Overview

This book presents new and original essays that capture the enigmatic and intriguing personal and imagined worlds of Chinese writers and artists in diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Including chapters on artist-writers such as Gao Xingjian, Dai Sijie, Ha Jin and Hong Ying, Tyrus Wong, and Shen Wei, the book explores personal cross-cultural experiences through their literary and other artistic works, reflecting on their cultural identity, their native home, and their new home, the past and the present. By writing, filming, and painting about their diaspora/diasporic experience, they are writing about their selves and the traumatic experience many of them have gone through in forgetting the past, forgiving the damage, and foreshadowing a future by re-visioning their selves. Their experience represents a generation’s quest for an identity of being Chinese but culturally distanced from China. As a study of cross-cultural human experience through the lens of literature, film, and other arts, this book will not only appeal to students and scholars of Chinese diaspora studies, it will also appeal to those with an interest in Chinese literature, film, and culture.

Full Product Details

Author:   Kwok-kan Tam ,  Lily Li
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.690kg
ISBN:  

9781041028840

ISBN 10:   1041028849
Pages:   274
Publication Date:   10 September 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Introduction. Chinese Writers and Artists in Diaspora: Constructing the Self Beyond and Without China 1. Diasporic Ground, National Parallels and Continental Divides: Resituating Chinese North American Identities in the 21st Century 2. Aesthetic Synergy in the Art of Tyrus Wong 3. Domestic Life as Allegory of Migration in Ha Jin’s Waiting 4. Folding and Unfolding: Evolving Cultural Identity in Shen Wei’s Modern Dance 5. The Home(land)less Self in Gao Xingjian 6. Dis/re-location of the Self in the Film Comrades: Almost a Love Story 7. Hong Kong Diasporans in Clara Law’s Films Autumn Moon and Floating Life 8. The Female Self and the Mirror in Xiaolu Guo’s Two Feature Films 9. Hong Ying: The Disowned Daughter Writing in Diaspora 10. Writing in Diaspora: Eileen Chang’s Self Writing 11. The Language of Survival: Linguistic Migrations in the Age of Globalization 12. Twentieth-Century Chinese Prisonscape and Its French Exophone Articulation in François Cheng and Dai Sijie 13. Mirrored Self: Identity Construction in Sinophone Literature in Thailand

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Author Information

Kwok-kan Tam is Dean of Humanities and Social Science and Chair Professor of English at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. Lily Li is Lecturer in Chinese and Humanities at Eastern Kentucky University, USA.

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