Speaker:
Mélanie Shi, EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris
Moderator:
Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, February 22, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm (Hong Kong Time)
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
This talk examines the material socialist literary networks during the Cold War via collaborations between communist publishing houses in China and the ex-Soviet bloc and their confluence in 1960s Paris. I discuss the publication of Chinese books and their worldwide diffusion during the 1960s to 1980s, centred on the central publishing house of China, the Foreign Languages Press (FLP, or Presses en Langues Étrangères), which exported books about communist China to non-Chinese readers along with similar state-sanctioned publishing houses in the ex-Soviet bloc. The translation of writers nominated for the Mao Dun and Stalinist prizes circulated in and through Paris, residence of expatriate intellectuals from East Asia, the USSR, and Latin America, and expatriate librairies like Éditeurs Réunis, Le Phénix, Le Point du Jour, and Librairie You Feng promoted the translation and circulation of literature to French where it was then read by European leftists converging in the capital. The texts translated by the Foreign Language Presses promoted the image of a unified revolutionary socialism countering the West based on a network of socialist cosmopolitanism, that converged in Paris despite the pressure of French linguistic assimilation.
Beyond the consequences for Europe, a convenient geographical confluence, I show how the diffusion of socialist literature via Paris connected the Chinese socialists with writers from the Global South through the review Littérature Chinoise, which posited China as an ally to anti-colonial struggles in the ex-Francophone empire and Latin America. While both the FLP and Littérature Chinoise emitted publications directly to other countries, the convergence of intellectuals and expatriate librairies in Paris made it an intermediator between China/Russia and the “Global South.”
Mélanie Shi is pursuing a postgraduate degree at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and previously studied at Columbia University (English/Comparative Literature) for her BA and at Peking University. She has written about orientalism in the 18th and 19th century European novel and then on the afterlife of “French Theory” via Sino-French literary and semiotic exchanges notably in the literary group Tel Quel’s voyage to Maoist China, and since then has become interested in the “actual China.” She is broadly interested, both literally and historically, in ideas from the 1960s, including Maoism, Lacanian analysis, the relation of expatriation and exophonic writing, and the Latin American left. Her current project examines the Foreign Languages Press (Presse en Langues Étrangères) in China and its role in a network of socialist literary cosmopolitan nodes spanning the USSR, the European left, and the global anti-capitalist anti-imperialist bloc and her ancillary project traces Jacques Derrida’s notions of cosmopolitanism and “geopsychoanalysis.”
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