Digital China
Creativity and Community in the Sinocybersphere
9789463720670
312 pages
Amsterdam University Press
Overview
Over the past decade, digital technologies have profoundly reshaped the Chinese cultural landscape. With a focus on the creative agency of new media and online communities, this volume examines this development through the notion of the Sinocybersphere - the networked spaces across the globe that not only operate on the Chinese script, but also imaginatively negotiate the meanings of Chinese culture in the digital age. Instead of asking what makes the internet or new media “Chinese,” the chapters situate contemporary entanglements of cultural and digital practices within specific historical, social, and discursive contexts. Covering topics as diverse as live-streaming, AI poetry, online literature, poetry memes, cyberpunk fiction, virtual art exhibitions, cooking videos, censorship, and viral translations, the collection as a whole not only engages with a wide range of Chinese new media phenomena, but also demonstrates their relevance to our understanding of contemporary digital culture.
Author Bio
Jessica Imbach is Junior Professor of Sinology/contemporary China at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. She is the author of Not Afraid of Ghosts: Stories of the Spectral in Modern Chinese Fiction (University of Zurich, 2017) and co-editor of Sinophone Utopias: Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream (Cambria Press, 2023). In 2023, she was awarded the FAN Award for early career researchers of the University of Zurich for her ongoing research project, Chinese Literature of the Future: Technology and Nation in Science Fiction and New Media.
