Trailblazing Scholar, Brilliant Critic

Abstract

This essay is an assessment of and a tribute to Yingjin Zhang’s manifold academic achievements. He has made tremendous contributions to multiple fields: film studies, modern Chinese literature, comparative literature, urban studies, media studies, Republican China studies, as well as other related areas of inquiry. His scholarly impact has been enormous. The essay focuses on two aspects of his scholarship: First, his leading position in the establishment, institutionalization, and internationalization of academic fields like Chinese cinema studies, modern Chinese literary studies, and Chinese comparative literature. Second, his vital role as an influential, astute theorist in rethinking the theoretical parameters and critical tools of the aforementioned disciplines. While he was shaping and reshaping academic fields through producing monumental books, he was keenly aware of the permeable disciplinary boundaries of ever-changing critical terrains. Just as he was establishing Chinese literature and cinema, transnational studies, comparative literature, and world literature, he was at the same time re-examining and reflecting on the feasibility of these terms in a new critical context. A brave, open-minded, self-reflexive spirit is characteristic of his scholarship as a whole. He did not take an entity for granted, but cross-examined and redefined it according to changing historical and social circumstances.

Notes

1 Yingjin Zhang, ed., A Companion to Chinese Cinema (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2012), l21–22.

2 Yingjin Zhang, “On Translation Processes,” Chinese Comparatist 1, no. 1 (Fall 1987): 12.

3 Yingjin Zhang, “Fetishism and Faddism: Manifestations of Literature as Commodity in Contemporary China,” Chinese Comparatist 3, no. 1 (July 1989): 26–32.

4 Yingjin Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2002), 4.

5 Yingjin Zhang, ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai: 1922–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3. See also Sheldon Lu’s review of the book.

6 Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang, New Chinese-Language Documentaries: Ethics, Subject and Place (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 1.

7 Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang, eds., From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), vii.

8 Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema. (London: Routledge, 2004), 1.

9 Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 17, 19, 24, 29, 40.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sheldon Lu

Sheldon Lu is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis where he has served as Department Chair of Comparative Literature, Director of Graduate Program of Comparative Literature, and Founding Co-Director of Film Studies. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of some twenty books and special journal issues in English and Chinese on comparative literature, Chinese literature, and films studies. His recent books include Comtemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation (2021); Lyric Poetry and Solidarity Society in Hong Kong in the 1950s (1950 niandai Xianggang citan yu jianshe 一九五〇年代香港詞壇與堅社, 2022, in Chinese); Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema: Reimagining a Field (2020, co-editor with Haomin Gong).