A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.
My dissertation on Chinese writers and artists that traveled abroad to Paris from the 1920s to 1940s discusses several intersections between modern Chinese literature and visual art and consists of five chapters. The first chapter, an introduction, provides historical background and contextualization of the study abroad movement in China and the significance of dreaming in literature, as well as a comparison of travel writing in the Western and Chinese traditions. The four subsequent chapters focus on the bilingual, experimental verse of modernist poet Li Jinfa; Chang Yu's nude and chrysanthemum oil paintings; Fu Lei's travel writing and art criticism; and humorous travel sketches by the fiction writer Xu Xu. Throughout my dissertation, I argue that these four young men were shaped by their travels to France in the first half of the 20th century. Faced with a French culture in decline, these travelers detached themselves in varying degrees from the mainstream ideology of political revolution and the discourse of national salvation during the Republican era. They chose instead to retreat to alternative spaces of the imagination, dreams, and classical aesthetics, and as a result were marginalized by the national canons of literature and art history. I read the motif of dream in their work, as a symbol of their political detachment, nostalgia for home, and disillusionment with Western modernity. My project is in dialogue with current scholarship in modern Chinese studies, comparative literature, world literature, and diaspora studies. Paris, long a site in the modern Chinese cultural imaginary, incited equal feelings of hope and disillusionment in Chinese youth. These diverse views of home, travel, and detachment can help us consider questions about the role of translation and the circulation of bodies and literature during this early moment of encountering modernity, when artists and writers were forced to negotiate their national identity in the increasingly divided political sphere from a place distinctly outside of China. This earlier period also informs the contemporary era of globalization and transnationalism, in which China plays a new role as a global economic power, and questions about translation continue to persist.
A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.
Vietnam annually sends a half million laborers to work at low-skill jobs abroad. Angie Ngọc Trần concentrates on ethnicity, class, and gender to examine how migrant workers belonging to the Kinh, Hoa, Hrê, Khmer, and Chãm ethnic groups challenge a transnational process that coerces and exploits them. Focusing on migrant laborers working in Malaysia, Trần looks at how they carve out a third space that allows them a socially accepted means of resistance to survive and even thrive at times. She also shows how the Vietnamese state uses Malaysia as a place to send poor workers, especially from ethnic minorities; how it manipulates its rural poor into accepting work in Malaysia; and the ways in which both countries benefit from the arrangement. A rare study of labor migration in the Global South, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment answers essential questions about why nations export and import migrant workers and how the workers protect themselves not only within the system, but by circumventing it altogether.
From Goa's magnificent beaches and waterfalls to the elegant Indo-Portuguese architecture, this guide explores all the best places to go as well as providing advice on what to do, where to eat and drink and a section of invaluable travel tips.
Kate isn't expecting to be swept off her feet by the strangely familiar green-eyed Scot; she's come to escape her philandering finance and the hectic Philadelphia ER in which she works. But she's a sucker for a man in a ki
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