Yanrong Wang

My name is Yanrong Wang, and I have joined the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies and the Centre of Literary and Intermedial Crossings in September 2022 as a PhD fellow. I obtained an MA in English Language and Literature in 2022 from Hainan University.

My doctoral research at VUB is fully funded by the CSC and reflects my interest in postcolonial settler literatures as well as in questions of gender, race and ethnicity. It is entitled “Towards Hybridization: Postcolonial and Diasporic Identities in Black Canadian Literature (1997-2020)” (supervisor: Janine Hauthal) and focusses on contemporary black Canadian writing by, e.g., George Elliott Clarke, Tessa McWatt, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Esi Edugyan, Andre Alexis and Wayde Compton. Adopting a postcolonial (narratological) approach, I will investigate how the (changing) representation of Black identities is bound up with narration and literary form and how it developed in African Canadian literature since the 1990s. In so doing, my project aims to explore the critical and imaginative potential of literary “ways of world making” (Nelson Goodman) in shaping African Canadian identities as well as transcultural encounters between Canada’s various ethnic groups (i.e., of African Canadians and white settlers, the indigenous population, other ethnic (migrant) groups).