Browsing by Author "Rojas, Carlos"

As the twenty-first century has entered an era of catastrophes, post-catastrophic trauma writings in world literature bear witness and give testimonies to the moments of crisis. With a comparative literary study of the post-catastrophic trauma writings and other forms of representations that respond to the 9/11 terrorism in the United States and the Covid-19 pandemic outbreaks in China, this research explores the question of how the collective traumas develop dynamic relationships with individuality and influence individuals’ mental lives affectively. In the catastrophic aftermath, the collective traumas shared by the individuals act on their interiority and form a sense of collective isolation, which means that an individual staying in a collectivity remains unconsciously isolated affects. The research will illustrate the embodiments of collective isolation at an individual level and delve into its social causes at a collective level. On an individual level, collective isolation is recognized as a traumatized subject’s sense of detachment from the chronological present, showing a dislocation with time. On a collective level, collective isolation is an exteriorization of a traumatized society by two types of violence: subjective violence and objective violence. The intensive conflicts around subjective violence directly by catastrophes may transform into invisible objective violence, which constantly and implicitly influences politics, cultures, and human affects. This research would land at the point that collectivity and individuality as two spatial concepts could be interpenetrated through affects, illustrating that the collective traumas represent dynamic relationships among violence, affects, public spheres, and the individual’s mental world.

Until the end of the 20th century, with the deepening of the Opening-up and Reform movement under the context of globalization and advancement of communication methods, both culture and economy in the PRC have achieved unprecedented success. Due to this mobilized improvement, the queer community in the PRC seems to have gained more and more visibility at the same time. In this case, the increasing queer activities in the PRC may be associated with a Westernized sense of “queer mobility”, which indicates an expanding space of recognition, identification, and presence for queer individuals. However, regarding the specific post-socialist context in the contemporary PRC, the economic, cultural, or social mobility may directly result in the phenomenon of “queer mobility”, since such progression in other aspects may potentially neglect or conceal the marginalized backwardness that has been embedded in the process of development. In other words, the sense of queer mobility cannot fully represent the intricate reality of queer subjects in the PRC. Thus, this thesis will primarily focus on the concept of “queer immobility” as an alternative to interpret the queerness in the contemporary PRC. Specifically, this queer immobility may not be understood as negative or an outright opposition to the sense of queer mobility; instead, the stress of “immobility” may offer us a novel lens to re-investigate the underlying circulation of loss and continuous melancholy structured by the spatial and psychological constraints within Chinese queer subjects. Also, the intervention of “immobility” may tentatively break the illusion of queer activism structured by the economic, cultural, or political prosperity. To visualize such queer immobility, the thesis will focus on four films in the contemporary PRC. Through the analysis of the immobilized psychological and geographical space, the thesis intends to reveal the multifaceted conundrum of Chinese queer subjects, who struggle between the mobilized illusions and uncompromising restrictions.

In his five-year-long world literature lecture series, running from 1989 to 1994, the Chinese diasporic writer-painter Mu Xin (1927-2011) provided a puzzling advice for the group of emerging Chinese artists living in New York: “Art is to sacrifice.” Reading this advice in tandem with other comments on “sacrifice” that Mu Xin provided throughout the lecture series, this study uses the concept of “art is to sacrifice one’s death” to examine the intricate relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Mu Xin’s project of art. The question of diasporic positionality is inherent in the relationship between aesthetic and ethical discourses, since the two discourses themselves were born in a Western tradition that was once foreign to Mu Xin. Examining his life together with his works in different medium, I trace the intellectual genealogy of his works to the legacy of Lu Xun and Lin Fengmian’s debate in the late 1920s. Then, I examine how Mu Xin reinvented their aesthetic-cum-ethical project to shape his role as an artist in the world. Finally, through comparing him to a similar Chinese diasporic artist Gao Xingjian, I put the artistic image that Mu Xin established for himself in relation to the political position that he inhabited as a diasporic artist working across cultural boundaries. I argue that Mu Xin not only vigorously forwarded an ethical project in pursuit of humanness with his advice on art but also envisioned such humanness to be a mediative process of social activity instead of any essential state of being or sentimentality in a singular mind. Through such an artistic project, Mu Xin managed to participate in reforming the static boundaries of culture and nation-state, such that he carried out a political project though fictional means, making the world more adaptive to individuals living within it.

When Kizuna AI debuted as the first VTuber in the world, a new Japanese popular culture emerges. In just five years, as a new category of YouTubers, a group of VTubers (virtual YouTubers) is gradually coming into the public eye. Different from other YouTubers, VTubers use a digital avatar to represent their body and response to their audience. By using technologies such as 3D and live2D, VTuber are able to create any characters they want ignoring the limitations of their real-life identity. Through their interactions with audience through digital avatars, some VTubers have gained a large number of followers and earnings during live streaming. Graphics technology and VTuber’s performance create a connection between virtuality and reality. However, since the emergence of VTuber agencies in 2018, the VTubing phenomenon faces several new limitations. The agency’s business contract shatters the fantasy world that VTuber brings to their audience and prompt the audiences to shift their attention from the VTuber's behavior to that of the people manipulate the avatar (naka no hito). The result dilutes or even eliminates the connection between the VTubers and their digital avatar.

This thesis examines the profound literary influence of Taiwanese writer Chen Yingzhen’s early writing, spanning from 1959 to 1965. It explores his journey from initially embracing the legacy of Lu Xun to the reciprocal impact of his collaboration with fellow writer Wei Tiancong, and ultimately, to his recognition by Wang Anyi. By situating Chen within the intricate literary landscape, conducting three comparative analyses of novellas that have adaptations and intertextual relationships, and focusing on the motif of the "fall of the father," both within the texts and in broader contexts, the thesis argues that:Chen Yingzhen’s early novels, characterized by their originality, rawness, and discernible traces of learning, reveal a more obvious adaptation of Lu Xun’s works alongside a closer reflection of his childhood. Chen’s engagement with Lu Xun commenced with his father’s reverence for this literary giant, but it is the shared experience of losing their fathers at an early age that forged a unique emotional resonance and literary bond between the two. Furthermore, Chen’s experience of dual fatherhood—both biological and adoptive—enabled him to continue Lu Xun’s pioneering narratives of intellectuals returning to their hometowns, albeit with a exploration the familial traumas and identity confusion in the younger generation, rather than the broader modernist dilemma. Also, the amalgamation of influences from his three fathers—in reality, and literature—shaped Chen’s distinctive literary and ideological framework, setting him apart from his contemporaries. While he introduced Western modernism to Taiwan and absorbed techniques from it, he retained elements of the May Fourth tradition and remained rooted in realistic concern, neither being swallowed by nihilism nor deviating from leftist aspiration. Moreover, Chen Yingzhen himself emerged as a literary father figure, serving as an exemplar or ideal with answers for the subsequent generation of authors from both sides of the trait. It is crucial to acknowledge that despite serving as a literary beacon for the emerging intellectual youth, Chen’s status as a literary father was not immune to the barriers of intergenerational, cultural, or temporal disconnects, due to the lack of understanding or inability to communicate. These divides make his figure hardly avoid being detached from the obscuration of imagination or even prejudice, and subjective projection.

The coffeehouse emerged as an unprecedented popular leisure spot in Shanghai during the 1920s, which always conjured up an aura of western exoticism. Accordingly, drinking coffee became prevalent among elite men and women who advocated a modern lifestyle, especially cultural intellectuals, and coffeehouses were soon favored by many writers and artists for social gatherings. Such a kind of gathering resembled the phenomenon of “salon” indigenous to the seventeenth century France that Habermas regarded as the most typical form of civil culture cultivated by public spheres such as cafés and restaurants. Meanwhile, the teahouse (茶館 chaguan), which had long

functioned as a popular place for social gatherings in China that intellectuals sat together and communicated on literary topics or political issues, although despised by some Republican reformists as backward ill tradition, had experienced some self- transformation to cope with the rapidly developing urban environment. The traditional habit of drinking tea of Chinese people was refreshed with a modern connotation, and the stimulated “tea talk meeting” (茶話會 chahua hui) phenomenon then prevailed among Republican cultural elites, which was the combination of the tradition of the genteel gathering (雅集 yaji) among Chinese literati and the introduced European salon culture, and was vital to inspiring literary and cultural productions. In the meantime, “tea” and “coffee” became important cultural symbols, with the actual gatherings that happened in teahouses and coffeehouses extended to the print media. Two best examples are the “Coffee Seats” (咖啡座 kafeizuo) column appeared on Shenbao 申報 in the late 1920s and the journal entitled Literature and Art Tea Talk (文藝茶話 Wenyi chahua) first produced in the early 1930s, where articles on literary and artistic topics were solicited and cultural elites could participate another form of gathering in an imagined public cultural space. The physical and virtual gatherings shared some highly similar essences, and both are crucial to the formation of collectivity and identification among cultural intellectuals. Referring to such notions as “public sphere” coined by Jürgen Habermas, “structure of feeling” proposed by Raymond Williams, and “imagined communities” by Benedict Anderson, this thesis is going to investigate how the teahouse and coffeehouse as both physical and imagined social spaces activated significant cultural implications and were closely related to the identity politics of cultural intellectuals in Republican Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. I regard the teahouse/coffeehouse as important public sites that accommodated multilayered elements of cultural modernity and “tea/coffee” as conspicuous cultural symbols manifested in literature and popular culture.

This thesis investigates the intersections between queer and posthuman studies, exploring how animality can serve as a force for queer movements. Drawing on the theories of Eve Sedgwick and Jack Halberstam, this project proposes the existence of an intermediate space between the domestic and the wild, which is linked by queer movements. Particularly, by examining three queer works from Hong Kong and Taiwan, this project demonstrates how animality provides resources and imaginative space for queering to transgress fixed features and identities. The works examined in this project queer taxonomies, language, species, bodies, and sexualities, opening up infinite possibilities for becoming. In this way, it intends to inspire new ways of thinking about identity, community, and the natural world.

This project explores the intersection between diasporic identity negotiation, gender, sexuality, and multi-cultural experiences portrayed in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004). It features two main chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. Chapter One focuses on the intimacy aspect in The Wedding Banquet, examining how it intersects with gender and sexuality in promoting cross-cultural identity formation. Through analyzing intimacy as the site of contestation between alienation, ambivalence, and sacrificial narratives, both of which contribute to the formation of a nuanced, multi-layered Asian American identity. I argue that Lee’s portrayal of familial intimacy challenges stereotypical depictions of Asian American family units and proffers a nuanced yet intricate understanding of cross-cultural identity formation, uncovering the dilemma and hypocrisy inherent in the Gao family narrative that is manifested as social critique under the disguise of a romantic comedy. Chapter Two analyzes Saving Face focusing on the intersection between the discourses of indebtedness, guilt, and female liberation. I argue that by paralleling the dilemma and different forms of oppression and alienation faced by Hwei-Lan and Wil, Wu provides insight into the elastic relationship between the liberation discourse and indebtedness, guilt, and filial responsibilities of ‘Chinese daughters’. Through the constant negotiations of these elements, self-narrativity is achieved through the construction of flexible identities that strive to attend to both filial responsibilities and the search for individual narratives and autonomy.

The relationship between metropolitan cities around the world and tales of murder has encompassed the complicated nature of modern life, and such is also the case of Shanghai in the Republican era. The prosperity of the print industry in Shanghai, in the first few decades of the 20th century, has intertwined profoundly with Shanghai’s reform culture that denotes different literary currents, ideological transformations and changes of everyday life, all of which pertain to cultural exchanges with the West. Such a socio-cultural context not only determines the material basis and the agencies of the production, circulation and reception of murder narratives, but also influences the cognitive and conceptual apparatuses that position murderous violence in different spectacles of political movements, social conventions and knowledge production. In this thesis, I examine tales of murders in various literary texts in Republican Shanghai before 1937, the first metropolis in Republican China and also one of the most famous cosmopolitan cities in a semicolonial society in the first half of the 20th century. I mainly focus on murder narratives in three different forms of texts: the newspaper coverage of murder cases and their aftermath represented by reports on Shen Bao 申報，the detective stories in the Huo Sang and Lu Ping series written by two illustrious Shanghainese authors, Cheng Xiaoqing and Sun Liaohong, and depictions of murder and murderous violence in the works of authors that are commonly grouped as Neo-sensationalist School. Besides the issue of genre, what also matter in this categorization are the narrative techniques they deploy and the different lenses they choose in approaching murders. Informed by Thomas de Quincey’s method of examining murder as a cultural phenomenon, instead of limiting it to the field of psychiatric analyses or legal practices, this thesis also deploys theories of nationalism, sexuality, flâneurie, surrealism and psychoanalysis to unpack how the tales of murder in Shanghai project discourses of Chinese modernity as a site of contestations multilayered with different forces. I therefore argue that the tales of murder have conjured up a domain of imagination that serves as an undercurrent of Chinese cultural history. The complexity of the cultural production concerning murder encounters the complex nature of the issue of Shanghai modern ranging from female rights, national formation, the role of intellectuals and leftist turn in reform culture, and linking to this, the ambiguity of the position of literature in a modernizing society.

This thesis examines cats and cat lovers in the intersection between the humananimal relationship and the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth century China and beyond. I argue that the presentation and representation of cats and cat lovers in the media space partake in the process of subjectivity formation and complicate the understanding of the human-nonhuman boundaries and the intersubjective space where humans and animals co-exist. Drawing evidence from cat anthologies in late Qing, newspapers, film magazines, pictorials in Republican Shanghai, manga, animation, and TV shows circulated in contemporary East Asian cyberspace, my project suggests three major realms of change associated with cats that have influenced the subjectivity formation in the human-animal interaction and imagination. My inquiry contributes to a deeper understanding of the agency of both cats and cat lovers actively embodies in the socio-cultural construction and the re-thinking of an alternative and non-anthropocentric way of reading and interpreting the practices and discourses related to animal-human relationships.

As Carlos Ginsburg pointed out, “What is much harder to reject in principle (but also as much harder and more laborious to achieve) is an analytical reconstruction of the intricate web of minute relations that underlies the production of any work of art, however simple” , my project will zoom in the process of visualization of the socialist China and post-socialist China from a cultural-microhistorical perspective—propaganda poster, stamp and philately, political pop art—to figure out the continuity and discontinuity of this process, and the relations of art and politics. In a micro level, the trajectory of this thesis will follow the discussion of the visualization history of socialist China and post-socialist China, and the relation between art and politics in Mao and post-Mao era. Rather than simply using the visual analysis as main research method, based on the primary archives and secondary resources, I will choose artwork, art collector, and artist as the three typical cases with different research methodologies, including iconography, gender studies, etc. From discussing the propaganda posters’ positive and negative influences to political movements in 1950s and 1960s (Chapter 1), further to the complicated roles of stamp collector and how it embedded with official and individual discourses in 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 2), finally to the mislabeled political pop art of Wang Guangyi’s work in 1980s and 1990s (Chapter 3), this thesis aims to offer a possible way to understand the politicalizing art process in modern Chinese history.

This thesis is a response to theorist Yuk Hui’s impassioned call for more thinkers to take up the crucial task of developing pluralist “cosmotechnics” and technodiversity, that is to say, to construct and attend to the multiplicity of ways in which technical relationships to the cosmos have been and are being staked out across different cultures to make possible deviations from “modern technology’s” homogeneous rendition of such a relationship as “enframing,” a la Heidegger. Unlike Hui who predominantly draws on classical and modern philosophical texts, however, I turn to contemporary Chinese- language novels – in particular, Lou Yi-chin’s Kuang chaoren (2018) and Yan Lianke’s Rixi (2015) – to (i) theorize alter-cosmotechnics beyond the Chinese Confucian and Daoist variants developed by Hui in The Question Concerning Technology in China, and (ii) extend Yuk Hui’s concept cosmotechnics more firmly into issues of aesthetics, literature and writing. On the former front, my efforts lead me to develop and describe a set of cosmotechnics that is centered around what I call “dissipation” and “enflaming”; insofar as such cosmotechnics technic-izes the cosmos neither in terms of the poetic unconcealment of world and man (Heidegger’s Greek poiesis) nor in terms of the unification or striving for harmony between cosmic and moral order (Hui’s Chinese Confucian/Daoist cosmotechnics) but in its insistence of things’ exhaustibility and already- being-dead, it forces us, I argue, to broach the problem of modern technology in a radically different way, i.e., not as a loss of pre-modern magic, but as the delayed realization of our pre-modern deaths. On the latter front, I explore the different ways in which aesthetics – in its designation of a sensuous mode that is adjacent to philosophy’s primary mode that is thinking, can be brought to bear on cosmotechnics-as-project; aesthetics, for instance, can allow for the demarcating-through-reading of certain premodern literary cultures as grounds for alter-ontologies of cosmotechnics (as in Kuang chaoren), or raise the possibility of a non-inscriptive mode of writing that is not pre-modern but precisely “contemporary” (as in Rixi).

The concerns and questions in this paper are predicated on what havehappened during the past three years in the field of Chinese danmei culture. I notice that, on the one hand, the state is cracking down on danmei fans’ erotic writing by punishing creators who produce “yinhui” works and depriving them of or imposing stringent censorship on media platforms where danmei fans share their works; on the other hand, the banned danmei dramas adapted from popular original novels are adjusted into “dan’gai dramas” to reenter the mainstream market and in this tends, several works have received huge commercial success. Juxtaposing these two phenomena, I divided the paper into two chapters to analyze two groups of texts – the danmei erotica which are criminalized or stigmatized by the discourse of “yinhui seqing” and the adapted dan’gai drama and its original novel which are permitted and consumed in the market. By closely reading these texts and examining how they interact with media theory, gender/queer theory, and literary criticism, I indicate the disruptive and subversive potential of danmei culture and unpack multiple contesting forces in this field to show the complexity, possibilities, and predicaments of danmei.

This thesis examines the representation of migrant workers in smaller-screen visual practices within the Chinese mediascape, using DV-made documentaries and short videos as case studies. By conducting a content analysis on the documentary Jianghu: Life on the Road and a series of rented room short videos on Douyin, I argue that the agency of migrant workers as subalterns in these visual practices is ambiguous and that digital technology can create complex power dynamics that do not necessarily lead to the empowerment of the subaltern. Furthermore, the thesis analyzes the content of the short videos to explore their homogeneity, the sense of hope conveyed through positive energy and the affective spectatorship they generate. Through these analyses, the thesis aims to contribute to discussions on the representation and agency of migrant workers in the Chinese mediascape and to offer insights into the complex power dynamics at play in smaller-screen visual practices.

Hong Kong has long been ensnared in the problems of limited housing and soaring land prices, which renders its physical space one of the most visible criteria embodying its social inequalities. Regarding space as an overarching concern andframework, this thesis mainly focuses on the representations and portrayals of Hong Kong’s urban space in Fruit Chan and Ann Hui’s films and further examines how the directors engage with social spaces in reality through depicting various cinematic spaces. All of these films explore the grassroots space of the underprivileged and marginalized people, which constitutes the underside of Hong Kong’s glamorous urban space shaped by economic developments and globalization. Fruit Chan’s Handover Trilogy including Made in Hong Kong (1997), The Longest Summer (1998), Little Cheung (1999), as well as the first two installments of his Prostitute Trilogy, Durian Durian (2000) and Hollywood Hong Kong (2000) hence reflect on how economic, political and social conditions are factored into the uncanny mutations and distortions of varying spaces ranging from public housing estates, cemeteries, streets to squatter villages. Ann Hui’s companion films, The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009), offer a detailed characterization of public housing estates and discuss the notion of housing in metropolitan contexts. The two directors deploy and recreate these paradigmatic spaces of Hong Kong as a critique of the history and social hierarchy of Hong Kong, which are intimately involved with the complexity of postcoloniality, neoliberalism, and globalization. Based on theories of spatiality, psychoanalysis, and urban sociology, this thesis argues that these cinematic spaces can be viewed as a site to negotiate with urban planning, spatial practices, transregional and transnational movements. On the one hand, space registers the hierarchical division of the society that renders the underprivileged more vulnerable. On the other hand, connections and a sense of community can also emerge from the space appropriated by its inhabitants. Furthermore, by engaging with border-crossing subjects, these films explore social spaces beyond Hong Kong and provide possibilities of investigating the broader social reality of post-socialist China, destabilizing the static binaries between local and global, periphery and center.