Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, eac... more Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Carpentaria from a different national perspective. Taken together, they highlight themes that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples have fought, and continue to fight, for their language, culture and sovereignty; concern for the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or the subversion of, national prejudices.
"Chaired by Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellow in Diaspora Studies, Dr Lynda Ng.
Since 1987, whe... more "Chaired by Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellow in Diaspora Studies, Dr Lynda Ng.
Since 1987, when his work was banned in China, Ma Jian has lived in Hong Kong, Germany and London. He has published a novel based on his travels in Tibet (Stick Out Your Tongue, 1987), and novels that critique the Tiananmen Square massacre (Beijing Coma, 2008) and China’s one-child policy (The Dark Road, 2012). "
""The 21st-century has been described as the Chinese century, a time when China will present new ... more ""The 21st-century has been described as the Chinese century, a time when China will present new challenges to the US in terms of economic, political and military dominance. Whether this comes to pass or not, the prospect of a Chinese century has been as much of a rallying-point for Chinese nationalism internally and as it has been the a cause of anxiety externally. The notion of a Chinese century demands the re-examination of China and its many incarnations – China as two separate governments and nations (the PRC in Mainland China and the ROC in Taiwan), China as several sites of cosmopolitan urbanism (Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore) and China as a ubiquitous international diasporic network evident throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Antipodes.
Central to the concept of “Chineseness” are myths about the common origins, history or culture of these disparate groups of people. In this paper I examine the different ways in which the modern Chinese nation and its culture have been defined and asserted in the literary novel. I argue that China as a case study makes clear the interrelationship between nation and what might be termed trans-nation: the national imaginary that traverses geographical space with migrants as they cross borders, and which persists temporally across generations as a pivotal aspect of identity formation. The cultural porosity of mainland China, its diasporic network and the significance of “the West” will be elucidated through a comparison of texts by canonical modern Chinese writers Lao She, Qian Zhongshu and Eileen Chang, along with works by more contemporary exiled/diasporic Chinese writers such as Ma Jian, Liao Yiwu, Tash Aw and Brian Castro. The strength of Chinese nationalism across geographic space and amongst heteronomous groups of people that have linguistic, ethnic and significant cultural differences demands a reconsideration of the nation as an autonomous body bounded by a discrete geographic territory. Accordingly, I will explore theoretical issues concerning, first, the extent to which nations are defined externally, through their interactions with other nations; and second, the ways in which diasporic networks function as pathways of influence for national identity.
""
Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, eac... more Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Alexis Wright's Carpentaria from a different national perspective. Taken together, they highlight themes that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples have fought, and continue to fight, for their language, culture and sovereignty; concern for the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or the subversion of, national prejudices.
Alexis Wright is known for reshaping literary forms to better suit and present an Aboriginal worl... more Alexis Wright is known for reshaping literary forms to better suit and present an Aboriginal worldview. Her work not only contains an inherently ecological perspective, but is also marked by a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which literature is imbricated with the nation and the economy. This essay traces the connections between Wright’s agitation for sovereignty and social justice, the creation of an Aboriginal economy, and the colonial legacy of climate change. It suggests that Wright’s fiction lays bare the anthropocentric nature of world literature in its current state and tables the prospect of a Gaian world literature.
Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine, 2020
Narrative medicine may take certain methodological cues from literary studies, linguistics and na... more Narrative medicine may take certain methodological cues from literary studies, linguistics and narrative theory, but until now it has remained firmly grounded in the health sector. It views storytelling and narrative as tools that can improve the performance of medical practitioners – first, by helping them process the confronting nature of their everyday jobs, and then by facilitating more effective communication with patients. Narrative competence thus provides an important supplement to the medical gaze, enhancing the clinical experience for practitioner and patient alike. But narrative medicine also has important implications from a literary point of view. It highlights the special position that the medical worker occupies in terms of being able to observe a cross-section of society. When a medical practitioner decides to engage not only with the scientific method of evidence-based medicine but also in the arts-based practice of narrative medicine, he or she has the opportunity to make an intervention in the broader culture. Consequently, the literature that emerges almost as an offshoot of narrative medicine is capable of creating forms of representation that more accurately reflect the heterogeneity of social conformance. It is a literature that draws attention to demographic sectors of society that might otherwise be denied mainstream representation.
This essay examines the ways in which a medical practice can inform a writing practice, and vice versa. Using the work of Chinese-Australian author Melanie Cheng as a case study, I show how narrative medicine traverses an important space between the medical gaze and the empathetic instinct. Cheng has worked as a General Practitioner (GP) for over ten years, whilst developing a parallel writing career. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day (2017), functions on one level as a therapeutic outlet for Cheng’s day job. In addition, by recasting the GP as a repository of secrets, her stories provide matchless insights into the lives of people from a range of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Cheng’s writing therefore transcends the boundaries of her own personal history and ethnicity, pointedly venturing beyond the territory expected of her as a Chinese-Australian author. Viewing Cheng’s work through the lens of her medical training shows us how the practice of medicine can work alongside that of writing to deepen our understanding of what is commonly referred to as the ‘human condition’.
The Bildungsroman could be described as a ‘future-facing' genre, in that its protagonist is expos... more The Bildungsroman could be described as a ‘future-facing' genre, in that its protagonist is exposed to the vicissitudes of life, gains experience, and comes of age; he or she, in other words, learns how to live. The horizon of such stories, beyond just the events being depicted, is the individual's life to come. In this paper, by contrast, I argue that a significant part of the coming-of-age process is the subject's confrontation with mortality. This kind of encounter is crucial to Martin Heidegger's philosophy, wherein he suggests that an authentic self can only be discovered via a confrontation with one's own finitude. In similar fashion, to leave one's childhood behind, in the classic Bildungsroman denouement, can be seen in this Heideggerian light as a coming to terms with the end of life. This complex interplay between maturity and mortality is starkly evident in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go. Whilst it is frequently read as science fiction because of its concern with the ethics of cloning and organ harvesting, I consider it instead as an inverted Bildungsroman. Rather than a passage to adulthood and future life, the protagonist must come to terms with certain death; rather than learning how to live, she (and her fellow clones) must instead learn how to die. This essay shows how Ishiguro attests to the continued pertinence of the Bildungsroman form, even as he seeks to update it in the face of technological change.
The very notion of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ presents us with numerous paradoxes, such a... more The very notion of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ presents us with numerous paradoxes, such as the way it challenges former distinctions made between democratic and Communist systems. This paper examines the rhetorical dimensions of Milton Friedman’s seminal text, Capitalism and freedom (1962), and demonstrates how literary analysis can make an important contribution towards our understanding of the formation of neoliberal ideology. Drawing on critiques of Chinese capitalism mounted by Zhu Wen in his 1994 short story ‘I Love Dollars’, and the essays in Yu Hua’s China in ten words collection (2011), I show the extent to which the perceived discordance between neoliberalism and socialism is grounded in bi-polar Cold War formations. This examination of neoliberal ideals across three literary genres highlights the layers of fiction, and truth, that are present equally within those designated categories of prose, non-fiction, and economic tract.
The Imaginary City
by Lynda Ng and Robert JC Young
Online publication
... more The Imaginary City
by Lynda Ng and Robert JC Young
Online publication
When you arrive at the cityscape of the imaginary city, among the anonymity of its tower blocks. apartment buildings, warehouses, offices and factories, you can find hidden sites of memory they live on unseen, until the magic cursor finds them then you will be transported to realms of love, fear and the intensities of the everyday.
World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority... more World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the centre-periphery model reigns supreme. The premise of this panel is that if world literature can be conceived as a corpus of texts that rise to planetary status through a literary market whose mechanisms of selection and gate-keeping rely on the university, prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry, its interpretative paradigms need to move beyond the analysis of the hierarchies of international capital to include language and translation. This panel invites papers exploring alternatives to world literature studies in the criticism of contemporary texts. The aim is to question world literature as a (mappable) system, one that uncannily echoes the " EU-niversalization " of global literary publishing, marked by the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Prevailing models of " world literature " often separate the literary from the political. For Pascale Casanova, literary internationalism means " standing united against literary nationalism, against the intrusion of politics into literary life ". This panel seeks to set the idea of an internationalist literature and Casanova's " literary internationalism " against each other. In our reading, internationalist literature is premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Decolonization struggles show that revolution and culture are interdependent , and that resistance is translatable across different contexts. We welcome proposals that train their gaze on a different temporality, namely on short-lived, topical, and/or politically oriented literature, often produced with little to no infrastructure. By eschewing a fixation with " universal " literary values, we aim to revalue the contingent and political imperatives of the historical " moment ". Such an emphasis would offer a riposte to the center-periphery model, shifting it instead to the vital South-South alliances that permitted the formation of " literary internationals " in the period of decolonization and after —alliances which appear to have been largely forgotten in contemporary theorizations of the world-literary field. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: • Alternative theoretical models to " world literature " • " Resistance literature " (e.g. protest poetry, Dalit writing) • The role of radical/independent presses in disseminating anti-imperialist and marginal writings; • Anti-colonial/Third-Worldist periodical culture (e.g. Présence Africaine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, El Moudjahid) • Internationalist networks during colonialism and decolonization that fostered the emergence of a " resistance " aesthetics, such as Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, All-India Progressive Writers' Association, PEN • The role of translation in disseminating literature in non-metropolitan languages Deadline for submitting paper proposals: September 23, 2016 ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/
This essay analyses Coetzee’s success as a world literary author, from two distinct angles. The f... more This essay analyses Coetzee’s success as a world literary author, from two distinct angles. The first stems from his non-European ‘southern’ position (and self-positioning) as a South African and then Australian writer with South American links, and his subscription to an ‘imaginary of the South’. The second looks beyond the colonial indebtedness to Europe, focusing instead on some of the ‘minor’ European cultures to which the oeuvre refers, and then on the ways in which it evokes Asia. As will be seen, Coetzee’s work from the very start acknowledges the pivotal role of Asia in the formation of Western identity.
An interview with film producer Emile Sherman and scriptwriter Louise Fox about their adaption of... more An interview with film producer Emile Sherman and scriptwriter Louise Fox about their adaption of Christos Tsiolkas' novel Dead Europe.
Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, eac... more Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Carpentaria from a different national perspective. Taken together, they highlight themes that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples have fought, and continue to fight, for their language, culture and sovereignty; concern for the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or the subversion of, national prejudices.
"Chaired by Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellow in Diaspora Studies, Dr Lynda Ng.
Since 1987, whe... more "Chaired by Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellow in Diaspora Studies, Dr Lynda Ng.
Since 1987, when his work was banned in China, Ma Jian has lived in Hong Kong, Germany and London. He has published a novel based on his travels in Tibet (Stick Out Your Tongue, 1987), and novels that critique the Tiananmen Square massacre (Beijing Coma, 2008) and China’s one-child policy (The Dark Road, 2012). "
""The 21st-century has been described as the Chinese century, a time when China will present new ... more ""The 21st-century has been described as the Chinese century, a time when China will present new challenges to the US in terms of economic, political and military dominance. Whether this comes to pass or not, the prospect of a Chinese century has been as much of a rallying-point for Chinese nationalism internally and as it has been the a cause of anxiety externally. The notion of a Chinese century demands the re-examination of China and its many incarnations – China as two separate governments and nations (the PRC in Mainland China and the ROC in Taiwan), China as several sites of cosmopolitan urbanism (Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore) and China as a ubiquitous international diasporic network evident throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Antipodes.
Central to the concept of “Chineseness” are myths about the common origins, history or culture of these disparate groups of people. In this paper I examine the different ways in which the modern Chinese nation and its culture have been defined and asserted in the literary novel. I argue that China as a case study makes clear the interrelationship between nation and what might be termed trans-nation: the national imaginary that traverses geographical space with migrants as they cross borders, and which persists temporally across generations as a pivotal aspect of identity formation. The cultural porosity of mainland China, its diasporic network and the significance of “the West” will be elucidated through a comparison of texts by canonical modern Chinese writers Lao She, Qian Zhongshu and Eileen Chang, along with works by more contemporary exiled/diasporic Chinese writers such as Ma Jian, Liao Yiwu, Tash Aw and Brian Castro. The strength of Chinese nationalism across geographic space and amongst heteronomous groups of people that have linguistic, ethnic and significant cultural differences demands a reconsideration of the nation as an autonomous body bounded by a discrete geographic territory. Accordingly, I will explore theoretical issues concerning, first, the extent to which nations are defined externally, through their interactions with other nations; and second, the ways in which diasporic networks function as pathways of influence for national identity.
""
Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, eac... more Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Alexis Wright's Carpentaria from a different national perspective. Taken together, they highlight themes that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples have fought, and continue to fight, for their language, culture and sovereignty; concern for the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or the subversion of, national prejudices.
Alexis Wright is known for reshaping literary forms to better suit and present an Aboriginal worl... more Alexis Wright is known for reshaping literary forms to better suit and present an Aboriginal worldview. Her work not only contains an inherently ecological perspective, but is also marked by a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which literature is imbricated with the nation and the economy. This essay traces the connections between Wright’s agitation for sovereignty and social justice, the creation of an Aboriginal economy, and the colonial legacy of climate change. It suggests that Wright’s fiction lays bare the anthropocentric nature of world literature in its current state and tables the prospect of a Gaian world literature.
Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine, 2020
Narrative medicine may take certain methodological cues from literary studies, linguistics and na... more Narrative medicine may take certain methodological cues from literary studies, linguistics and narrative theory, but until now it has remained firmly grounded in the health sector. It views storytelling and narrative as tools that can improve the performance of medical practitioners – first, by helping them process the confronting nature of their everyday jobs, and then by facilitating more effective communication with patients. Narrative competence thus provides an important supplement to the medical gaze, enhancing the clinical experience for practitioner and patient alike. But narrative medicine also has important implications from a literary point of view. It highlights the special position that the medical worker occupies in terms of being able to observe a cross-section of society. When a medical practitioner decides to engage not only with the scientific method of evidence-based medicine but also in the arts-based practice of narrative medicine, he or she has the opportunity to make an intervention in the broader culture. Consequently, the literature that emerges almost as an offshoot of narrative medicine is capable of creating forms of representation that more accurately reflect the heterogeneity of social conformance. It is a literature that draws attention to demographic sectors of society that might otherwise be denied mainstream representation.
This essay examines the ways in which a medical practice can inform a writing practice, and vice versa. Using the work of Chinese-Australian author Melanie Cheng as a case study, I show how narrative medicine traverses an important space between the medical gaze and the empathetic instinct. Cheng has worked as a General Practitioner (GP) for over ten years, whilst developing a parallel writing career. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day (2017), functions on one level as a therapeutic outlet for Cheng’s day job. In addition, by recasting the GP as a repository of secrets, her stories provide matchless insights into the lives of people from a range of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Cheng’s writing therefore transcends the boundaries of her own personal history and ethnicity, pointedly venturing beyond the territory expected of her as a Chinese-Australian author. Viewing Cheng’s work through the lens of her medical training shows us how the practice of medicine can work alongside that of writing to deepen our understanding of what is commonly referred to as the ‘human condition’.
The Bildungsroman could be described as a ‘future-facing' genre, in that its protagonist is expos... more The Bildungsroman could be described as a ‘future-facing' genre, in that its protagonist is exposed to the vicissitudes of life, gains experience, and comes of age; he or she, in other words, learns how to live. The horizon of such stories, beyond just the events being depicted, is the individual's life to come. In this paper, by contrast, I argue that a significant part of the coming-of-age process is the subject's confrontation with mortality. This kind of encounter is crucial to Martin Heidegger's philosophy, wherein he suggests that an authentic self can only be discovered via a confrontation with one's own finitude. In similar fashion, to leave one's childhood behind, in the classic Bildungsroman denouement, can be seen in this Heideggerian light as a coming to terms with the end of life. This complex interplay between maturity and mortality is starkly evident in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go. Whilst it is frequently read as science fiction because of its concern with the ethics of cloning and organ harvesting, I consider it instead as an inverted Bildungsroman. Rather than a passage to adulthood and future life, the protagonist must come to terms with certain death; rather than learning how to live, she (and her fellow clones) must instead learn how to die. This essay shows how Ishiguro attests to the continued pertinence of the Bildungsroman form, even as he seeks to update it in the face of technological change.
The very notion of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ presents us with numerous paradoxes, such a... more The very notion of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ presents us with numerous paradoxes, such as the way it challenges former distinctions made between democratic and Communist systems. This paper examines the rhetorical dimensions of Milton Friedman’s seminal text, Capitalism and freedom (1962), and demonstrates how literary analysis can make an important contribution towards our understanding of the formation of neoliberal ideology. Drawing on critiques of Chinese capitalism mounted by Zhu Wen in his 1994 short story ‘I Love Dollars’, and the essays in Yu Hua’s China in ten words collection (2011), I show the extent to which the perceived discordance between neoliberalism and socialism is grounded in bi-polar Cold War formations. This examination of neoliberal ideals across three literary genres highlights the layers of fiction, and truth, that are present equally within those designated categories of prose, non-fiction, and economic tract.
The Imaginary City
by Lynda Ng and Robert JC Young
Online publication
... more The Imaginary City
by Lynda Ng and Robert JC Young
Online publication
When you arrive at the cityscape of the imaginary city, among the anonymity of its tower blocks. apartment buildings, warehouses, offices and factories, you can find hidden sites of memory they live on unseen, until the magic cursor finds them then you will be transported to realms of love, fear and the intensities of the everyday.
World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority... more World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the centre-periphery model reigns supreme. The premise of this panel is that if world literature can be conceived as a corpus of texts that rise to planetary status through a literary market whose mechanisms of selection and gate-keeping rely on the university, prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry, its interpretative paradigms need to move beyond the analysis of the hierarchies of international capital to include language and translation. This panel invites papers exploring alternatives to world literature studies in the criticism of contemporary texts. The aim is to question world literature as a (mappable) system, one that uncannily echoes the " EU-niversalization " of global literary publishing, marked by the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Prevailing models of " world literature " often separate the literary from the political. For Pascale Casanova, literary internationalism means " standing united against literary nationalism, against the intrusion of politics into literary life ". This panel seeks to set the idea of an internationalist literature and Casanova's " literary internationalism " against each other. In our reading, internationalist literature is premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Decolonization struggles show that revolution and culture are interdependent , and that resistance is translatable across different contexts. We welcome proposals that train their gaze on a different temporality, namely on short-lived, topical, and/or politically oriented literature, often produced with little to no infrastructure. By eschewing a fixation with " universal " literary values, we aim to revalue the contingent and political imperatives of the historical " moment ". Such an emphasis would offer a riposte to the center-periphery model, shifting it instead to the vital South-South alliances that permitted the formation of " literary internationals " in the period of decolonization and after —alliances which appear to have been largely forgotten in contemporary theorizations of the world-literary field. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: • Alternative theoretical models to " world literature " • " Resistance literature " (e.g. protest poetry, Dalit writing) • The role of radical/independent presses in disseminating anti-imperialist and marginal writings; • Anti-colonial/Third-Worldist periodical culture (e.g. Présence Africaine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, El Moudjahid) • Internationalist networks during colonialism and decolonization that fostered the emergence of a " resistance " aesthetics, such as Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, All-India Progressive Writers' Association, PEN • The role of translation in disseminating literature in non-metropolitan languages Deadline for submitting paper proposals: September 23, 2016 ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/
This essay analyses Coetzee’s success as a world literary author, from two distinct angles. The f... more This essay analyses Coetzee’s success as a world literary author, from two distinct angles. The first stems from his non-European ‘southern’ position (and self-positioning) as a South African and then Australian writer with South American links, and his subscription to an ‘imaginary of the South’. The second looks beyond the colonial indebtedness to Europe, focusing instead on some of the ‘minor’ European cultures to which the oeuvre refers, and then on the ways in which it evokes Asia. As will be seen, Coetzee’s work from the very start acknowledges the pivotal role of Asia in the formation of Western identity.
An interview with film producer Emile Sherman and scriptwriter Louise Fox about their adaption of... more An interview with film producer Emile Sherman and scriptwriter Louise Fox about their adaption of Christos Tsiolkas' novel Dead Europe.
After Aboriginal author Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007,... more After Aboriginal author Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, it rapidly achieved the status of a classic. The novel is widely read and studied in Australia, and overseas, and valued for its imaginative power, its epic reach, and its remarkable use of language.
Indigenous Transnationalism brings together eight essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria from a distinct national perspective. Taken together, these diverse voices highlight themes from the novel that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples fight for their language, culture and sovereignty; a concern with the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or subversion of, national prejudices.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive.
After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?
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Talks by Lynda Ng
Since 1987, when his work was banned in China, Ma Jian has lived in Hong Kong, Germany and London. He has published a novel based on his travels in Tibet (Stick Out Your Tongue, 1987), and novels that critique the Tiananmen Square massacre (Beijing Coma, 2008) and China’s one-child policy (The Dark Road, 2012). "
Central to the concept of “Chineseness” are myths about the common origins, history or culture of these disparate groups of people. In this paper I examine the different ways in which the modern Chinese nation and its culture have been defined and asserted in the literary novel. I argue that China as a case study makes clear the interrelationship between nation and what might be termed trans-nation: the national imaginary that traverses geographical space with migrants as they cross borders, and which persists temporally across generations as a pivotal aspect of identity formation. The cultural porosity of mainland China, its diasporic network and the significance of “the West” will be elucidated through a comparison of texts by canonical modern Chinese writers Lao She, Qian Zhongshu and Eileen Chang, along with works by more contemporary exiled/diasporic Chinese writers such as Ma Jian, Liao Yiwu, Tash Aw and Brian Castro. The strength of Chinese nationalism across geographic space and amongst heteronomous groups of people that have linguistic, ethnic and significant cultural differences demands a reconsideration of the nation as an autonomous body bounded by a discrete geographic territory. Accordingly, I will explore theoretical issues concerning, first, the extent to which nations are defined externally, through their interactions with other nations; and second, the ways in which diasporic networks function as pathways of influence for national identity.
""
Papers by Lynda Ng
This essay examines the ways in which a medical practice can inform a writing practice, and vice versa. Using the work of Chinese-Australian author Melanie Cheng as a case study, I show how narrative medicine traverses an important space between the medical gaze and the empathetic instinct. Cheng has worked as a General Practitioner (GP) for over ten years, whilst developing a parallel writing career. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day (2017), functions on one level as a therapeutic outlet for Cheng’s day job. In addition, by recasting the GP as a repository of secrets, her stories provide matchless insights into the lives of people from a range of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Cheng’s writing therefore transcends the boundaries of her own personal history and ethnicity, pointedly venturing beyond the territory expected of her as a Chinese-Australian author. Viewing Cheng’s work through the lens of her medical training shows us how the practice of medicine can work alongside that of writing to deepen our understanding of what is commonly referred to as the ‘human condition’.
by Lynda Ng and Robert JC Young
Online publication
When you arrive at the cityscape of the imaginary city, among the anonymity of its tower blocks. apartment buildings, warehouses, offices and factories, you can find hidden sites of memory they live on unseen, until the magic cursor finds them then you will be transported to realms of love, fear and the intensities of the everyday.
Published online
www.robertjcyoung.com/imaginary_city.html
Since 1987, when his work was banned in China, Ma Jian has lived in Hong Kong, Germany and London. He has published a novel based on his travels in Tibet (Stick Out Your Tongue, 1987), and novels that critique the Tiananmen Square massacre (Beijing Coma, 2008) and China’s one-child policy (The Dark Road, 2012). "
Central to the concept of “Chineseness” are myths about the common origins, history or culture of these disparate groups of people. In this paper I examine the different ways in which the modern Chinese nation and its culture have been defined and asserted in the literary novel. I argue that China as a case study makes clear the interrelationship between nation and what might be termed trans-nation: the national imaginary that traverses geographical space with migrants as they cross borders, and which persists temporally across generations as a pivotal aspect of identity formation. The cultural porosity of mainland China, its diasporic network and the significance of “the West” will be elucidated through a comparison of texts by canonical modern Chinese writers Lao She, Qian Zhongshu and Eileen Chang, along with works by more contemporary exiled/diasporic Chinese writers such as Ma Jian, Liao Yiwu, Tash Aw and Brian Castro. The strength of Chinese nationalism across geographic space and amongst heteronomous groups of people that have linguistic, ethnic and significant cultural differences demands a reconsideration of the nation as an autonomous body bounded by a discrete geographic territory. Accordingly, I will explore theoretical issues concerning, first, the extent to which nations are defined externally, through their interactions with other nations; and second, the ways in which diasporic networks function as pathways of influence for national identity.
""
This essay examines the ways in which a medical practice can inform a writing practice, and vice versa. Using the work of Chinese-Australian author Melanie Cheng as a case study, I show how narrative medicine traverses an important space between the medical gaze and the empathetic instinct. Cheng has worked as a General Practitioner (GP) for over ten years, whilst developing a parallel writing career. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day (2017), functions on one level as a therapeutic outlet for Cheng’s day job. In addition, by recasting the GP as a repository of secrets, her stories provide matchless insights into the lives of people from a range of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Cheng’s writing therefore transcends the boundaries of her own personal history and ethnicity, pointedly venturing beyond the territory expected of her as a Chinese-Australian author. Viewing Cheng’s work through the lens of her medical training shows us how the practice of medicine can work alongside that of writing to deepen our understanding of what is commonly referred to as the ‘human condition’.
by Lynda Ng and Robert JC Young
Online publication
When you arrive at the cityscape of the imaginary city, among the anonymity of its tower blocks. apartment buildings, warehouses, offices and factories, you can find hidden sites of memory they live on unseen, until the magic cursor finds them then you will be transported to realms of love, fear and the intensities of the everyday.
Published online
www.robertjcyoung.com/imaginary_city.html
Indigenous Transnationalism brings together eight essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria from a distinct national perspective. Taken together, these diverse voices highlight themes from the novel that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples fight for their language, culture and sovereignty; a concern with the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or subversion of, national prejudices.
Though literature and censorship have been conceived as long-time adversaries, this collection seeks to understand, rather, the degree to which they have been dialectical terms, each producing the other, coeval and mutually constitutive.
After the opening of the USSR’s spekstrahn, the enormous collections of literature forbidden under the Soviets, containing more than one million items, the push to redefine censorship so expansively has encountered cogent criticism. German scholars describing the centralised control of East German print publication, for example, have wanted to insist on the substantive difference of pre-publication state censorship from more mundane forms of speech regulation in democracies. Work on South African apartheid censorship and the operations of censorship in colonial countries is also demonstrating its formative role in the institutional structures of literature beyond the metropole. In light of these and other developments, Censorship and the Limits of the Literary examines a number of critical issues. Is literature ever without censorship? Does censorship need the literary? In a globalizing era for culture, does censorship represent the final (failed) version of national control?