The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events
Tuesday, 07 November 2023, 18:00Venue: Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Campus Westend, Seminarhaus, SH 0.101, Max-Horkheimer-Str. 4, 60323 Frankfurt am Main
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften and Institute of theatre, film and media studies of Goethe University
Lecture series »Sinophone Classicism« | hybrid format
Zhen Zhang (New York University)
»Sinophone Cine-feminisms«
Art: »Stone Seal« by Shi-siang TEO, courtesy of the artist
Registration and participation
Participation on spot
Venue: Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Campus Westend, Seminarhaus, SH 0.101, Max-Horkheimer-Str. 4, 60323 Frankfurt am Main
Participation via Zoom
For the Zoom registration link, please click
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Organizers
Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Sinology Institute of Goethe University, Graduate Research Training Program »Configurations of Film« of Goethe University
About the lecture
In this talk, I outline aspects of the research agenda in my new book Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema. Tracking and analyzing several women filmmakers’ innovative and socially engaged work in both fictional and non-fictional modes, I explore the aesthetic and political possibilities of their trans-cinematic practices for a multifaceted feminist intimate-public commons integral to women’s world cinema. Engaging the evolving Sinophone cultural and media studies and the idea of »Sinophone classicism«, I discuss several works that embody and complicate the notion of »Chineseness as temporal and mnemonic experience in the digital era« with a cine-feminist lens.
Movie still: Wen Hui »Dance with Third Grandmother« (2015)
About the speaker
Professor Zhen Zhang teaches and directs the Asian Film and Media Initiative at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her previous publications include An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1895–1937, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century, DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (co-editor). She is the lead editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas.
About the lecture series
In recent years, literary and cultural works that evoke the cultural memories of classical Chinese traditions are gaining popularity in the global Sinitic-languages space and cyberspace. From literary to visual culture, from pop music to fashion, from state policies to daily rituals, these classicist articulations present Chineseness as complicated, multifaceted, multilingual, and cross-cultural. They raise important questions on the relevance of Chinese traditions today to China, to global Chinese communities, and to a future of »world literature«—as Goethe envisioned it nearly two centuries ago. In this multiannual lecture series, prominent scholars, writers, and artists will present fascinating case studies from their research or draw upon their aesthetic practices to elaborate on their understanding on these important questions. Such investigations demonstrate the abundant aesthetic and intellectual resources that the vast repertoire of Chinese cultural memories may provide to engage in a dialogue on the present and future of a global culture.
Concept of the lecture series: Zhiyi Yang, Professor of Sinology, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften