Jointly organised by the Cluster of LLCE, China Studies Centre and the Department of Chinese Studies, the University of Sydney
4–5.30pm, Monday 4 June, 2018
SLC Common Room 536, Brennan MacCallum Building A18
In the Anglophone world, “Tiananmen” has become a shorthand for the events that took place in Tiananmen Square on June 4th, 1989. The deaths that occurred on this day were not only mourned across China, but, thanks to the presence of foreign journalists in the Square, were experienced as a shared historical moment across the globe. The outpouring of sympathy post-Tiananmen eased the passage for a new generation of migrants from China traveling to the West on humanitarian grounds, with the category ‘young student’ now identified as being at risk and at odds with the mandates of the homeland.
This paper concentrates on the transnational dimensions of June 4th. Tiananmen initially signified a rupture between the government and its people, but over time it has come to represent a distinct historical bifurcation between two versions of China: the official narrative taught and circulated within the PRC’s borders, and the counter-narratives preserved in the literatures beyond those confines. Looking at post-Tiananmen fiction by contemporary Chinese writers such as Chan Koonchung, Yu Hua and Sheng Keyi, I reflect on the process of national amnesia, the status of Chinese exiles and diaspora, and the role played by the West as a market for alternate types of Chinese literature. Finally, turning to Lucy Kirkwood’s 2013 play, Chimerica, I argue that viewing Tiananmen as part of a shared global history significantly complicates our assumptions about the relationship between home and nation.
About the Speaker
Lynda Ng is an Adjunct Fellow with the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and currently teaches in the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney. From 2012 to 2014 she was the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at the University of Oxford, working on a project that examined Chinese diasporic and exilic literature. She has published essays on censorship and literary value, cosmopolitanism, and neoliberalism. Her edited collection of essays, Indigenous Transnationalism: Essays on Carpentaria, is due out this year with Giramondo Press, and she is currently collaborating on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project about the work of J. M. Coetzee, entitled ‘Transnational Coetzee’.
More information
Josh Stenberg
josh.stenberg@sydney.edu.au