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In various ways, Chinese diasporic communities seek to connect and re-connect with their "homelands" in literature, film, and visual culture. The essays in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora examine how diasporic bodies and emotions interact with space and place, as well as how theories of affect change our thinking of diaspora. Questions of borders and border-crossing, not to mention the public and private spheres, in diaspora literature and film raise further questions about mapping and spatial representation and the affective and geographical significance of the push-and-pull movement in diasporic communities. The unique experience is represented differently by different authors across texts and media. In an age of globalization, in "the Chinese Century," the spatial representation and cultural experiences of mobility, displacement, settlement, and hybridity become all the more urgent. The essays in this volume respond to this urgency, and they help to frame the study of Chinese diaspora and culture today.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction. Remapping the Homeland.- Chapter 2: The geography helps": Affective Geographies and Maps in Xiaolu Guo's A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.- Chapter 3: From Rust Belt to Belleville: Two Recent Films on Chinese Migrant Sex Workers in Paris.- Chapter 4: Borderscape, Exile, Trafficking: The Geopoetics of Ying Liang's A Family Tour and Bai Xue's The Crossing.- Chapter 5: Displaced Nostalgia and Literary déjà vu: On the Quasi-archaic Style of Li Yongping's Retribution: The Jiling Chronicles.- Chapter 6: Literary Exile in the Third Space: Ha Jin's Critique of Nation-States in The Free Life.- Chapter 7: Remapping New York's Chinatowns in the Works of Eric Liu and Ha Jin.- Chapter 8: The Holy Hole in Chinese Patriarchal Culture: Going Pop and South.- Chapter 9: This Place Which Is Not One: Diaspora, Topophrenia, and the World System.
About the author
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University. His books include
Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination.
Melody Yunzi Li is Assistant Professor in Chinese Studies at University of Houston. Her research interests include Asian diaspora literature, modern Chinese literature and culture, migration studies, and translation studies.
Report
"Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora provides readers with myriad understandings of networks and fragments of places, spaces, languages, and times, to arouse, create, reciprocate, and repress feelings; and to urge scholarship to attend to these emotions." (Yahia Ma, Asian Studies Review, May 8, 2023)
