Yanping Zhang

Toward a Media History of the Socialist International: Incarnations and Migration of ‘Revolutionary Romanticism’ in Literature, Arts, and Media (1928-1986)

This project investigates the conditions that drove literary productions from Mainland China to enter the world literary system. It focuses on the decisive role played by a transnational group of “literary agents” in creating the cultural capital of the PRC since China’s economic reforms. My research draws on textual analysis, interviews, and archival works to explore a chain of translations that enabled the transition of contemporary Chinese literature from a constituent of a writers’ international to a part of world literary economy. It delineates the unexpected collaborations, difficult negotiations, and various strategies that are involved in the social, cultural, and literary acts of translation.

Y. P. Zhang is currently an A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at UW-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests include world literature, translation studies, modern and contemporary Chinese literature, critical theory, and global South studies.