Book Launch: 'Identity, Multiplicity, and Resistance in Taiwanese Poetry'
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS Main Building
- Room
- R201
- Event type
- Launch
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Dr Wen-Chi Li and Professor Rosa Lombardi to share the new edited volume, Identity, Multiplicity, and Resistance in Taiwanese Poetry.
This edited volume examines how Taiwanese poets conceptualise identity, employing multiple voices to challenge political hegemony and to re-evaluate Taiwan’s colonial legacy and nationalism. Poetry in Taiwan emerges at the intersection of Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Japanese languages and traditions.
As the rise of China has narrowed Taiwan’s international space and often led to Taiwanese culture being perceived as a tributary or by-product of China on the global stage, the book focuses on Taiwanese poetry to illuminate a history of local resistance across gendered, cultural, and linguistic contexts. It attempts to deconstruct the hegemony and homogeneity of 'Chineseness', exploring multiple ways of repositioning Taiwan on the map of world literature.
About the speakers
Dr Wen-Chi Li
Wen-chi Li received his SNSF Postdoctoral Mobility Return Grant for a fellowship at Walter Benjamin Kolleg, University of Bern. He is the author of Taiwanese Face, Chinese Masks: Yang Mu and His Postcolonial Poetry (Cambria, forthcoming), and editor of Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022). As a translator, he co-translated Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen (Seagull Books, 2023), which was awarded the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.
Professor Rosa Lombardi
Rosa Lombardi is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Chinese literature at Roma Tre University. She has published widely on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, and on contemporary Taiwanese poetry, focusing on authors such as Xi Murong, Yang Mu, Chen Li. Her work includes books and essays, translations of contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese fiction, and a Chinese Italian bilingual dictionary. She is currently researching Taiwan’s modern and contemporary poetry.
Image credit: Aaron Burden via Unspalsh
