Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9645902
Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker
This article examines sociopolitical commentary in contemporary Chinese science fiction literature written by authors of the post-1980s generation. With a close reading of Hao Jingfang's 郝景芳 “Beijing zhedie” 北京折疊 (Folding Beijing, 2014) and Chen Qiufan's 陳楸帆 “Lijiang de yu'ermen” 麗江的魚兒們 (The Fish of Lijiang, 2006), the analysis focuses on how these works reflect the lived experience of ordinary urbanities in postmodern China and pays particular attention to the stories' engagement with the chronotope. This article argues that through the chronotope contemporary Chinese science fiction stories express unease about rapid transformation and visualize a divided Chinese society characterized by spatial disparity.
{"title":"Spatiotemporal Explorations","authors":"Frederike Schneider-Vielsäcker","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9645902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9645902","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines sociopolitical commentary in contemporary Chinese science fiction literature written by authors of the post-1980s generation. With a close reading of Hao Jingfang's 郝景芳 “Beijing zhedie” 北京折疊 (Folding Beijing, 2014) and Chen Qiufan's 陳楸帆 “Lijiang de yu'ermen” 麗江的魚兒們 (The Fish of Lijiang, 2006), the analysis focuses on how these works reflect the lived experience of ordinary urbanities in postmodern China and pays particular attention to the stories' engagement with the chronotope. This article argues that through the chronotope contemporary Chinese science fiction stories express unease about rapid transformation and visualize a divided Chinese society characterized by spatial disparity.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"92 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77855525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9645962
Alexa Alice Joubin
The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities as viral origins—in the United States. Offering strategies for inclusion and for identifying tacit forms of misogynistic racism, this article analyzes the manifestation of the ideas of yellow peril and yellow fever in recent films and television series. The spectatorial aspect of racism has both fetishized Asian bodies and erased Asianness from content creators' visual landscapes. These case studies reveal that racialized thinking is institutionalized as power relations in the cultural and political life, take the form of political marginalization of minority groups, and cause emotional distress and physical harm within and beyond the fictional universe.
{"title":"Screening Anti-Asian Racism","authors":"Alexa Alice Joubin","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9645962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9645962","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities as viral origins—in the United States. Offering strategies for inclusion and for identifying tacit forms of misogynistic racism, this article analyzes the manifestation of the ideas of yellow peril and yellow fever in recent films and television series. The spectatorial aspect of racism has both fetishized Asian bodies and erased Asianness from content creators' visual landscapes. These case studies reveal that racialized thinking is institutionalized as power relations in the cultural and political life, take the form of political marginalization of minority groups, and cause emotional distress and physical harm within and beyond the fictional universe.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86366963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9645892
Winnie L. M. Yee
Although the exhaustion and brutal exploitation of nature in the name of progress has been decried in recent decades, post-socialist China continues to use economic gains to justify the destruction of the majority of the populace and their environment. This article focuses on the lives of Chinese people and the ways in which urban spaces, which are the result of a long-term ideologically and economically driven development paradigm, are rendered spectral and uncanny by contemporary Chinese writers. Specters serve as common tropes for social injustice, personal vendettas, or unspeakable traumas. Di qi tian 第七天 (The Seventh Day, 2013) by Yu Hua 余華 (1960–) and Yuese liaoren 月色撩人 (Seductive Moon, 2008) by Wang Anyi 王安憶 (1954–) are analyzed in order to expose the dire effects of the urbanization of post-socialist China on the everyday lives of people of every profession, age, class, and gender.
{"title":"Ghostly Chronotopes","authors":"Winnie L. M. Yee","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9645892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9645892","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Although the exhaustion and brutal exploitation of nature in the name of progress has been decried in recent decades, post-socialist China continues to use economic gains to justify the destruction of the majority of the populace and their environment. This article focuses on the lives of Chinese people and the ways in which urban spaces, which are the result of a long-term ideologically and economically driven development paradigm, are rendered spectral and uncanny by contemporary Chinese writers. Specters serve as common tropes for social injustice, personal vendettas, or unspeakable traumas. Di qi tian 第七天 (The Seventh Day, 2013) by Yu Hua 余華 (1960–) and Yuese liaoren 月色撩人 (Seductive Moon, 2008) by Wang Anyi 王安憶 (1954–) are analyzed in order to expose the dire effects of the urbanization of post-socialist China on the everyday lives of people of every profession, age, class, and gender.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90114471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9646063
Enhua Zhang
{"title":"Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era","authors":"Enhua Zhang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9646063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9646063","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"45 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72516822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9646002
Emma J. Teng
This article asks how the category of “mixed race” can help us think through the recent spate of violence against Asian Americans, culminating in the Atlanta mass shootings of March 2021. It further reflects on a tension within mixed-race studies: whereas mixed-race theory, in its embrace of anti-essentialism and hybridity, bespeaks a certain hope and optimism, mixed race as a lens through which to view history brings us inescapably to violence. Tracing how the concept of mixed race threads through a history of violence in this country, the article demonstrates how misogyny and racial hatred toward Asians have long been intertwined. Recent anti-Asian hate crimes surface the continuities in the targeting of Asians as a source of pollution and contagion, and in representations of Asian women as a source of sexual “temptation” that must be restricted, prohibited, or eliminated. Finally, it is argued that the turn away from the post-racialism of the Obama era and the rise of a new white nationalism call our attention to a fundamental flaw in the very premise of mixed-race theory: that is, the category of “mixed race” simultaneously unlocks the liberatory potential of nonbinary identities and reifies the problematic category of race itself.
{"title":"“And This Is What He Did”","authors":"Emma J. Teng","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9646002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9646002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article asks how the category of “mixed race” can help us think through the recent spate of violence against Asian Americans, culminating in the Atlanta mass shootings of March 2021. It further reflects on a tension within mixed-race studies: whereas mixed-race theory, in its embrace of anti-essentialism and hybridity, bespeaks a certain hope and optimism, mixed race as a lens through which to view history brings us inescapably to violence. Tracing how the concept of mixed race threads through a history of violence in this country, the article demonstrates how misogyny and racial hatred toward Asians have long been intertwined. Recent anti-Asian hate crimes surface the continuities in the targeting of Asians as a source of pollution and contagion, and in representations of Asian women as a source of sexual “temptation” that must be restricted, prohibited, or eliminated. Finally, it is argued that the turn away from the post-racialism of the Obama era and the rise of a new white nationalism call our attention to a fundamental flaw in the very premise of mixed-race theory: that is, the category of “mixed race” simultaneously unlocks the liberatory potential of nonbinary identities and reifies the problematic category of race itself.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84886873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9645932
T. Lee
This article ponders writing and art that leverage the written script in Sinitic contexts, specifically where Sinographs are fetishized for creative and/or critical purposes—that is to say, they are turned into a spectacle as well as a method. The article analyzes various “technologies of orthography” pivoting on the Sinograph across three modalities of Sinophone expression: Taiwanese concrete poetry, transnational Chinese text-based art, and ludic mediatizations of the written script. It then speculates on the social psychological meaning of the spectacularized Sinograph as a creative-critical nexus by thinking it through the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, arguing that the Sinograph as a grotesque figure embodies contradictory impulses immanent in the regeneration of Chinese culture by fracturing it from within.
{"title":"Spectacles of the Sinograph in Chinese Literary and Art Productions","authors":"T. Lee","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9645932","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9645932","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article ponders writing and art that leverage the written script in Sinitic contexts, specifically where Sinographs are fetishized for creative and/or critical purposes—that is to say, they are turned into a spectacle as well as a method. The article analyzes various “technologies of orthography” pivoting on the Sinograph across three modalities of Sinophone expression: Taiwanese concrete poetry, transnational Chinese text-based art, and ludic mediatizations of the written script. It then speculates on the social psychological meaning of the spectacularized Sinograph as a creative-critical nexus by thinking it through the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, arguing that the Sinograph as a grotesque figure embodies contradictory impulses immanent in the regeneration of Chinese culture by fracturing it from within.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78910950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9645992
Suk-Young Kim
Lotus blossoms, dragon ladies, K-pop beauty queens, and crazy rich Asians . . . these are the jaded stereotypes distilled by the prevalent popular imaginary surrounding Asian/Asian American women. Despite their varying temperaments, they tend to focus on the particular decorative sensibilities and ornateness of Asian/Asian American female bodies. Among multiple scholarly efforts to wrestle with these enduring perceptions of yellow women, Ann Anlin Cheng's concept of ornamentalism is arguably the most significant theoretical perspective to have emerged in recent years. And yet, in the wake of the 2021 shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, which primarily targeted women of Asian descent, the notion of ornamentalism is rendered nearly irrelevant in the face of ghastly violence against hard-working, nonornamental bodies of Asian/Asian American women. Navigating through the debris of colonial intimacies, ornamentalism, and techno-orientalism, this article relies on the figure of the visor-wearing ajumma, a Korean word referencing a middle-aged woman. As a transnational and transhistorical framework emerging from the messy interstitial spaces between theory and reality, the concept of the ajumma stands at a crossroads marked by the suffocating weight of the American empire and the precarity of Asian/Asian American lives facing the persistent forces of racism, sexism, classism, and ageism.
{"title":"Postornamentality","authors":"Suk-Young Kim","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9645992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9645992","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Lotus blossoms, dragon ladies, K-pop beauty queens, and crazy rich Asians . . . these are the jaded stereotypes distilled by the prevalent popular imaginary surrounding Asian/Asian American women. Despite their varying temperaments, they tend to focus on the particular decorative sensibilities and ornateness of Asian/Asian American female bodies. Among multiple scholarly efforts to wrestle with these enduring perceptions of yellow women, Ann Anlin Cheng's concept of ornamentalism is arguably the most significant theoretical perspective to have emerged in recent years. And yet, in the wake of the 2021 shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, which primarily targeted women of Asian descent, the notion of ornamentalism is rendered nearly irrelevant in the face of ghastly violence against hard-working, nonornamental bodies of Asian/Asian American women. Navigating through the debris of colonial intimacies, ornamentalism, and techno-orientalism, this article relies on the figure of the visor-wearing ajumma, a Korean word referencing a middle-aged woman. As a transnational and transhistorical framework emerging from the messy interstitial spaces between theory and reality, the concept of the ajumma stands at a crossroads marked by the suffocating weight of the American empire and the precarity of Asian/Asian American lives facing the persistent forces of racism, sexism, classism, and ageism.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89331142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9645912
Xuesong Shao, S. Lu
This article adopts Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the chronotope to analyze the 2015 film Laopaoer 老炮兒 (Mr. Six), directed by Guan Hu 管虎 and starring Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛, exploring its representation and reconfiguration of the real as well as the imagined time-spaces of Beijing. Revolving around generational conflicts against the grain of a globalized and gentrified Beijing, Mr. Six creates a strong nostalgic appeal and laments the withering of mores from the past. The film not only attends to the physiognomic remapping of contemporary Beijing but also incorporates topographical imaginaries from the culture of the martial arts. By invoking hybrid sites of memory, Guan Hu mobilizes cultural legacies associated with Beijing and creates a palimpsestic urban chronotope. Furthermore, this article compares Mr. Six to its literary and filmic predecessors, probing its insights and oversights in restoring cultural memories and in capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary China. With gaps and conflicts on textual, contextual, and intertextual levels calling into question the efficacy of Mr. Six's exposé of China's social stratification and urban gentrification, the stories in, of, and around Mr. Six reiterate the coordination between cultural elites and consumer culture.
{"title":"Reconfiguring the Chronotope","authors":"Xuesong Shao, S. Lu","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9645912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9645912","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article adopts Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of the chronotope to analyze the 2015 film Laopaoer 老炮兒 (Mr. Six), directed by Guan Hu 管虎 and starring Feng Xiaogang 馮小剛, exploring its representation and reconfiguration of the real as well as the imagined time-spaces of Beijing. Revolving around generational conflicts against the grain of a globalized and gentrified Beijing, Mr. Six creates a strong nostalgic appeal and laments the withering of mores from the past. The film not only attends to the physiognomic remapping of contemporary Beijing but also incorporates topographical imaginaries from the culture of the martial arts. By invoking hybrid sites of memory, Guan Hu mobilizes cultural legacies associated with Beijing and creates a palimpsestic urban chronotope. Furthermore, this article compares Mr. Six to its literary and filmic predecessors, probing its insights and oversights in restoring cultural memories and in capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary China. With gaps and conflicts on textual, contextual, and intertextual levels calling into question the efficacy of Mr. Six's exposé of China's social stratification and urban gentrification, the stories in, of, and around Mr. Six reiterate the coordination between cultural elites and consumer culture.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"98 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80904075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9646033
Xiaoju Wang
{"title":"The Great Leap Backward: Forgetting and Representing the Mao Years","authors":"Xiaoju Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9646033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9646033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89583005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-9645922
Astrid Møller-Olsen
What if, in the encounter between the subject and the city, it is the buildings, the streets, the rooms that are moving and the human beings who are at a standstill? Inspired by the efforts of literary scholars and human geographers to apply a unified understanding of space and time to the study of the (fictional) city, this article employs an analysis centered on the figure of the elevator to explore how literary narratives can help expand our understanding of space-time as an intuitive and quotidian fact of existence. In a comparative study of Taiwanese author Wu Mingyi's short story “The Ninety-Ninth Floor” and Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse's “Mute Doors,” this article proposes the term time-space as a suitable concept for dealing with discrete sections of space-time in literature and goes on to explore the elevator as a prime example of such an explicitly temporal, and spatially confined, time-space.
{"title":"Take the Elevator to Tomorrow","authors":"Astrid Møller-Olsen","doi":"10.1215/25783491-9645922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-9645922","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What if, in the encounter between the subject and the city, it is the buildings, the streets, the rooms that are moving and the human beings who are at a standstill? Inspired by the efforts of literary scholars and human geographers to apply a unified understanding of space and time to the study of the (fictional) city, this article employs an analysis centered on the figure of the elevator to explore how literary narratives can help expand our understanding of space-time as an intuitive and quotidian fact of existence. In a comparative study of Taiwanese author Wu Mingyi's short story “The Ninety-Ninth Floor” and Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse's “Mute Doors,” this article proposes the term time-space as a suitable concept for dealing with discrete sections of space-time in literature and goes on to explore the elevator as a prime example of such an explicitly temporal, and spatially confined, time-space.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79964541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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