Chang Xu (She/her) is a PhD student in History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester. She gained an MA in Film Studies with Media Studies at the University of Leicester and an MSc in Film Curation at the University of Glasgow. Her current research project is about the Chinese American female filmmakers’ contribution to representing Chinese Americans in American cinema.
'Constructing Modern China through Chinese American Travelogue Fictions'
In American cinema history, China is often portrayed as the other exotic, heterotypic place for American audiences, such as Chinatown. Chinatown often represents China in an old-fashioned way while ignoring the modern development of China and Chinese culture. This paper uses textual analysis to investigate how more contemporary Chinese American travelogue fictional films Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019) and Emily Ting’s Go Back to China (2019) construct modern China through filming location choices, dining customs, rituals, and multilingualism. Indeed, travelling to China offers an opportunity to experience the country first-hand and understand its culture better. These films create a space Homi Bhabha introduced as the “Third Space”, a place that, with its hybridity, liminality, and ambivalence, is unique in providing a platform for multicultural communication. The spatial transition from America to China, therefore, allows Chinese Americans to step outside their recollection and see their heritage in a timelier light.
Keywords: Diaspora, liminality, cultural representation, film.
Carinya Sharples is a PhD student in English Studies and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Leicester, exploring creative (re)presentations of mixedness in contemporary Guyanese literature and the Caribbean more widely. In 2020, she co-edited and published Inspire: Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing while completing an MA in Creative Writing and Education at Goldsmiths. Her fiction and journalism have been published by Adda Stories, The London Reader, BBC World Service, The Guardian, Gal-Dem, among others. She has led creative-writing workshops for London Libraries, Poetry vs Colonialism, schools and charities, as well as mixed-race magazine Middleground. She previously lectured in the Centre for Communication Studies at the University of Guyana, and has led sessions in decolonising creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.
'Writing Self: How Mixed-Race Writers Find Belonging on the Page'
In this paper I will examine re/presentations of ‘mixedness’ in contemporary British and Caribbean literature. I will argue that the page represents a necessary space for writers of mixed heritage or ethnicity to gather and explore all aspects of their identity. Often people of mixed heritage are asked to explain themselves through rigid racial accounting, which was developed and spread during European colonisation, or they are forced to ‘choose a side’. I will draw on my experience of running creative-writing workshops for writers of mixed heritage, as well as examples from contemporary authors from the UK, Caribbean and US – such as Zadie Smith, Tessa McWatt, Dean Atta, Danzy Senna, and Bernardine Evaristo – to show how creative writing is being used to challenge fixed, essentialist notions of race; to explore what Homi Bhabha called the ‘third space’; and to demonstrate how mixedness itself is a source of creative propulsion.
Keywords: Liminality, mixedness, creativity, self-writing, essentialism and diversity.
David George Lyons is a PhD candidate currently studying at the University of Bologna, in the department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (LILEC). The general topic of his research project is female travel literature in the Grand Tour. Specific focus is being placed on the philological link between travel literature and artistic productions. In a broader sense, the project represents an opportunity to analyse the Tour as a vehicle of cultural heritage.
'Painting with Words: Ekphrastic Reluctance in Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826)'
Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée represents an unusual and fairly understudied travel diary that inhabits several converging literary genres. Within the context of the Grand Tour, which saw its literary peak and vogue for diaries in the previous century, Jameson’s work stands as a fairly late example of travel writing from the perspective of a non-aristocratic, middle-class governess. This paper focusses on Jameson’s self-reflexive analyses of artwork through Italy. Namely, Jameson’s inability to depict her visual experiences in a written form produces literary synaesthesia, an intangible blend of the senses. Methodologically, this paper examines the visual grammar that informed Jameson’s uneasiness with extricating the ekphrastic “speaking” power of art. Jameson doubted the rhetorical effectiveness of those written accompaniments (usually poems) to describe, or perhaps enhance, specific artwork. Additionally, the Diary is viewed through the lens of gender criticism, the playful duality of the author-heroine narrator, and Jameson’s authorial preoccupations. The paper concludes by emphasising that Jameson’s reluctance to describe and praise Italian artwork is based on the properness of Protestant constraint and her opposition to the exhaustive treatments of her male contemporaries, instead, favouring the ‘sentimental’ approach of Sterne (1768), namely a personal and emotional reflection on travelling.
Keywords: Grand Tour, ekphrasis, synaesthesia, travel literature, feminism, religion.