CLIC is delighted to welcome prof. Shuangyi Li as the 2025-2026 Lorand Chair Intermediality, and warmly invites you to his inaugural lecture, "Sino-African Transcultural Memory in the 20th & 21st Centuries: Literary Articulation and Visual Mediation of Space in Women Writers’ Works."
- Date: Tuesday 17 March
- Time: 18:00
- Venue: Campus Etterbeek, room I.0.03 (Building i)
Attendance is free, but registration mandatory.
To register, click here.
Abstract:
This lecture will first introduce several Chinese and African women writers’ literary works that engage with the construction of Sino-African cultural relations: Stories of the Sahara (1976) by the Chinese-Taiwanese author Sanmao (1943-1991), Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China (2023) by the British-Nigerian author Noo Saro-Wiwa, 30,000 Miles of Africa (2016) by the Chinese travel writer Shumin Bi, and The Dragonfly Sea (2019) by the Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. These women writers’ understanding, exploration, and negotiation of Sino-African relations revolve around a number of key ‘sites and ties of memory’ (e.g., the sea, the desert, railways), while also reviewing European linguistic and cultural influences and colonial legacies. Common to their storytelling is the deployment and mediation of visual artwork, such as maps, paintings, and photography, to evade and resist dominant political discourses and narratives, as well as to revisit and reconstruct Sino-African cultural memory.
I will then use Owuor’s novel The Dragonfly Sea as an in-depth case study to illustrate the intermedial dynamic between literature and painting. The novel tells the story of the Kenyan female protagonist Ayaana’s ‘return’ journey to China by sea. The Indian Ocean is portrayed as a space of ceaseless human and animal migrations, a network of historical, political, and economic relations, connectivities, and interchanges, which (in)form and (re)shape the basis and framework of what may be described as transcultural memories between and beyond Africa and China. Importantly, the novel engages with the Franco-Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki’s (1920-2013) lyrical abstract paintings. His works draw inspiration from Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Chinese calligraphic lines, and Daoist thought, which points to a visually and artistically mediated encounter, understanding, and cultural memory beyond verbally constructed narratives. Zao’s real-life journey shares Ayaana’s fictional crossing of the Indian Ocean by boat. Zao’s paintings, embodying cross-cultural aesthetics, resonate with Ayaana’s transformative perceptions, experiences, and re-imaginings of the sea and cultural relations. They translate and transform each other in the autobiographical, fictional, and aesthetic making of Sino-African transcultural memories.
Shuangyi Li is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol. He is the author of two monographs: Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (2017, International Comparative Literature Association [ICLA] Anna Balakian Prize 2019) and Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature in a Global Age (shortlisted for R. Gapper Book Prize 2022). Shuangyi received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Lund University in Sweden funded by Swedish Research Council between 2017-2021. He is the co-editor of the book series with Edinburgh University Press, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in World Literature and Intermediality’, and the book review editor of the ICLA’s house journal, Recherche Littéraire / Literary Research.