Goethe Fellows
Research on contemporary sinophone culture
»Sinophone classicism« is a research project proposed by the Sinologist Zhiyi Yang (Goethe Fellow 2021‒2025). It has resulted so far in high-impact publications, a successful lecture series, and an international workshop, with further publications, workshops, and funding applications to follow
The concept »Sinophone classicism«
»Sinophone classicism« is a concept proposed by Zhiyi Yang. The Sinophone refers to the Sinitic languages that include but are not limited to Modern Standard Mandarin. »Classicism,« on the other hand, refers to innovative ways to adapt, reinvent, redeploy, and appropriate a cultural past deemed as »classical« by agents of its cultural memory. In the last few decades, classicist literary and art works have become a notable trend in the global sinophone space and cyberspace, ranging from fashion to music, from dance theater to pop culture, and from digital art to avant-garde poetry. »Sinophone classicism« is therefore proposed as an decentralized, multilingual, and intercultural approach to studying such ongoing transformations of the Chinese cultural past. This paradigm empowers subjective, intimate, and reflexive ways to experience an individual’s culturally acquired »Chineseness« that is temporal, mnemonic, and often mediated in our era by digital media. This paradigm joins recent scholarly efforts to dismantle the view of «Chinese modernity« as a monocentric and homogenous experience by refocusing on classicism as a kind of »antimodern modernism.« It also joins the post-Eurocentric turn in global academia by hinting at a future of cross-cultural classicisms.
Publications
This paradigm is first defined by Yang in a high-impact article »Sinophone Classicism: Chineseness as Temporal and Mnemonic Experience in the Digital Era,« published in The Journal of Asian Studies in 2022. It is then further expatiated by Zhiyi Yang and David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University) in the introduction to a special issue that they co-edit for Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, titled »Classicism in Digital Times: Textual Production as Cultural Remembrance in the Sinophone Cyberspace« (forthcoming 2023). Yang and Wang are now planning to co-edit a handbook »Global Sinophone classicisms« to investigate a diverse range of phenomena so as to deepen, expand, or modify the conceptual framework of »Sinophone classicism,« with particular attention on questions of hybridity, agency, and critical challenges.
The lecture series »Sinophone classicism«
Inaugurated in the winter semester of 2021, the lecture series »Sinophone Classicism: Chinese Cultural Memories in a Global Space« has successfully run for four consecutive semesters and has invited fifteen renowned scholars from North America, East Asia, and Europe to Frankfurt. In the summer semester of 2023, Mingwei Song (Wellesley College, USA) investigated the archaeology and futurology in contemporary Sinophone science fiction; Fangdai Chen (Lingnan University, Hong Kong) examined the neo-avant-gardism in the classicist novel of the up-and-coming internet writer Chen Chuncheng; and Barbara Mittler (Heidelberg University, Germany) explored the classical aesthetics of »pregnant silence« and the tradition of remonstration in Chinese music and literature, which culminated in a music piece composed during the Covid lockdown in Shanghai, spring 2022. All lectures took place in a hybrid format, so that also interested people who do not live in Frankfurt could participate. Some llectures are published on the YouTube channel of the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften.
Workshops in cooperation with Harvard University and Lingnan University
In June 2022, an online workshop titled »Classicism in Digital Times« was held by three universities, Harvard University, Lingnam University, and Goethe University. Currently, Zhiyi Yang is planning another workshop together with David der-Wei Wang, which will be held on site at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften of Goethe University.
Building upon the academic success of this project, funding applications in various constellations are in progress.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Zhiyi Yang, Goethe University (z.yang@em.uni-frankfurt.de)