In Memoriam of Yingjin Zhang

Abstract

Yingjin Zhang’s contributions to Chinese cinema studies, literary studies, urban studies, visual studies, and transmedia studies are manifold and substantial. Fundamentally, when reading his scholarship as a whole, we can discern a strong concern with foregrounding marginal realities and conceptualizing contemporary Chinese cinema and literature as an “oppositional public sphere.” Informed by his theoretical paradigm of polylocality, as well as a de-centered view of the world, Zhang’s scholarship also makes significant interventions in discourses of world literature. Most importantly, Zhang’s conception of Chinese and Sinophone literatures as creative acts of worlding leaves a rich legacy that will inspire future scholars, theorists, and critics in the field of Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies.

Yingjin Zhang 张英进 (1957–2022) was a scholar whose work transcends boundaries and carves new paths for generations of future researchers, students, and critics. He developed novel theoretical paradigms and methodological approaches that fundamentally transformed the interlinked fields of Chinese cinema, comparative literature, and cultural studies. Spanning across film studies, modern Chinese studies, literary studies, urban studies, visual studies, and transmedia studies, his writings engage themes of history and politics, theory and ethics, subjectivity and gender, place and migration, as well as the crucial contextual realities of exhibition and circulation. He leaves behind a legacy that invites all of us to re-examine the polylocal and trans-spatial dynamics of cinema and literature, and to continue building a world history of Chinese-Sinophone literatures.

Throughout his career, Zhang was famous for his intellectual acumen, innovative pedagogy, dedicated mentorship, and generous, collegial spirit. Born and raised in Fujian, China, he began his career at Fujian Normal University where, after receiving his MA in English in 1985, he served as a lecturer in the department of Foreign Languages as well as at the department of Journalism and Communication at Xiamen University. He moved to the United States in 1987, received his MA at the University of Iowa in 1988, and earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at Stanford University in 1992. He then taught at Indiana University in Bloomington, was honored with an Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 1996, and became Associate Professor in 1998, while also receiving numerous teaching excellence recognition awards. He served as the fourth president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL) from 1992 to 1994 and convened the third ACCL conference in 1994 at Princeton University, providing a crucial platform for the exchange of ideas among scholars in Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies. In 2001, he joined the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he would rise to become the Director of the Chinese Studies Program and Distinguished Professor of Chinese Literature and Film, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies. At the time of his untimely passing, Zhang had served as Department Chair for seven years, successfully building many forward-thinking programs to support the comparative, multilingual, interdisciplinary, and multi-media creativity, research, and teaching of the department’s faculty and students.

As his research, teaching, and service to a variety of intersecting fields grew ever more significant and substantial, he became a faculty fellow at the UCSD Center for Humanities, the Taiwan National Science Council, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the East-West Studies Center at Hong Kong Baptist University, and the Asia Research Institute at the University of Singapore. In 2003, he was named a Fulbright Scholar and China Research Fellow at Peking University, and from 2016 until 2022, he served as Chair Professor in the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Chair Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at Tongji University. As many recent touching and emotional tributes attest, Yingjin Zhang is one of the most foundationally important scholars in the field of modern Chinese studies, whose groundbreaking monographs, edited volumes, and scholarly collaborations exert a tremendous influence upon the future direction of research and teaching in Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies at universities in the United States and worldwide.

A De-Centered View of the World: Demythifying Chineseness and the Importance of Marginality

One of the most consequential and enduring objectives of Zhang’s work was his desire to re-envision the field of Chinese comparative literature and cultural studies as a category broad enough to embrace multiple approaches adopted in the field. He sought to create an open intellectual space dissociated from any nationalistic or political implications, and conceived of “Chineseness” as a cultural and historical, rather than ethnic, national, or political reference point.¹ Beginning in the first edited volume of his career—China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature—we observe his call for a Chinese culturalism that transcends geopolitical borders, as well as an awareness of fluid boundaries. Promoting rigorous theoretical investigations and border crossings by Chinese and non-Chinese scholars alike, he goes beyond the traditional hegemony of both Eurocentric and China-centric values and paradigms, and also redirects our attention to non-canonical, unofficial, and historically insignificant texts.² These texts on the margins of literary and cinematic production, he argues, must be subjected to critical scrutiny in order to reveal their crucial links to larger issues in Chinese history and culture, such as canon formation, gender construction, urban experience, colonial situation, postcolonial migration, and the impact of consumer culture.³ What we need, he states, is “a de-centered view of the world” such that we may attend to specific localities and their constantly shifting borders in order to “re-examine the notion of what is marginal.”⁴ This triple concern with transcending the national paradigm, focusing on the marginal, and inviting a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives, informs the entire trajectory of Zhang’s thought, and leads him to “demythify Chineseness as a pre-given, monolithic, and immutable essence.”⁵ Instead, he posits “the national as cinematic projects” (in the plural)⁶ and proposes a comparative framework of Chinese cinema(s) that enables us to trace interactions—and cooperation—between Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong in early cinema, and transnational cinema throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Building on Chris Berry’s work, Zhang proposes a positive view of Chinese cinema and clears the way for “strategic allegiances or permutations by means of boundary-crossings, intra-national, and inter-cultural citations of images, themes, motifs, styles, genres, and other cinematic and cultural conventions” that characterize filmmaking in all three Chinas: PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.⁷ At the same time, he also calls attention to the marginalized people and spaces that are integral components of transnational film productions, yet are rarely present in cinematic analyses. For this reason, he advocates a change in film studies’ methodology and calls for a move away from auteur and movement-based study and toward contextualized, place-based industry research.⁸

Polylocality and Cinema as an Oppositional Public Sphere

In his 2010 pathbreaking book Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, Zhang engages Henri Lefebvre’s conception of “space as a productive process”⁹ and posits space as a dynamic force and discursive mechanism that generates change. Cinema, writes Zhang, belongs to what Lefebvre calls “representational space” (a space dominated by artists and writers that is linked to imagination) because it “has an affective kernel and embraces the loci of passion, of action, and of lived situations.”¹⁰ It also may be “directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic.”¹¹ Zhang connects this idea to Doreen Massey’s model of the relationality and open-endedness of space, as well as the interplay between the “production of space” and the “space of production.”¹² These ideas are important for Zhang because, as he writes, they convinced him to direct attention not just to the dominant or official space, but to an array of dominated yet alternative, interstitial, and contingent spaces that have been opened up or produced by the new spaces of Chinese film production since the early 1990s: underground (dixia 地下), independent (duli 独立), semi-independent, semiofficial, translocal, and transnational forms of cinema.¹³ Zhang furthermore draws on Miriam Bratu Hansen’s theory of early cinema and the public sphere, which shifts the emphasis from the space of film representation (which focuses on close readings of films as works of art) to that of film exhibition and reception (which pertains to lived experiences).¹⁴ Inspired by Hansen, Zhang explores the possibility of a “plebeian,” “proletarian,” or “oppositional” public sphere vis-à-vis the dominant industrial-commercial public sphere that is organized from above by the exclusive standards of high culture or the stereotypes of commodity culture. Zhang’s important critical intervention here is to focus his attention (and ours) on the experiencing subjects themselves, and on their context of living (Lebenszusammenhang).¹⁵ In other words, Zhang identifies here the potential of contemporary Chinese cinema to create an “oppositional public sphere” in the space of exhibition and reception and, especially, the audience’s sensorial, affective experience. This shared intersubjective horizon in collective reception allows filmmakers and audiences to obtain new experiences and generate new meanings “in excess of—if not in opposition to—those intended by the nation state or the market.”¹⁶ Though often marginal, ephemeral, and limited, these new spaces, that are opened up by new modes of filmmaking, provide individuals with a potent means of experiencing, sharing, and enhancing the liberating potential offered by cinema, which may hold the possibility of subverting the “power geometry” of contemporary reality.¹⁷

Zhang links this concern with the liminal, potentially subversive public sphere of film production to polylocality, an important theoretical paradigm that he created. Globalization, notes Zhang, works to polarize society in accordance with differentiated abilities to move through space: “some inhabit the globe, others are chained to place.”¹⁸ Translocality—being identified with more than one locale—implies multiple states of identity and foregrounds the privilege of being able to have access to resources and benefit from new global realities by enjoying “many imaginary homes.”¹⁹ Polylocality differs from translocality in that it recognizes the unevenness and asymmetry that exists in our contemporary moment of circulation, velocity, and flow that is visually reflected in the “non places” of supermodernity. Zhang draws on Manuel Castells’ assertion that “globalization is an era where timeless time exists in tension with chronological time” and “a space of flow exists in tension with a space of places.”²⁰ To restore a balanced view of place and locality in the geography of globalization, Zhang calls for “a global sense of the local, and a global sense of places.”²¹ Similarly, he joins Arif Dirlik in his endeavor to move beyond the hybrid of the global-local (or the glocal) toward a recognition of the primacy of place and its autonomy, what Dirlik terms the “utopian dream of place-based imagination.”²² Like Dirlik, Zhang seeks to prioritize “the voices of the weak who are straining to be heard over the voices of globalization that erase both people and places.”²³

Zhang’s idea of polylocality foregrounds an unswerving concern with the experiential realm of everyday life and the quotidian, an objective he shares with the majority of contemporary Chinese filmmakers, who make it their mission to articulate the voices of the weak. As the body of Zhang’s scholarship shows, he consistently highlights the work of those Chinese filmmakers who trace everyday spatial practices in specific locales with local immediacy and a view that stays close to people’s lived realities. The edited volumes he created in collaboration with his UC San Diego colleague Paul Pickowicz underscore this profound, unwavering desire to reveal Chinese filmmakers’ place-based projects grounded in polylocality that are critical of the trappings of modernity and globalization. In their co-authored books From Underground to Independent (2006) and Filming the Everyday: Documentaries in Twenty-First Century China (2017),²⁴ Pickowicz and Zhang bring together scholars who present new studies of filmmakers and films that highlight individual contingent experience, the ambivalence of public space, and the gradual disappearance of the local. In so doing, they provide an opportunity to rethink the local/global dynamics in contemporary China and prioritize place-based subjectivities and polylocality within the “power-geometry”²⁵ of a rapidly changing society. In another edited volume, New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject, and Place (2015), Zhang and Kuei-fen Chiu take ethics as a central issue in current Chinese documentaries by bringing place and migration into their inquiry, as well as larger considerations of subject, gender, and power.²⁶ Overall, in many of his scholarly projects, Zhang seeks to make his readers aware of the “fragmented, restless nature of modern urban life,”²⁷ and how this experience is reflected in Chinese cinema and literature created on the peripheries of social and cultural power.

Creative Acts of Worlding: Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature

In addition to his strong focus on the powerful potential of new Chinese cinemas, Zhang also contributed in significant ways to discourses of world literature that began to play a prominent role in literary studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. As globalization engendered increasingly transnational flows and reshaped disciplinary boundaries, David Damrosch’s conception of “world literature as a mode of circulation and reading” foregrounded the dynamics of translation as well as the spatial movement of literary works.²⁸ Damrosch’s flexible circulation model allows for a large scale of heterogeneity and multiplicity and emphasizes the worlding power of a literary work in its new language and cultural context.²⁹ The crucial problem that Zhang addresses, particularly in the volume The Making of Sinophone Literatures as World Literature that he co-edited with Kui-fen Chiu in 2022,³⁰ is the inequality between center and periphery in world literature and, particularly, the configuration of Chinese literature as a “small literature” in the world literature space.³¹ Tackling issues of Chineseness head-on, Zhang intentionally chooses the designation “Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as world literature”—rather than “global Chinese literature” or “world literature in Chinese”³²—for several important reasons. First, Zhang indicates that this term refers to those works that are characterized by “cross-linguistic spatial movement, intent on acquiring a new life by claiming the recognition of readers beyond the literary circles of Chinese-speaking communities.”³³ In this way, he shifts attention away from questions of “Chineseness” and instead highlights the circulation, reception, and reinvention of a text’s new life in the host culture. He includes the Sinophone as an analytical cognitive category informed by the critique of Chinese hegemony, but specifically and intentionally includes not only texts on the margins of Chinese culture (as the Sinophone does) but also literary and cinematic texts from within mainland China. He allows space in this definition for many different kinds of Sinophone literatures, and for pre-modern Chinese literary texts. Importantly, he also advocates a “located approach”³⁴ to the practice of Chinese-Sinophone literatures as world literature.

In developing this “located approach,” Zhang is inspired by Damrosch’s insight that “for any given observer, even a genuinely global perspective remains a perspective from somewhere, and global patterns of the circulation of world literature take shape in their local manifestos.”³⁵ Zhang finds the located approach to world literature productive in that it emphasizes “visibility, circulation, worlding, multiculturalism, and scale.”³⁶ Literary scholars, he asserts, are inevitably located vis-à-vis both the created literary worlds they study and the realpolitik of historical and contemporary worlds in which they are implicated.³⁷ Each of us, he emphasizes, has a standpoint, a position, an orientation that is informed by a necessarily partial and particular perspective. Most importantly, throughout his many writings on the subject of world literature, Zhang encourages dialogue and transnational cooperation so as to facilitate the recreation and the life of Chinese and Sinophone texts in translation. In his view, this transcultural flow and re-casting of Chinese texts in other languages increases the potential of Chinese and Sinophone texts “to act as an active power in the making of worlds.”³⁸ Zhang believes that it is in the process of transcultural transformation that writing gains in translation, and that the power of world literature as “world-making and world-opening” increases. In this way, Chinese-Sinophone literatures as world literature may succeed in challenging entrenched parochial Western-centered views of the world. Citing his mentor Dudley Andrew’s spatial metaphor of “an atlas of various maps,”³⁹ Zhang hopes that this conceptual openness and flexibility of Chinese-Sinophone literatures as world literature will lead to a realization that, rather than one single center in the world republic of letters,⁴⁰ there are several overlapping centers.

Zhang’s tireless objective to trace the worlding power of Chinese and Sinophone texts culminated in the publication, in July 2023, of A World History of Chinese Literature. Made possible by the diligent work of Zhang’s family in collaboration with the editors at Routledge, this collection of thirty contributors’ essays maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds, looking both within – at the world of Chinese literature, its history, cultural, local, and regional specificities—and without—at the way Chinese literature has circulated throughout the world.⁴¹ This, Zhang’s last edited volume, traces the re-creation and reception of Chinese and Sinophone literatures in world literature while also showcasing translingual writers and scholars, specific processes of translation and transmediation, as well as Chinese and Sinophone writers’ and filmmakers’ engagement with borders, oceans, and rainforests. Organized into eight parts, the book brings together a broad array of scholars who examine topics such as “worlding Chinese literature across the globe,” “Sinophone worlds of borderlands, urban jungles, and rainforests,” “ecological critique as world literature,” “performance and performativity in modern China,” as well as “new worlds of gender configurations” and transmedia internet fictions. A World History of Chinese Literature is a tremendous achievement that, in the spirit of Zhang’s life-long effort to invite a diversity of perspectives and voices, opens up new possibilities for future reflection, critique, and modes of inquiry.

Remembering Yingjin Zhang’s Legacy and Impact

The sixteen contributors to this commemorative issue in memory of Yingjin Zhang together present valuable glimpses into the breadth and depth of his scholarly and pedagogical enterprises. In keeping with his values of interdisciplinarity, open-endedness, relationality, and multidimensional flows, the scholars assembled here each illuminate a specific aspect of Zhang’s work to create a kaleidoscopic image of a multifaceted, though incomplete, whole. What emerges is not an encyclopedic survey of a monumental body of work, but rather a multitude of distinct moments, which speak of profound appreciation, fellowship, and gratitude to a colleague, mentor, and friend, who left too soon.

In keeping with his values of interdisciplinarity, open-endedness, relationality, and multidimensional flows, the scholars assembled here each illuminate a specific aspect of Zhang’s work to create a kaleidoscopic image of a multifaceted, though incomplete, whole.

The issue opens with a collection of articles by mentors and colleagues, who were part of Zhang’s life and career since the 1980’s. Dudley Andrew, who was Zhang’s first mentor in the United States, opens this issue by presenting a personal sketch of Zhang’s career, from his arrival in the United States to his apogee as head of the department of Literature at University of California, San Diego. In his article titled “Yingin Zhang, Incomparable Comparatist,” Andrew traces Zhang’s work as an encyclopedist of all types of Chinese cinema, and also focuses on Zhang’s perceptive study of Eileen Chang’s screenplays. Andrew points out that, like Zhang, Eileen Chang always remained “in between” countries, languages, and genres, and highlights Zhang’s deep awareness of the equivocal quality of her work.

In the second article included here, titled “Trailblazing Scholar, Brilliant Critic: In Memory of Yingjin Zhang,” Sheldon Lu presents an assessment of and tribute to Zhang’s contributions and impact on the fields of modern Chinese literature, comparative literature, urban studies, and media studies. Lu foregrounds Zhang’s brave, open-minded, self-reflexive spirit that was characteristic of his scholarship as a whole. He particularly emphasizes Zhang’s work as a theorist, who re-thought the theoretical parameters and critical tools of several disciplines.

In his contribution titled “Through a Glass, Globally: World Literature According to Yingjin Zhang,” Ban Wang traces Zhang’s biographical and career trajectory and focuses especially on the newly published volume A World History of Chinese Literature, which reveals that, as Wang writes, “Chinese literature always had worldly aspirations and transethnic components.” He also foregrounds Zhang’s thought-provoking definition of “Chinese literature as practice”⁴² and advocates the importance of an ecologically critical reading of world literature.

In “A Special Colleague: Teaming up with Yingjin Zhang,” Paul Pickowicz, Zhang’s long-time colleague, describes their fruitful scholarly collaboration over many years, which led to the publication of several edited volumes. By describing the processes, decisions, and resources that enabled their endeavors, Pickowicz allows us to gain insight into the organizational strategy and method the two authors employed to bring together scholars of Chinese cinema so as to highlight new underground and documentary filmmaking in China.

In the second section, titled “Worlds of Literature and Cinema,” Carlos Rojas considers the first and final volumes of Zhang’s career in a comparative perspective, examining some of the key concerns between Chinese and world literature that preoccupied Zhang throughout his career. Rojas stresses Zhang’s understanding of Chinese and world literature not as discrete concepts or categories, but rather as dynamic practices, which allow them to consistently exceed and transcend political or institutional limitations.

Yiwen Wang, in her essay titled “Topographical Historiography: Yingjin Zhang’s Methodological Intervention in Chinese Cultural History,” argues that Zhang’s topographical mapping constructs a historiographical network that includes temporal phases, locational nodes, and transmedia synergies. She shows that this innovative methodological approach enables a spectator to “see the forest through the trees” and guides readers through the labyrinthine forest of Chinese cultural history without oversimplifying its complexity.

In her article titled “Mapping Chinese Science Fiction and Science Writing as World Literature: A Discussion of Methodology” Dingding Wang foregrounds Zhang’s located approach to reading Chinese-Sinophone literatures as world literature. She delineates how Zhang insisted on challenging the Euro- and North American–centric mapping of world literature by tracing science fiction’s world-building, world-traveling, and world-engaging strategies.

In her essay “Mapping China in World Cinema,” Angie Chau pays tribute to Zhang’s transformative contributions as a teacher of Chinese cinema. By asking key questions, such as “Who speaks for Chinese cinema in the West? To whom do they speak? About what subjects? In whose name or what name? And to what effect?,” Chau illustrates Zhang’s commitment to cross-cultural dynamics as well as his creative and effective pedagogical practices.

In the third section, titled “Methodologies and Paradigms,” Charles Laughlin’s essay, “Engaged Realism: Rereading Yingjin Zhang on Reportage and Documentary Film,” examines Yingjin Zhang’s scholarly commentary on the practice of nonfictional artistic creation under the names of reportage (baogao wenxue 报告文学) and (independent) documentary film (duli jilupian 独立纪录片). Laughlin’s study shows that Zhang identifies fundamental kinships between reportage and documentary and shows that nonfiction texts and images play an important role in the formation and development of modern Chinese culture.

In “Illuminating the Screen: Yingjin Zhang’s Impact on Chinese Cinema through Star and Performance Studies,” Pai Wang draws our attention to Zhang’s significant contributions to Chinese star and performance studies. Wang describes the fundamental theoretical frameworks Zhang adopts and highlights Zhang’s engagement with the concept of “betweenness,” a core theme in performance studies.

In her essay titled “Thinking with Yingjin Zhang,” Liang Luo illuminates Zhang’s contributions to our understanding of contemporary Chinese independent documentary, as well as Taiyu films from 1960s Taiwan. Tracing the impact of Zhang’s work on her own research, particularly her exploration of Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens’s interwar international avant-garde cinema, she foregrounds Zhang’s concern with playfulness in Chinese cultural production, as well as the intersection of politics and poetics.

Daisuke Miyao, in his article “Translocality and Polylocality in Ozu’s Late Spring and Hou’s Good Men, Good Women: A Belated Tribute to Yingjin Zhang,” traces Zhang’s comparative, multidirectional approach to film studies that simultaneously looks outwards, inwards, backwards, and sideways. Discussing Ozu Yasujiro’s Late Spring and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Good Men, Good Women in comparative perspective, he proposes his concept of translocal imagination, which is linked to Zhang’s notion of polylocality.

The final section, titled “Politics of the City Space,” opens with Ping Zhu’s article “Flânerie as a Critical Metaphor,” in which she highlights Zhang’s deep fascination with the concept of flânerie and walking in the city as a process of creating intersubjective aesthetic experience and modern knowledge. Zhu’s article highlights Zhang’s concern with “ephemeral zones of individual, everyday, and local perceptions,” which he believed were an integral aspect of comparative film studies.

In her article “In Search of Hospitality: Spaces of Affect and Yingjin Zhang’s Legacy in Urban Humanities,” Xiaojiao Wang revisits Zhang’s writings on spaces and explores the kaleidoscopic imaginary he created to analyze spaces in literature and film. She argues that, through his generous interpretation of marginalized spaces and his astute perception of affect in spatial movements and transformations, Zhang offers us a glimpse into how we approach the concept of hospitality, as well images of strangers, outsiders, the “homeless,” and “guests.”

Christopher Lupke, in his essay “Revisiting the Imagined Spaces of Shanghai with Yingjin Zhang,” revisits Zhang’s first book, The City in Modern Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (1996). In particular, he highlights Zhang’s chapter on women writers, who depict their experiences in the urban environs of Beijing and Shanghai. Lupke’s study underscores the important contributions Zhang made to Chinese gender studies and the study of women’s subjectivities.

Finally, in “Reconfigurations of Modernity: Yingjin Zhang’s Quest for an Urban Enlightenment,” Yomi Braester concludes this special commemorative issue by recalling Zhang’s focus on urban life in city spaces. He shows that Zhang’s first book continues to be relevant and important because it recognizes the potential of cities to establish a Chinese modernity that would serve as an alternative to nationalist discourse, while also offering a humanist approach.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Géraldine Fiss

Géraldine Fiss is Associate Teaching Professor in Inter-Asia and Transpacific Studies at the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches modern Chinese literature, film, intellectual history, and aesthetics. Her research focuses on Chinese literary and cinematic modernisms; Chinese-German literary, poetic, and cinematic encounters; Chinese women’s literature and film; and Chinese ecocritical discourses. In her current work, she examines modern and contemporary Chinese poetry and cinema, and the trans-cultural influences that inform these literary and visual modes.

Notes

1 Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 5.

2 Ibid., 9.

3 Ibid., 16.

4 Ibid., 16.

5 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (Routledge, 2004), 5.

6 Ibid., 6.

7 Ibid., 7.

8 Yingjin Zhang, ed., China in a Polycentric World, 23. Zhang notes that industry research as well as careful, interview-based audience studies would be important methodologies to employ in film studies, but that the field is unprepared to undertake these kinds of contextual studies that go beyond analyzing the aesthetic elements within films and cinematic strategies used by filmmakers.

9 Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 2.

10 Ibid., 2.

11 Ibid.

12 Doreen Massey’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 3.

13 Ibid., 3.

14 Miriam Bratu Hansen’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 3.

15 Ibid., 3.

16 Ibid., 4.

17 Ibid., 5.

18 Ibid., 5.

19 Stuart Hall’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 8.

20 Manuel Castell’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 5.

21 Doreen Massey’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 6.

22 Arif Dirlik’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 6.

23 Arif Dilik’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 6.

24 Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds., From Underground to Independent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Filming the Everyday: Documentaries in Twenty-First Century China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

25 Zhang frequently mentions the notion of “power geometry” throughout Cinema, Space, and Polylocality.

26 Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds. New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject, and Place (Routledge, 2015).

27 Rickett’s idea in Paul Pickowicz, Kui-yi Shen, and Yingjin Zhang, eds., Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926–1945, 2.

28 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

29 Damrosch indicates “works that are actively present in a literary system beyond that of its original culture” in David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, quoted in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 10.

30 Kui-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds. The Making of Sinophone Literatures as World Literature (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022).

31 Pascale Casanova’s idea in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 6.

32 Zhang is referring to David Wang and Jing Tsu’s term “global Chinese literature” and the older term used by Chinese scholars, “world literature in Chinese.” Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 12.

33 Zhang, The Making of Sinophone Literatures.

34 Yingjin Zhang, “Locations of China in World Literature and World Cinema” in The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, edited by Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022), 40.

35 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, 27, in Zhang, “Locations of China,” 40.

36 Zhang, “Locations of China,” 41.

37 Ibid., 42.

38 Pheng Cheah, 2, in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality, 11.

39 Dudley Andrew in Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality.

40 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, translated by Malcolm de Bevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

41 Yingin Zhang, ed. A World History of Chinese Literature (Routledge, 2023).

42 Ibid.