowered to speak for the voiceless subaltern. Moreover, I engage with the contemporary debate regarding the "literature of force" (力的文学). I pay special attention to the borrowing of mechanical terms in this debate and tackle with the paradox between scientific determinism and the agency of literature.

 

    By situating the representation of machines in the historical context of the imperialism, modernization and the introduction of Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s China, this paper sheds new light on the discourse of technological optimism that accompanies the modernization of China till today.