Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics

This book examines the works of four contemporary first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists in France: François CHENG, GAO Xingjian, DAI Sijie, and SHAN Sa. They were all born in China, moved to France in their adulthood to pursue their literary and artistic ambitions, and have enjoyed the highest French and Western institutional recognitions, from the Grand Prix de la Francophonie to the Nobel Prize in Literature. They have established themselves not only as writers, but also as translators, calligraphers, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers mainly in their host country. French has become their dominant—but not only—language of literary creation (except for Gao); yet, linguistic idioms, poetic imagery, and classical thought from Chinese cultural heritage permeate their French texts and visual artworks, reflecting a strong translingual and transmedial sensibility. The book provides not only distinctive literary and artistic examples beyond existing studies of intercultural encounter, French postcolonial, and Chinese diasporic enquiries; more importantly, it formulates a theoretical model that captures the creative dynamics between the French/francophone and Chinese/sinophone spaces of articulation, thereby contributing to contemporary debates about literary and artistic production, interpretation, and circulation in the global development of comparative/world literature, as well as intermediality studies.

“The book is overflowing with trendy concepts. … Li’s scintillating monograph is a must read for all those interested in a singular body of non-postcolonial, diasporic literature/ visual arts by a group of authors who straddle the Francophone and the Sinophone, yet stubbornly resist labels of any sort.” (Yunfei Bai, Recherche littéraire - Literary Research, Vol. 38, 2022) “Another groundbreaking contribution to Franco-Chinese Studies by the impressive Shuangyi Li. The current volume is eloquently written, well-researched and important. As a rare scholar who works adeptly in French and Chinese, Li is uniquely poised to shed light on not only the writing but also the visual art of four Chinese-born immigrants to France. Though their work has been studied before, this is the first time the writing and visual art of all four key figures has been juxtaposed and the first look at their work through the optics of transmediality and translation.” (Michelle Bloom, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California Riverside, USA)

“Showing how the French-Chinese symbiosis sparks translingual and transmedial creativity in an important generation of migrant writers, this illuminating book offers an alternative to postcoloniality in Francophone Studies and to the centre-periphery paradigm in World Literature.” (Xiaofan Amy Li, Lecturer in Comparative Cultural Studies, University College London, UK)

“This is more than a study of Franco-Chinese literature. Moving beyond language, Shuangyi Li’s book develops a method of reading between travel, translation, translingualism, intermediality, and world literature.” (Christina Kullberg, Professor of French and Francophone Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden)

Shuangyi Li is a Lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (2017) (International Comparative Literature Association Anna Balakian Prize 2019). He received his PhD in French at the University of Edinburgh and was selected as pensionnaire étranger at L'École Normale Supérieure, Paris (2012-13). He worked as a Swedish Research Council/Vetenskapsrådet Research Fellow at Lund University, Sweden (2019–2021).