ABOUT THIS BOOK

Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World examines reportage as an important aesthetic form of cultural production in the Sinophone world. Originating as a proletarian fiction in interwar Europe, reportage spread around the world, coming into its own in the Sinophone world from the 1930s to today. Going beyond fact-based journalism, reportage is pursued through a variety of artistic forms and media, from nonfiction writing to photography to documentary film. Reportage’s plurimedial representations facilitate and amplify intersectional struggles against multiple forms of social and political oppression. Engaging its audiences in affective ethico-political exchanges with (human or nonhuman) subjects, reportage promotes audiences’ empathetic responses to the democratic appeals of marginalized groups whose status, identity, or situation manifest emergent ethical challenges in the society of their time.

This work offers new understandings of reportage’s dialectical relationship with its readership by evoking sympathetic identifications with personal contemplations of place, hearth, and senses of belonging. Covering a breadth of media across mainland China, Taiwan, and the Sinophone diaspora in the United States and Japan, this book examines how intermediality cultivates distinctive expressions in reportage, cross-cultural empathy, and ethico-political relationships between the reporter, photographer, filmmaker, and their surroundings.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Charles A. Laughlin is Ellen Bayard Weedon Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia.
Li Guo is Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Utah State University.

REVIEWS

“Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World challenges the Western-oriented definition of ‘reportage’ as a fixed genre by drawing on diverse literary and artistic materials from the Chinese-speaking world across various moments in Chinese and Sinophone modernity.”— Hang Tu, National University of Singapore

“Situating reportage within its transnational revolutionary history, this anthology reconceives its legacy as an ethico-aesthetic mode of plurimedia and affective engagement. The first in-depth inquiry into reportage across diverse media in the Chinese-speaking world, this pathbreaking book sets a new global benchmark for the study of nonfiction art.”— Lingzhen Wang, Brown University

“Against the post-truth era of fake news and censorship, this provocative volume has rediscovered reportage in its realistic adherence to real people, real events. The contributors have successfully redefined reportage as a critical and aesthetic multimedia practice that penetrates social reality in the Chinese-speaking world.”— Ban Wang, Stanford University

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Ren Jian