Over the past twenty years, Chinese novelist Yan Lianke has emerged as one of the most important writers in the world. In Discovering Fiction, Yan offers insights into his views on literature and realism, the major works that inspired him, and his theories of writing. He juxtaposes discussions of the high realism of Leo Tolstoy and Lu Xun against Franz Kafka’s modernism and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism, charting the relationship between causality, truth, and modes of realism. He also discusses his approach to realism, which he terms “mythorealism”—a way of capturing the world’s underlying truth by relying on the allegories, myths, legends, and dreamscapes that emerge from daily life. Revealing and instructive, Discovering Fiction gives readers an unprecedented look into the mind and art of a literary giant.

Carlos Rojas presents a sweeping survey of the historical and political significance of one of the world’s most recognizable monuments. Although the splendor of the Great Wall has become virtually synonymous with its vast size, the structure’s conceptual coherence is actually grounded on the tenuous and ephemeral stories we tell about it. These stories give life to the Wall and help secure its hold on our collective imagination, while at the same time permitting it to constantly reinvent itself in accordance with the needs of each new era.

Through an examination of allusions to the Wall in an eclectic array of texts—ranging from official dynastic histories, elite poetry, and popular folktales, to contemporary tourist testimonials, children’s songs, and avant-garde performance art—this study maps out a provocative new framework for understanding the structure’s function and significance.

This volume approaches the Wall through the stories we tell and contends that it is precisely in this cultural history that we may find the Wall’s true meaning, together with the secret of its greatness.

The collapse of China’s Qing dynasty coincided roughly with discoveries that helped revolutionize views of infectious disease. Together, these parallel developments generated a set of paradigm shifts in the understanding of society, the individual, as well as the cultural matrix that mediates between them. In Homesickness, Carlos Rojas examines an array of Chinese literary and cinematic tropes of illness, arguing that these works approach sickness not solely as a symptom of dysfunction but more importantly as a key to its potential solution.

Rojas focuses on a condition he calls “homesickness”—referring to a discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by an excessive proximity to it. The product of a dialectics of internal alienation and self-differentiation, this inverse homesickness marks a movement away from the “home,” conceived as spaces associated with the nation, the family, and the individual body. The result is a productive dynamism that gives rise to the possibility of long-term health. Without sickness, in other words, there could be no health.

Through a set of detailed analyses of works from China, Greater China, and the global Chinese diaspora—ranging from late-imperial figures such as Liu E and Zeng Pu to contemporary figures such as Yan Lianke and Tsai Ming-liang—Rojas asserts that the very possibility of health is predicated on this condition of homesickness.

In 1960, Japanese scholar of Chinese literature Takeuchi Yoshimi gave a pair of lectures titled “Asia as Method,” in which he considered how one might engage with Western theory from an East Asian perspective. Since then, it has been fashionable to use the “X as method” formulation to take what might have otherwise been an object of analysis and use it to elaborate an innovative methodology. Drawing inspiration from the numerous recent books and articles built around that formulation, contributors to this issue propose breaking the linkage between methodologies and objects or phenomena that inspired them and then applying them to a broader array of topics. Essays address the meanings that get left out in the process of translation, artistic representations of garbage, indigenous eco-fiction from Inner Mongolia, the role of cannibalism in a popular Hong Kong television series, and the implications of Taiwan legalizing same-sex marriage. The issue focuses on topics related to China in hopes of reassessing the assumptions that have come to define the concept of "China" and its relationship to the West.

Contributors. Yomi Braester, Hsiao-hung Chang, Margaret Hillenbrand, Chun-kit Ko, Belinda Kong, Petrus Liu, Laikwan Pang, Christopher Rea, Carlos Rojas, Shuang Shen, Robin Visser, Lorraine Wong

This is a study of visuality in early modern and modern China. Its focus, however, is not so much on imagery per se but rather on how vision itself has been conceived, imagined, and deployed in a variety of discursive contexts. Of particular interest is how these discourses of vision have been used to articulate issues of gender and desire, and specifically processes of gendered subject formation. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—ranging from the canonical to the popular to the esoteric—the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively. At the same time, however, it argues that those historical periodizations themselves do not reflect a smooth, unidirectional temporal movement; rather, they are the result of a complex process of retrospection and anticipatory projection. The goal of this volume is to use a focus on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity.

The contributors to New World Orderings demonstrate that China’s twenty-first-century rise occurs not only through economics and state politics but equally through the mutual entanglements of overlapping social, economic, and cultural worlds in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They show how the Chinese state has sought to reconfigure the nation’s position in the world and the centrality of trade, labor, religion, migration, gender, race, and literature to this reconfiguration. Among other topics, the contributors examine China’s post-Bandung cultural diplomacy with African nations, how West African “pastor-entrepreneurs” in China interpreted and preached the prosperity doctrine, the diversity of Chinese-Argentine social relations in the soy supply chain, and the ties between China and India within the complex history of inter-Asian exchange and Chinese migration to Southeast Asia. By examining China’s long historical relationship with the Global South, this volume presents a non-state-centric history of China that foregrounds the importance of transnational communicative and imaginative worldmaking processes and interactions.

Contributors. Andrea Bachner, Luciano Damián Bolinaga, Nellie Chu, Rachel Cypher, Mingwei Huang, T. Tu Huynh, Yu-lin Lee, Ng Kim Chew, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Shuang Shen, Derek Sheridan, Nicolai Volland

Yan Lianke is a world-renowned author of novels, short stories, and essays whose provocative and nuanced writing explores the reality of everyday life in contemporary China. In Sound and Silence, Yan compares his literary project to a blind man carrying a flashlight whose role is to help others perceive the darkness that surrounds them. Often described as China’s most censored author, Yan reflects candidly on literary censorship in contemporary China. He outlines the Chinese state’s project of national amnesia that suppresses memories of past crises and social traumas. Although being banned in China is often a selling point in foreign markets, Yan argues that there is no requisite correlation between censorship and literary quality. Among other topics, Yan also examines the impact of American literature on Chinese literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Encapsulating his perspectives on life, writing, and literary history, Sound and Silence includes an introduction by translator Carlos Rojas and an afterword by Yan.