While much attention is paid to anglophone literature about ecological crises, discussions of how East Asian writings of the city articulate and contest the Anthropocene in local contexts remain inadequate. In this talk, Dr Xiaofan Amy Li will examine recent Sinophone fiction (post-2000) by contemporary Hong Kongese writers, in particular Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse. Xiaofan Amy Li focuses on the imagery of Hong Kong and its various fictional avatars, relating them to questions about urbanity in the Anthropocene and surreal motifs that recur in much Hong Kong literature. She will discuss how urban space, social relations, and affect are visualised in specific ways by the relevant literature, arguing that Hong Kongese Sinophone fiction offers surreal cityscapes that speak to particular dimensions of urban life in Hong Kong and weird nature-cultural entanglements symptomatic of the Anthropocene. Simultaneously, Hong Kong literature also helps us rethink certain assumptions about the critical uses and frameworks of ecocritical literature. Via this ecocritical reading, Xiaofan Amy Li will also trace crucial connections between environmental aesthetics and Surrealism, understood not as a Paris-centric movement of the European interwar era but a multidirectional, inter-East Asian, and global artistic field.

Xiaofan Amy Li is Associate Professor in Comparative Cultural Studies at University College London. She completed her PhD at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Xiaofan Amy Li was Junior Research Fellow in Comparative Literature & Translation at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and taught at SOAS and the University of Kent before joining UCL. Her research focuses on French/Francophone and Chinese/Sinophone literatures and cultures. She is the author of Comparative Encounters between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi (Legenda, 2015) and the co-author of Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility (Routledge, 2019). Her next monograph on The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.