Zhiyi Yang

Aufenthalt

2021–2025 (Goethe-Fellow)

Forschungsthema

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

Projektbeschreibung

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.

Wissenschaftliches Profil

Zhiyi Yang ist seit 2012 Professorin für Sinologie an der Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. Nach dem Studium der chinesischen Literatur, Geschichte und Philosophie an der Peking University hat sie 2012 am Institut für Ostasienstudien der Princeton University promoviert. 2019/20 war sie Fellow am Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In ihren jüngsten Forschungen und Publikationen hat sie sich mit der chinesischen Dichtung und Kunst des Mittelalters, insbesondere mit dem Werk von Su Shi, beschäftigt sowie mit dem Leben und Werk von Wang Jingwei, einem politisch aktiven Dichter des angehenden 20. Jahrhunderts.

Veröffentlichungen (Auswahl)

• Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China’s Wartime Collaboration, Michigan: University of Michigan Press 2023.
• »An Alternative Lyric Modernity? Modern Classicism and Zhou Zuoren’s Wartime Doggerels«, in: Journal of the American Oriental Society 142, 2 (2022).
• (Hg. mit Jeremy Taylor), Elite Accommodation, Collaboration and Cultural Production in Japanese-Occupied China. Sonderausgabe des European Journal of East Asian Studies 19, 2 (2020).
• »The Memory of an Assassin and Problems of Legitimacy in the Wang Jingwei Regime (1940–1945)«, in: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 80, 1 (2020), S. 37–83.
• »Site: The Impossibility of Remembering the Past at Nanjing«, in: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) 32, 1 (2020), S. 233–278.
• Dialectics of Spontaneity. The Aesthetics and Ethics of Su Shi (1037–1101), Leiden: Brill 2015.