Through a Glass, Globally

Abstract

Yingjin Zhang was a quiet and deep-thinking scholar in graduate school. He had the foresight to focus on film studies as the new frontier of scholarship, leaving a rich legacy for us. His recent work on world literature articulates the agency and activity of Chinese writing from different locals and contexts, as these intervene with, critique, and alter the established and Eurocentric world of letters. Chinese literature’s remaking of the world has engaged in contending with the existing world with imagination and creativity.

Notes

1 Yingjin Zhang, ed. A World History of Chinese Literature (London: Routledge, 2023), 5.

2 Ibid.

3 Robert Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 33.

4 Zhang, A World History, 8.

5 Ibid., 4.

6 Ibid., 5.

7 Ibid.

8 Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, eds., The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022), 9.

9 Xiaotong Fei, 费孝通, ed. Ethnic Multiplicity in China’s National Unity (Zhonghua minzu de duoyuan yiti geju中华民族的多元一体格局) (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu xueyuan, 1989), 1.

10 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 4.

11 Timothy Clark, Literature and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ban Wang

Ban Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Sublime Figure of History (Stanford University Press, 1997), Illuminations from the Past (Stanford University Press, 2004), History and Memory (Lishi yu jiyi 歷史與記憶) (Oxford University Press, 2004), China in the World (Duke University Press, 2022), and At Home in Nature (Duke University Press, 2023). He has edited and co-edited eight books, including Chinese Visions of World Order (Duke University Press, 2017), Words and Their Stories (Brill, 2011), and Trauma and Cinema (Hong Kong University Press, 2004). He has taught at SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard University, Rutgers University, Zurich University, Seoul National University, and Yonsei University.