Literary and Social Movements: China, Hong Kong, and the Transpacific
The term “diaspora” refers to the “movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland” while the term “Chineseness” has been discussed as “an open and indeterminate signifier whose meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated in different sections of the Chinese diaspora” (Ien Ang). As alternatives to the concept of the “Chinese diaspora,” scholars have proposed concepts such as the “Sinophone” (meaning Chinese-speaking world) or the “transpacific” (meaning crossing or extending across the Pacific Ocean). This course will bring together works by authors in the Chinese diaspora, the Sinophone, and the transpacific that thematize critical moments of transition and political upheaval from the 20th century to the present: the Cultural Revolution in China, Tiananmen Square, the 1997 Handover of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Democracy Movement, and transpacific migration. How have authors experimented with literary and creative forms to engage histories of state violence and the social movements that have emerged in response? What are the stakes of remembering events that have been repressed by the state? How do texts take up state violence while simultaneously engaging longstanding modes of representational violence? In this course, we will take up these questions through an interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural works in variety of genres (drama, novels, poetry, and film).
Potential Readings
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (1988, Penguin Edition 1993)
Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger: a novella and stories (W.W. Norton, 2009)
Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Knopf Canada, 2017)
Xu Xi, Dear Hong Kong (Penguin, 2017)
Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)
Lily Wong, Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (2020)
Shu-Mei Shi, Introduction to Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013)
Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism (1998)
Abbas Ackbar, Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997)
Shirley Lim, Embracing the Angel: Hong Kong Poems (2014)
Ten Years (dir. Kwok Zune, et. al, 2015), Netflix
Potential Readings
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (1988, Penguin Edition 1993)
Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger: a novella and stories (W.W. Norton, 2009)
Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Knopf Canada, 2017)
Xu Xi, Dear Hong Kong (Penguin, 2017)
Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)
Lily Wong, Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness (2020)
Shu-Mei Shi, Introduction to Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013)
Rey Chow, Ethics after Idealism (1998)
Abbas Ackbar, Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997)
Shirley Lim, Embracing the Angel: Hong Kong Poems (2014)
Ten Years (dir. Kwok Zune, et. al, 2015), Netflix
All material © Y-Dang Troeung, 2021