Speaker: Prof. Chih-ming Wang 王智明, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

Abstract

This talk features the theme of return in Chinese diasporic narratives since the late 1970s when China began its post-socialist transformation. Ranging from films, autobiographies, and fictions written by diasporic Chinese authors, including Peter Wang’s 1986 film A Great Wall, Maxine Hong Kingston’s 2011 memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and Gish Jen’s 2022 collection of stories Thank You, Mr. Nixon, among others, these narratives present and embody a complex structure of feeling about the opening of China, about being Chinese overseas in the era of China’s rise, and about diverse and sometimes conflicting aspirations for and experiences of returning to China. Against the campaign to tell the China Story well, these stories of diasporic returning--with an emphasis on the problematic of trans/national relations--offer a different approach to the discussion of Global China by shedding new light on how the China Dream is understood beyond China.

Bio

Chih-ming Wang is research fellow and deputy director at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, and the Chair of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society (2023-2027). He is the author of Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013) and Rearticulation: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan (Linking, 2021; in Chinese). He co-edited a special issue with Yu-Fang Cho for American Quarterly on “The Chinese Factor: Reorienting Global Imaginaries in American Studies” (June 2017) and with Daniel Goh on Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017). He is currently working on two projects: one on Asian American return stories and post/cold war entanglements and the other on the idea of extraterritory and the history of US imperialism in Taiwan.