Kiinalaisen scifi-kirjailija Chen Qiufanin romaani Jättömaa on vastikään julkaistu suomeksi, minkä johdosta Helsingin yliopiston Konfutse-instituutti järjesti Chenin tuotantoa käsittelevän verkkotilaisuuden tiistaina 12.10. 2021 klo 12:15—13:45.

Tilaisuudessa suomentaja Rauno Sainio kertoo suomeksi Jättömaan kääntämisestä ja Chen Qiufan kertoo englanniksi romaanista ja muista teoksistaan. Haastattelijana toimii Helsingin yliopiston tohtorikoulutettava Eero Suoranta.

In light of the recent Finnish translation of Chen Qiufan’s science fiction novel Waste Tide, this video contains first a discussion in Finnish with the translator Rauno Sainio and then a Q&A session in English with Chen Qiufan, conducted by Eero Suoranta, PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki. The English part with Chen Qiufan begins around 43 minutes 48 seconds in the video.

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Guest Lecture on Ghost Island Literature

Time: Friday 12 November, 12:15-13:45 Helsinki Time

Speaker: Dr. Chia-rong Wu, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Please register before 7 November in order to get the link to the event.

Registration Link is here (or copy and paste https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/113884/lomakkeet.html)

This talk examines the controversial nickname of Taiwan as a ghost island and further explores its growing impact on contemporary literary and artistic creation in the local community. In the supernaturally enhanced accounts produced during the Qing rule, Taiwan is portrayed as the adobe of fantastic beasts and monsters with reference to a variety of legends and myths. During the Japanese occupation period, Taiwan was named by its colonizers as a “ghost island” due to its severe epidemic problems like malaria and cholera. This spectral label on Taiwan directly points to the political divide between the colonizers and the colonized in a symbolic light. In postwar Taiwan, the “ghost island” has continued to function as a thought-provoking identity of the contested island-nation. Intriguingly, the ghost-island identity has been widely adopted by Taiwanese writers, celebrities, and netizens to reflect the self-doubt and self-mockery of the islanders under the circumstance that Taiwan is comparable to an invisible ghost country not officially recognized by the United Nations. Given its colonial, cult, and political backdrops, ghost-island narrative has emerged as a notable trend in Taiwan literature and more. This presentation intends to expand the scope of the genre by taking into account the development and transformation of the ghost-island narrative in pop music, cinema, and even video games. Across platforms, ghost-island narrative serves as an effective medium that not only speaks to the historical past of the contested island-state but also channels political and psychological anxieties experienced by Taiwanese islanders in the twenty-first century.