Options
Rui Kunze
Former Member
Title
Dr.
Last Name
Kunze
First name
Rui
Phone
+41 71 224 2157
Now showing
1 - 10 of 15
-
PublicationChinese Woman in New York City: Transcultural Travel and Postsocialist Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-first Century China( 2016-03-13)This paper explores transcultural travel as the new space of Chinese women and culture in motion in a globalizing postsocialist China. We adopt Lisa Rofel’s concept of ‘postsocialist cosmopolitanism’ to examine how a new generation of Chinese women writers fashions a new female self in their writings about lived experiences in transnational and transcultural environments. According to Rofel, postsocialist cosmopolitanism combines first, a self-conscious transcendence of locality accomplished through the formation of a global consumer’s identity, and second, a domestication of cosmopolitanism by way of nationalist-inspired renegotiation of China’s place in the world. We examine the literary tropes of travel, dwelling and homecoming in the works of two new women writers, i.e. Wei Hui (b.1973) and Chun Shu (b.1983), while extending Rofel’s insights by adding the aspects of motion, border-crossing and cultural negotiations. Both authors rose to fame with novels— Shanghai Baobei (Shanghai Baby, 1999) and Beijing wawa (Beijing Doll, 2002) respectively—that depict young urban women’s self-awareness of their body and mobility in China’s postsocialist metropolis. Both set their follow-up works—Wei Hui’s Wo de chan (Marrying Buddha, 2004) and Chun Shu’s Guangnian zhi meiguomeng (Light Years – American Dream, 2010)—in New York City, the archetypal citadel of capitalism, including its Chinatown. This study will analyse the geo-political, eco-political, linguistic, religious, and sexual conflicts arising through the main female protagonists’ travel in and out of New York City, Shanghai and Beijing. It will show how transcultural travel and the construction of postsocialist cosmopolitanism in these works involve nationalist rhetoric, a critique of capitalism, a longing for presocialist China before 1949 and the identity formation process of the protagonists as global consumers. It will shed light on the new image of twenty-first century Chinese woman in New York City and enhance our understanding of her new postsocialist dreams and nightmares.Type: conference paper
-
PublicationType: conference paper
-
PublicationType: conference paper
-
-
PublicationType: conference paper
-
PublicationType: conference paper
-
PublicationShanghai, Shanghai: a Study of Colonial Memory and Cultural Anxiety of Shanghai in Globalization( 2004-01-08)Wang, RuiThe thesis of this paper is that the nostalgia of “Shanghai in the 30s” is an avoidance of its semi-colonial history and this nostalgia underlies the cultural anxiety in present-day Shanghai in the context of globalization. If the ideology imposed by Chinese Communist Party on its people repressed the collective memory of the city, then the commercialism of globalization represents another repressing force. By taking advantage of Chinese people’s current depoliticizing tendency and encouraging the nostalgia of an imagined “the 30s” of Shanghai, commercialism truncates the cultural memory of the city and therefore puts the cultural identity of its people into question.Type: conference paper
-
PublicationStruggle and Symbiosis: : The Canonization of the Poet Haizi and Cultural Discourses in Contemporary ChinaThe poet Haizi committed suicide in March of 1989, only months before many others died on June 4th of that same year. A relatively obscure poet at the time of his death, Haizi is now hailed as the epitome of the ?hero of poetry? whose writings represent the idealistic 1980s. Does Haizi?s death coincide with the 1989 pro-democratic movement only in time or are there certain connections? Why are Haizi and his poetry interpreted as representative of the ?idealism? of the 1980s? What does this interpretation suggest about culture and society in post-1989 China? This study examines the ongoing canonization of Haizi. It first traces the cultural practices involved with the canonization from 1989 to 2010. After contextualizing Haizi and his writings within discussions of ?modernism? and ?world literature,? this study investigates three literary aspects of his texts contributing heavily to his canonization: the literary theme of minjian to contest the offi cial narratives of ?history? and ?nation?; the writing of epic to create a national canon; and the rhetorization of Christian symbols and motifs which shares ideological grounds with the ?Mao style? in their prescription of a ?sublime? poet-hero. Theoretically founded on E. Husserl?s phenomenological notion of ?sedimentation,? this study observes the continuity and changes in Chinese culture from the Maoist era to the 1980s and the post-1989 decades, in particular the increasingly subtle struggle and symbiosis between literature and politics, between the intellectual and the state in China.
-
PublicationType: book sectionVolume: 6
-
PublicationSex and the Glocalising City: Women Writers as Transcultural Travellers in Postsocialist Chinese Literature, 1997-2016In Chapter Nine, ‘Sex and the Glocalising City: Women Writers as Transcultural Travel- lers in Postsocialist Chinese Literature, 1997–2016’, Daria Berg and Rui Kunze investigate the themes of gender, sexuality and the glocalising cityscape—combining both globalising and localising trends—in postsocialist Chinese women’s writings. Using the works of two women writers—Wei Hui 衛慧 (alias Zhou Weihui 周衛慧, b. 1973) and Chun Shu春樹 (alias Zou Nan 鄒楠, b. 1983)—as case studies, this chapter traces transcultural flows from US popular culture into China and the construction of a new glocalising culture in Chinese literary discourse. It examines the new wave of women’s writings about the glocalising citys- cape, transcultural travel and the quest for cosmopolitanism. The imaginary of the glocalising cityscape appears in two dimensions: as a local, native place as epitomised by Shanghai and Beijing, and also as a global, foreign symbol of ultramodernity in the shape of New York. It sets the stage for China’s new transcultural women travellers who seek an ultramodern lifestyle characterized by sexual and economic emancipation. This study sheds fresh light on the self- fashioning of a new generation of women writers as China’s emerging cultural entrepreneurs.Type: book sectionVolume: 6