Transforming the Way of Water: Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea and Zao Wou-Ki’s Paintings
The Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s novel The Dragonfly Sea (2019) revolves around the female protagonist Ayaana, a supposedly Chinese descendant, growing up on the Kenyan island of Pate and travelling to China to study on a state-sponsored scholarship and back. The protagonist’s cross-cultural journey is deeply entangled with both historical past and contemporary global political and economic affairs. The Indian Ocean is portrayed as a space of ceaseless human and animal migrations, a network of historical, political, and economic relations, connectivities, and interchanges, which (in)form and (re)shape the basis and framework of what may be described as transcultural memories between and beyond Africa and China.
This talk proposes to approach this novel from an intermedial perspective. The Franco-Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki’s (1920-2013) abstract paintings, drawing inspiration from Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Chinese calligraphic lines, and Daoist thought, are frequently cited in the novel, which points to a visually and artistically mediated encounter, understanding, and cultural memory beyond verbally constructed narratives. Zao shares Ayaana’s journey crossing the Indian Ocean by boat. Zao’s paintings, embodying cross-cultural aesthetics, resonate with Ayaana’s transformative perceptions, experiences, and reimaginings of the sea and cultural relations. They translate and transform each other in the autobiographical, fictional, and aesthetic making of Sino-African transcultural memories.
Shuangyi Li is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol. He is the author of two monographs: Proust, China and Intertextual Engagement: Translation and Transcultural Dialogue (2017, International Comparative Literature Association Anna Balakian Prize 2019) and Travel, Translation and Transmedia Aesthetics: Franco-Chinese Literature in a Global Age (shortlisted for R. Gapper Book Prize 2022). Shuangyi received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Lund University in Sweden funded by Swedish Research Council between 2017 and 2021. Together with Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce at Edinburgh, he has recently launched a new book series with Edinburgh University Press, titled ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in World Literature and Intermediality’.
Date:
4 February 2025, 17:00
Venue:
Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Road OX2 6LU
Venue Details:
Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre (lower ground floor)
Speaker:
Shuangyi Li (University of Bristol)
Organising department:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organiser:
Professor Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary China
Booking required?:
Not required
Cost:
Free
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Clare Orchard
