Author: susansu

Above image: Bai Yao and others on left, Bai Yao’s Prequel to Floating Clouds on right.

? Nicholas Y. H. Wong (PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature)
“Literary Collectives and “Minor” Time in Mahua Autobiographical Fiction about the Late 1950s”
Friday, November 3rd, 3-5pm in CEAS 319
Discussant: Yueling Ji (PhD Student, EALC)

Please join us Friday (11/3) from 3-5pm, as we host Nicholas Y. H. Wong (PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature). He will present a draft of his dissertation chapter, which he summarizes as follows:

This dissertation chapter examines sojourner-Chinese poet, librettist, and editor Bai Yao’s (1934–2015) unfinished piece of life-writing in the third person, Prequel to Floating Clouds (Lüyun qianshu, 2016). Bai Yao’s microhistory of urban Chinese-Malayan, or Mahua, literary societies and journals, managed by U.S.-sponsored Hong-Kong-based literary organization Union (Youlian), reveals his maximalist, encyclopedic approach to “becoming-minor.” Set around 1957, the year when Bai Yao arrived in newly independent Malaya, the novel presents time as a thick transnational node and generational fold, against the punctual national time of Leftist, nativist Mahua literary histories. Bai Yao also develops Youlian’s anti-communist, Malayan-oriented “life-camps” as an anti-Yan’an model of literary collectivity and study, legitimately connected to mainland Chinese republican-era societies. I examine Bai Yao’s account of Mahua literary autonomy via the depoliticized aesthetics of the Third Force, or non-alignment, and of cultural China (wenhua Zhongguo).

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).

Above image: The “Asia Realty” building, Frank Raven’s offices on Sichuan Rd.

Matt Lowenstein (PhD Student, History)
“An American Banker in Shanghai: Frank J. Raven in Historiographical Perspective”
?Friday, October 20th, 3-5 p.m. Wieboldt 301N?
Discussant: Spencer Stewart (PhD Student, History)

Please join us Friday (10/20) from 3-5pm, as we host Matt Lowenstein (PhD Student, History). He will present a draft of his article in progress, which he summarizes as follows:

In 1904, a 29-year- old veteran of the Spanish-American War arrived in Shanghai to take up work as an engineer. It was the beginning of a brilliant career and a charmed life. Frank Raven would go on to form a number of financial and property ventures, most notably the American-Oriental Banking Corporation. His reputation and social standing were ratified in accolades from the Shanghai American School, the Rotary Club, the American Club, and, his crowning glory, election to the Shanghai Municipal Council. But in 1935, silver poured out of country. With depositors lining up at the door, Raven was forced into liquidation. In the subsequent proceedings, the courts discovered criminal improprieties and sentenced Raven to five years in federal penitentiary. The literature treats Raven as the archetypal Great American Huckster, heir to a long tradition of confidence men, snake oil salesmen, and patent medicine cranks. For some, Raven represents American imperialism at its ugliest: greed unvarnished by higher ideals. For sympathetic scholars, he was a victim of a federal government intent on disciplining Americans abroad. This historiographical essay, relying on archives in Washington, Shanghai, and New York, and on Raven’s personal diaries, seeks to present Raven in his own terms. By taking him seriously as a financier, it hopes to open a new perspective on the history of Chinese finance during the Republican period.

The paper is available directly below, or at this link. If you have not received the password, or have questions about accessibility, please feel free to contact Helina Mazza-Hilway (mazzah@uchicago.edu) or Susan Su (susansu@uchicago.edu).