L. Maria Bo, "Writing on Water: Cold War Literary Translations and the Chinese Diaspora," in conversation with Vaughn Rasberry

During the Cold War, the ideological struggle to win the hearts and minds of the Chinese took place on the pages of literary texts. A battle of the books between Washington D.C. and Beijing mobilized entire networks of U.S. Foreign Service posts, book publishers, and higher education institutions to take sides in propagating representations of either democracy or communism to ethnic Chinese communities around the world. In Writing on Water, L. Maria Bo argues that these propagated literary texts, simply by undergoing translation, also became the means for new forms of anglophone Chinese identity and diasporic communities to emerge.

Rather than examining how translated literary texts produced strict equivalents that "worked" to spread ideology, Bo reads these texts as fluid equivocal exchanges. She attends to the various languages through which these texts traveled, including hegemonic varieties of English, numerous forms of Chinese, and other local patois. Doing so uncovers how ideology and meaning come undone in these texts-in-transit, allowing us imagine the formation of dispersed, ideologically diverse reading publics spanning East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the US heartland.

L. Maria Bo teaches classes in Asian, American, and Asian American literature. Her research is comparative, specializing in 20th/21st century literature between East Asia and the Americas. She studies translation to sound out fruitful crossings between critical translation theory, asian studies, and ethnic studies. Her first book focuses on English-Chinese literary translations during the Cold War to illuminate a methodology for studying multilingual diasporic literature. More recently, she has also begun to write on Asian/American science fictions.

Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.