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.

Sounds Sensesis about what happens to the francophone postcolonial condition when sound is taken as a point of departure for engaging cultural production. Offering a synthetic overview of sound studies, it dismantles the retinal paradigms and oculocentrism of francophone postcolonial studies. By shifting the sensory hermeneutics of perception from the visual, the textual, and the graphemic to the sonic, the auditory, and the phonemic, the book places cultural production that privileges or otherwise exaggerates æstheticized sensorial experiences at the forefront of francophone postcolonialism. In the process, it introduces two primary theoretical thrusts—the unheard and the unintegrated—to the project of analyzing, extending, and rejuvenating francophone postcolonial studies. The book reevaluates francophone culture in relation to sound and the experience of sound, situating it along the fluid axes of paralingual utterance, audio-vision, voice, and narrative speakers. Through a range of case studies focusing on parafrancophonics, poetry, world music, cinema, the graphic novel, popular speech phenomenæ, and the poetics and politics of transcolonial identification, Sounds Senses demonstrates how francophone postcolonial culture is satiated with a glut of unexplored sonic significance.

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.

This book provides answers to the following questions: How could visual art support us in reflecting about interculturality critically? When we look at, engage with and experience art, what is it that we can learn, unlearn and relearn about interculturality? The book adds to the multifaceted and multidisciplinary field of intercultural communication education by urging those working on the notion of interculturality (researchers, scholars and students) to give art a place in exploring its complexities. No knowledge background about art (theory) is needed to work through the chapters. The book helps us reflect on ourselves and on our engagement with the world and with others, and learn to ask questions about these elements. The authors draw on anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and sociology to enrich their discussions of critical interculturality.

Multilingual Literature as World Literature examines and adjusts current theories and practices of world literature, particularly the conceptions of world, global and local, reflecting on the ways that multilingualism opens up the borders of language, nation and genre, and makes visible different modes of circulation across languages, nations, media and cultures. The contributors to Multilingual Literature as World Literature examine four major areas of critical research. First, by looking at how engaging with multilingualism as a mode of reading makes visible the multiple pathways of circulation, including as aesthetics or poetics emerging in the literary world when languages come into contact with each other. Second, by exploring how politics and ethics contribute to shaping multilingual texts at a particular time and place, with a focus on the local as a site for the interrogation of global concerns and a call for diversity. Third, by engaging with translation and untranslatability in order to consider the ways in which ideas and concepts elude capture in one language but must be read comparatively across multiple languages. And finally, by proposing a new vision for linguistic creativity beyond the binary structure of monolingualism versus multilingualism.

The connection between travel and translation is often evoked in contemporary critical theory, both practices seen as metaphors of mobility and flux linked to globalized 'post-modern' society. Travel is a multiple activity, encompassing temporary and voluntary displacement, repeated movement, exile, economic migration, diaspora. Places of origin are often plural and unstable, in spite of the enduring appeal of traditional labels such as 'mother country' or 'patrie'. The multiple interfaces between translation, travel and migration are the focus of all contributions in this special issue. Starting from different points of view, and using a variety of methodologies, the authors raise fundamental questions about the way in which we perceive the link between language, national or ethnic identity, and individual voice. Topics range from the interaction between travel, travel narratives and translation in early English representations of China, to the special role played by interpreters in mediating the first contact between a literate and a non-literate culture; from the multiple functions and audiences addressed by contemporary Romani literature and its translation, to the political as well a cultural implications of translating popular music across the Bosporus. A number of the articles focus on detailed textual analysis, covering the intersection between exile, self-translation and translingualism in the work of Manuel Puig; the uses and limitations of translation in the works of migrant authors; or the impact on figurations of Europe of experimental work embracing polylingualism. Collectively, these contributions also underline the importance of a closer examination of our assumptions about who the translators and the interpreters are, and what roles they play in our society.

Accounts of travel to England reached unprecedented levels of popularity in the German states in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Competition therefore increased for travel writers to produce travelogues which offered the most authentic, original and vibrant picture of England. The wider range of narrative strategies which travellers consequently deployed increasingly drew on the emotional responses of their audience whether to serve a political purpose, show concern for the darker side to the Industrial Revolution or simply demonstrate the humanitarian interests of the travellers themselves. In this broad-ranging study, Alison E. Martin draws on a variety of travellers, men and women, canonical and forgotten, to chart the fascinating variety of styles and approaches which mark this highly interdisciplinary genre.