Crossing the World to Sleep with You: Chinese Crip Poetry and its Cross-Cultural Translatability is the title of this talk to be given by Hangping Xu, (East Asian Languages and Culture, UC, Santa Barbara).

Yu Xiuhua rose to her celebrity status when her poem “Crossing China to Sleep with You” went viral in 2014 on Chinese social media platforms, causing what can be called a cultural event, which director Fan Jian documents in his 2016 film Still Tomorrow. As a female poet who lives with cerebral palsy in rural China, Yu was often labeled by media representations as a “brain-paralyzed peasant poet.” Such a sensationalist labeling strategy exploits her various minority identities. Focusing on the rise of Yu as a “crip” trickster figure, the talk advances a critical account of Chinese internet poetry as transmedial performance.

Hangping Xu specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese literary, cultural, and visual studies, comparative literature, and Taiwan Studies. Situating China in the world and destabilizing the notion of “Chineseness,” his research also pays attention to the history of diaspora, dispersion, immigration, and globalization. His interdisciplinary research engages two significant turns in literary and cultural studies—namely, the affective and the ethical —by foregrounding disability as a mode of critique. It particularly examines “disability aesthetics,” that is, how the disabled body in our cultural imaginaries evokes affective responses, or what can be called “aesthetic nervousness.” It explores the ways in which disability opens up new ethical horizons because its excessively corporeal and often spectacularized embodiment conceptually and aesthetically challenges how a culture defines what it means to be human.

The East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (GSSC) welcomes Professor Xu. We invite graduate students to contact us if you are interested in participating in a grad student workshop with him on October 20th at noon. email: eap-gssc@cornell.edu for details.