Goethe-Fellows

Zhiyi Yang

Professor of Sinology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

2021–2025 (Goethe Fellow)

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»Sinophone Classicism. Contested Memory and Multifaced Chineseness in a Global Space«

Project outline:

In recent years, in the global Sinophone space, literary and cultural products that evoke classical Chinese aesthetic traditions are gaining popularity. This project proposes to critically explore how Sinophone writers and artists negotiate their vernacular identities with China’s cultural memories and global cultural markets. I argue that, while some of these practices ally with the Han-ethnocultural nationalism embedded in the soft power initiative of the Chinese state, many reflect active local agency in constructing relational identifications by diverse communities whose experience with modernity was non-linear or shaped by colonial legacies. The project aims to rethink the role that native traditions, in the form of evoked cultural memories, play in Chinese modernity, to study the transformation of textual, visual, and sonic memories of Chineseness across the media milieu, and to examine the production, dissemination, and consumption of aesthetic classicism across geopolitical spaces. It will also help create a cross-cultural and comparative study of global classicisms. (Zhiyi Yang)

Scholarly profile of Zhiyi Yang

Zhiyi Yang has been a professor of sinology at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main since 2012. She studied Chinese literature, history, philosophy, and comparative literature at Peking University. In 2012 she received a PhD in East Asian studies from Princeton University. 2019/20 she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her research and publications have focused on classical (and modern classicist) Chinese poetry and its relation to society, politics, and intellectual history. She has published her first book on the 11th century poet Su Shi and has recently completed a monographic manuscript on Wang Jingwei, an early 20th century politician and poet who gained the unfortunate distinction as the chief Chinese collaborator with Japan in WWII. She is currently working on contemporary Chinese classicist internet poetry and on aesthetic classicism across the Sinophone space.

Website:
Please find more information about Zhiyi Yang here.

Main areas of research:

Classical and modern Chinese literature and poetry; aesthetics and philosophy; Republican Chinese history; memory culture

Selected publications:

Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China’s Wartime Collaboration (forthcoming)
»An Alternative Lyric Modernity? Modern Classicism and Zhou Zuoren’s Wartime Doggerels«, in: Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 142 (2) (2022) (forthcoming).
(ed. with Jeremy Taylor), Elite Accommodation, Collaboration and Cultural Production in Japanese-Occupied China. Special issue of European Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 19 (2) (December 2020).
»The Memory of an Assassin and Problems of Legitimacy in the Wang Jingwei Regime (1940–1945)«, in: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 80 (1) (2020), p. 37–83.
»Site: The Impossibility of Remembering the Past at Nanjing«,in: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), vol. 32 (1) (2020), p. 233–278.
Dialectics of Spontaneity. The Aesthetics and Ethics of Su Shi (1037–1101), Leiden: Brill 2015.

Zhiyi Yang

Scholarly profile of Zhiyi Yang

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