Division of Languages and Literature, Dean of the College, and Chinese Studies Program Present

Xiao Hong, Frontier Literature, and Literatures of East Asia

This talk is based on my first monograph, Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia. The book reconceptualizes the contested frontier of modern Manchuria in Northeast Asia as a critical site for making and unmaking multiple national literatures in modern East Asia. In this talk, I use the Chinese writer Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death (1935), a canonical piece of Chinese nationalist literature, to illustrate my conceptions of frontier literature and literary territorialization. Depicting a Chinese Manchuria during the era of Japanese colonial Manchukuo, Xiao Hong’s work exemplifies the process of territory-making through literature. Meanwhile, it features aesthetic and stylistic choices that accommodate the colonial regime, thereby bringing the very translational elements that the author seeks to expel into its formation. By reading Xiao Hong’s work and other works by Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese writers comparatively along the national and imperial margin of modern Manchuria, my book demonstrates how East Asian literatures and cultures co-form in conflict, with mutual inclusion at the very site of exclusion. The book resonates with my broader commitment, as a scholar, to the exploration of how people from the peripheries – geographical or metaphorical – find voices, gain power, and establish connections through transcultural contestation and negotiation.  

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail ying@bard.edu.

Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102

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