Contemporary China Centre University of Westminster
2014 Autumn Semester Seminars

Please note that non-University of Westminster attendees for any of the following seminars should register with Helena Scott at [log in to unmask]
 
Dr Joanne Smith Finley 
‘Controlling Terra Nullius: Truth and Consequences of the 'National Partner Assistance Programme' in Xinjiang, China.’
Wed 29 Oct  |  Westminster Forum, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  5-7pm

Following the 2009 riots in Xinjiang, senior leaders met in Beijing in March 2010 to call for an East-West collaboration in which richer provinces and municipalities would act as donors and investors in a scheme to build Xinjiang into a ‘moderately well-off society’. A similar drive was announced in Tibetan regions, suggesting that Chinese leaders continue to believe that developing the economies of restive peripheral regions will quell ethnic instability. The ‘national partner assistance programme’, involving 19 provinces and municipalities in China proper, is expected to provide financial support, training and education to Xinjiang’s least developed southern oases, where the majority population is Uyghur. Yet most of these initiatives are perceived as intended to benefit Han migrants, who are increasingly encouraged to escape to Xinjiang’s beautiful landscapes from China’s over-populated East. Local Uyghurs claim the programme has done little to assist people in Xinjiang, but rather speeds the process of ‘giving away what belongs to us’. In this talk, Dr Smith Finley examines the stated aims of the ‘national partner assistance programme’ (development; redistribution of wealth), outlines possible truths behind the policy, and predicts its likely consequences.

Joanne Smith Finley is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University. Her research interests include the formation, transformation, hybridisation and globalisation of identities among the Uyghurs of contemporary Xinjiang, China; strategies of symbolic resistance among the Uyghurs; alternative representations in Uyghur popular song and popular culture; the ethno-politics of the hostess industry in Xinjiang; and changing gender norms among Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang and in the diaspora. She has published a range of journal articles and book chapters on these topics, and her monograph The Art of Symbolic Resistance: Uyghur Identities and Uyghur-Han Relations in Contemporary Xinjiang (Brill Academic Publishing) was published in 2013. This is an ethnographic study of evolving Uyghur identities and ethnic relations over a period of 20 years (from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union through the 1997 Ghulja disturbances and the 2009 Ürümchi riots to the present). Dr Smith Finley is also co-editor of two edited volumes: Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia (Ashgate, 2007) and Language, Education and Uyghur Identity in Urban Xinjiang (Routledge, forthcoming in 2015). 

Dr Heather Inwood
‘Contemporary Chinese Literature as Participatory Culture: Viral Verse and Transmedia Worlds’
Wed 12 Nov  |  Westminster Forum, 32/38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  6-8pm

This talk explores the digital transformation of literary practices underway in China by focusing on case studies from contemporary Chinese poetry and popular fiction. Since the 1990s, the rapid growth of the Chinese internet has helped make literature the tenth most popular online activity, ushering in an age of mass participation in the creation and evaluation of literature. The Chinese internet is home to huge volumes of what would traditionally be considered amateur literary texts, but that command public attention on an unprecedented scale and serve as a source of accolades, entertainment and revenue. Increasingly, the success of literary works is decided less by questions of intrinsic “quality” than by the ease with which they spread from one media site to another, attracting new consumers and layers of meaning in the process. This talk considers the implications of participatory literary production for the definition and status of Chinese literature and proposes that literature be reconfigured as a transmedia cultural form, encompassing not just written texts but all manner of media adaptations, variations, and the imaginative worlds and social practices that surround them.

Heather Inwood is Lecturer in Chinese Cultural Studies and Undergraduate Programme Director for Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. She received her PhD in modern Chinese literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2008 and was Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University between 2008 and 2013. Her research interests span the fields of Chinese literature, media and popular culture, with a particular focus on interactions between contemporary literature and digital media technologies. Her book, Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes, explores the fate of modern Chinese poetry an age of the internet and consumer culture and was published by the University of Washington Press in 2014.

Guo Xiaolu
‘Beyond Identities – Artists as Avatars of Narrative Force’
Wed 26 Nov  |  Westminster Forum, 32/38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  5-7pm

Xiaolu Guo is a British/Chinese novelist, essayist, filmmaker and poet. As one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, Xiaolu has published several novels and short story collections by Random House UK/USA. Her novel A Concise Chinese English Dictionary For Lovers was translated into 28 languages and was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007. UFO In Her Eyes, a study of totalitarianism in a semi-real Chinese village, has been translated into 8 languages and made into an award winning feature film. Village of Stone was a finalist for the Dublin Impact Literary Award and The Independent Foreign Prize. Her most recent novel I Am China, influenced by Calvino and Kundera’s work, is a multi-layered exploration of the artist’s role in a politicized world. 
	She has also directed a number of feature films and documentary essays. Her first feature, How Is Your Fish Today, a hybrid of documentary and fiction, was selected at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and received Grand Jury Prize at the International Women’s Film Festival in Pairs. Her second feature She, A Chinese, a homage to Godard’s La Chinoise, received the Golden Leopard Award at Locarno Film Festival. Her documentary essay We Went to Wonderland was selected for ND / NF at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Late At Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness is her most recent essay film, selected for the London Film Festival and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 2014. She has travelled intensely around the world conducting master classes in film festivals and universities. She is currently an Honorary Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

2015 Spring Semester Seminars

Dr Sarah Dauncey  
‘Is it time for “soft disabled power” in China? Countering disability discrimination through positive cultural representation’
Wed 21 Jan  |  Westminster Forum, 32/38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  5-7pm

Professor Bill Callahan
‘Journey to the Other Side: Methods and Ethics for Making Films about China’
Wed 04 Feb  |  Westminster Forum, 32/38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  5-7pm

Dr Lars Laamann
"Accommodating the People: Social Housing as Political Action in 1950s Beijing"
Wed 18 Feb  |  Westminster Forum, 32/38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  5-7pm
 
Dr Monica Merlin
 ‘Women artists and feminism in contemporary Mainland China: new perspectives and practices’
Wed 04 Mar  |  Westminster Forum, 32/38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  5-7pm

Dr Liu Jieyu
‘Changing Family Relations in Rural China: Gender, Migration and Familial Support’
Wed 18 Mar  |  Westminster Forum, 32/38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW  |  3-5pm