Professor Wen-chin Ouyang

Key information
- Roles
- Near and Middle East Section Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies Member Member Member China Institute Academic Staff, SOAS China Institute
- Department
- China Institute, Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies, Near and Middle East Section & School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
- Qualifications
- BA, BEd (Tripoli), MA, MPhil, PhD (Columbia)
- Building
- Russell Square: College Buildings
- Office
- 435
- Email address
- wo@soas.ac.uk
- Telephone number
- +44(0)20 7898 4348
- Support hours
-
Monday 12 noon - 1:00pm
Tuesday 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Biography
Wen-chin Ouyang was born in Taiwan and raised in Libya. She completed her BA in Arabic at Tripoli University and PhD Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University in New York City. She taught Arabic language, literature and culture at Columbia University, University of Chicago and University of Virginia before she moved to London. She is interested in critical theory and thought as well as poetics and prosaics. She has written extensively on classical and modern Arabic narrative and literary criticism. She is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013). She has also published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism, and Chinese storytelling. She is Editor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures and a member of the editorial board of Bulletin of SOAS. She founded and co-edits Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature. She chaired the editorial board of Middle East in London Magazine (2007-08) and contributes regularly to Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature. A native speaker of Arabic and Chinese, she has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies.
Research interests
The Silk Road and World Literature
The Silk Road, which is in a variety of academic, political and cultural programmes around the world, is a metaphor for a form of globalization that predated the twentieth century and the strategic importance of Central Asia today, can serve as a non-Eurocentric framework in the study of cross-cultural interactions and developments.
The key ideas are:
There is a need to go beyond the dominant view of world as made up of discreet, bordered, sovereign realms and consider it as interconnected, networked nodes of continues flow of cross cultural interaction, so as to identify and articulate various patterns of globalization and different forms for cosmopolitanism without privileging one cultural unit or historical moment.
Ideas, languages, cultural expressions and products emerge, take shape and develop or decline within the framework of global networked circulation. It is possible and necessary to identify and describe the various structures of global economy of exchange, across time and space, within which the birth, maturity, death and even revival of ideas, languages and cultural expressions and products may be theorized.
Multilingualism is at the heart of creativity. Each language is always in contact with other languages as well as other systems of expression, especially image and sound, and through such contact it gains and rejuvenates its creative force. It is important to uncover the various forms of multilingualism latent in each linguistic and cultural expression, so as to understand fully and in a more complex fashion the ways in which language, whether based in word, image or sound, produces meaning and makes an impact, and to encourage and support multilingualism and creativity. Multiculturalism has been in existence in a variety of forms around the globe and is both product and producer of cross-cultural contacts and multilingualism. It is, like multilingualism, the foundation of creative cultural expressions.
Material objects are sites of cultural memory and discourse. They provide evidence of global circulation of ideas, languages and cultural expressions in various forms: the objects themselves, the raw material of these objects, the relevant techniques and technologies, the use and function of these objects in one culture or across cultures, and the cultural legacy accumulated around these objects. (Examples: musical instruments, china, paintings, manuscripts, etc). They are interesting objects of study as such, and can more importantly serve as one key focus of the project.
Literature, the visual arts and music inhere multilingualism and multiculturalism accumulated through cultural encounters across time and space. They tell similar stories of intercultural development but diverge in their expressive outlets, production of meaning and reception, and nuance. Comparative study of these is crucial in understanding and articulating different forms of multilingualism and multiculturalism and the divergent patterns of their development.
It is necessary to adopt a simultaneously multi- and interdisciplinary approach to cultural encounters and intercultural developments, or different forms of globalization (past and present, East and West) that bring together to mutually inform and enrich: (i) languages, literatures, cultures, religions, material culture, music history, politics, development studies, anthropology, and the sciences; (ii) scholars of and from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, to track the circulation of ideas, languages, cultural expressions and products, across various and overlapping networks. (Circulation of silk will not be traced from China centripetally, for example, but to and fro China, Damascus and Venice at the same time).
Conferences
Multilingualism and Multilingual Identities in World Literatures(s): OWRI Creative Multilingualism Strand 5 Workshop
PhD Supervision
Name | Title |
---|---|
Manhal AL DAKHLALLAH | The Question of Aesthetics in Literary Translation in view of the Prismatic Translation Theory: An Integrative/Critical Review Analysis of the Arabic Translations of Charles Dickens's Aesthetics-Poetic Style. |
July Blalack | Travel Inside and Outside: Maghribi Resistance as a Literary Force |
Dr Poonkulaly Gunaseelan | |
Yue Han | Militarism in Israeli and Palestinian Cinemas |
Miss Yunzi Han | Representing Sexual Politics in Walled Societies: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Iranian Cinemas since the Late 1990s. (Working title) |
Mr Jinjian Li | Nyerere and Post-Colonial Swahili Literature (working title) |
Pascale Pean | The Taste of Home: Identity and Resistance in Haitian-American Food |
Rafaa Taher S Ragebi | |
Dylan K. Wang | Unto Myself Reborn: Self-Translation in Modern Chinese Literature |
Dr Annie Webster | Stories of Creative Destruction in post-2003 Iraqi Fiction |
Dr Jessica Siu-yin Yeung | Semiotics of Allegory: Queerness in Contemporary Taiwan and Hong Kong Novel and Cinema |
Publications
Contact Wen-chin
- Telephone