Dreams from China's Past: Visions of the Future in Popular Science and Literature Magazines, 1927–1949
Speaker: Aaron William Moore, University of Edinburgh
Moderator: Victor Seow, Harvard University
Abstract: Examination of the early evolution of Chinese science fiction, which at the time was predominantly referred to as kexue xiaoshuo, reveals how existing genres, media, and cultural movements converged to produce a new way of writing about the future in a non-Western literary milieu. The context in which Chinese SF evolved was characterised by vernacular movements, popular politics, imperialist threats, and the Chinese Nationalist government’s revolutionary promotion of national science. By the 1920s, dreams of the future moved beyond late imperial fantasy tales to embrace speculative science writing, and not just in China but also in the Soviet Union, the Anglophone world, and Imperial Japan. This talk will argue that the writers of science fiction endeavoured to create a ‘China dream’, which was a vision mainly tied to the historical experience of the KMT era (1927–1949). I will explain the formation of the dream through the evolution of a new literary genre—science fiction—by analysing the role of the foreign in science reporting, describing the debate over literature and science in the 1930s, and finally showing the importance of KMT China’s science magazine culture.
About our speaker: Aaron William Moore is the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Writing War (2013) and Bombing the City (2018).