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Nick Stember

@beckminster.bsky.social
101 followers 35 following 28 posts

Historian and translator of Chinese comics and science fiction.

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Reposted by Nick Stember
Damian M @damiandamiani.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
The first #ChinaComx workshop last week was a great success! Engaged discussions, provocative questions, fun talks, and overall a greatly inspiring two-and-half days of engaging with lianhuanhua and other Chinese comics. Thanks to all participants for taking their time!
Full room at Barbara Mittler’s opening keynote! Stephan Packard delivered the second keynoteWe ended the workshop with a hands-on session to browse the CATS Seifert Chinese Comics CollectionChinaComx PhD candidates Jiu Song and Aijia Zhang in conversation with Stephan Packard
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Reposted by Nick Stember
Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 03/09/2024
Ma Zhiyuan 馬致遠 (ca. 1250 - 1312), "To the tune 'Bo bu duan'"
布衣中,問英雄。
王圖霸業成何用?
禾黍高低六代宮。
楸梧遠近千官塚。 
一場惡夢。

Standing in humble homespun robes,
I question history's men of great esteem: 
What use were all your kingly plans; 
How long endured the tyrant's scheme? 
Palaces from the Six Dynasties 
Now fertilize the farmer's grain, 
And scraggly catalpa trees 
Mark loyal ministers' remains: 
All history is one bad dream.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 29/07/2024
Another well-known one from pre-1949 is Cao Hanmei’s (Zhang Guangyu’s brother) adaptation of Jinpingmei, which Huang Dingru has written about recently: www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3... Not sure if there is a translated version of the comic online though.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 29/07/2024
Hi Jess! Just saw this. If you’re looking for iconic/important long-form Chinese comics, I would suggest Zhang Guangyu’s Cartoon Journey to the West (1945), which I’ve also translated on my blog: www.nickstember.com/manhua-journ...
nickstember.com
Zhang Guangyu's Manhua Journey to the West (1945) - Part 1 of 6 - Nick Stember
Part 1 of 6 of a translation of Zhang Guangyu's 張光宇 (1900-1965) overlooked masterpiece, Manhua Journey to the West 西漫遊記.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 08/09/2023
Sarah Dauncey @ Uni Nottingham considers affective visions of disability in the 2nd #BACS2023 keynote “Emotional subjects: Citizenship, identity and the emotional world of disability in China”
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 08/09/2023
Leigh Jenco @ London School of Economics investigates moral responses to inequality in her paper “Validity and the Cult of Qing (Passion) in Late Ming Poetic Criticism” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 08/09/2023
Abandoned woman convention, meet the vulgar and unrefined husband convention 🔥🔥🔥
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 08/09/2023
Kar Yue Chan @ Hong Kong Metropolitan Uni explores the poetics of grief in her paper “Epitomizing the Poignancy in Poetry and Cantonese Opera: “The Heartbreaking Poetry” of Zhu Shuzhen” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 08/09/2023
Moxuan Luo @ Uni Hong Kong kicks off day 2 of #BACS2023 with his paper “The Evolution and Political Imagination of "Wu Hu Jiang"(五虎將) in Ming and Qing Fictions”
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Dylan K. Wang @ SOAS gets historical with his paper “Depicting Chinese Murders: Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee Mysteries as Illustrated by Himself” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Lindsey McLean-Melchor @ Uni Grenada considers the intersection of the personal and the political in her paper “Woman-Author, Woman-Subject: (Auto)biographical trends in non-fictional literature (2002-2019) by Chinese-British author Xue Xinran 薛欣然 (1958-)” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Yaqi Zhang @ Uni Leeds foregrounds the audience in her paper “A Case Study of the Reception of the Translation of Legends of the Condor Heroes Written by Jin Yong” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Mary Mazzilli @ Uni_of_Essex considers strategic self-fashioning in “Exophony, Translation, and Transnationalism in Sinophone contemporary writers” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Didn’t manage to get any pics—too much multitasking for my poor older millennial brain—but here are the abstracts for this fantastic panel #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Yang Shaoyu @ uniofwarwick delves into micro-narratives of wartime life in her paper “Memory Lost and Revived: Representations of the Nanjing Massacre in the Novels of Chinese American Writers and their Self-Translation” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Karita Kan @ HongKongPolyU questions ‘the end of rural China’ in the first keynote of #BACS2023 “Seeds of change: Fifteen years of China’s rural transformation”
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Yantao Sun (University of Leeds) investigates love and heroism in her paper “Reinventing ‘heroic sons and daughters’: a rising hybrid genre of web romantic fiction and the popularism imagination of self-community relationship in contemporary China” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Anna Antong Chen (University of Sydney) explores the mechanism of irony in her paper “The trauma narrative in Wang Xiaobo’s fiction: irony, memory and identity” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 07/09/2023
Will Gatherer (University of Queensland) gets meta with his paper “Anxiety in the anthropocene: Post-postmodernism and eco-consciousness within the contemporary novels of Ma Yuan (马原)” #BACS2023
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
Finally, Yang Hao (University of Lancaster) will bring the panel to a close with his paper “A Happy Excursion Against the China's Digital Leviathan” which looks at the Taoist allegory of the “happy excursion” [xiāoyáo yóu 逍遥游] to counter digital hegemony in daily life.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
Gao Shiyu (University of Edinburgh & Centre for Chinese Visual Art, Birmingham City University) will then turn to concerns about the constant threat of surveillance, espionage, and censorship with her paper “Surveillance Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Expanded Media Art.”
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
Next, Angela Becher (University of Liverpool) will present her paper “Decolonising virtual reality: Of Sinofuturism and other tales,” examining Sinophone media art that challenges dominant power structures and narratives in relation to the changes brought about by VR and AI.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
Our first presenter will be Li Wenzhu (University of Alberta) , who will be presenting her paper “The Assemblage of Desire, Power, and Subjectivity in People’s Republic of Desire” which looks at the 2018 documentary by Hao Wu on live streaming in China, particularly on the YY platform.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
I’ll also be chairing panel B5: New Media, New Art for #BACS2023, which will be held in the SE wing of Bush House, floor 2, room 10, Thursday 7 Sept 14:00 – 15:30.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
You can find out more about the conference here: bacsuk.org.uk/conferences/... #BACS2023
bacsuk.org.uk
BACS Conference 2023 – BACS: The British Association for Chinese Studies
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
Last but not least, Wei Hao Goh will conclude the panel with his paper, “Nothing Is Real: The Post-human in Gigant DOKU: LuYang the Destroyer (2021),” exploring a Buddhist-inspired rejection and affirmation of the fragmentary, transient self.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
Turning the 1990s, Kang Jiaqi’s paper “‘China’s art world has the cold and the flu’: ‘Product art’ and the New History Group in 1990s Wuhan” will consider vocabularies of contagion and anxieties about globalisation in Wuhan in the early 1990s.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
I’ll be kicking things off with my paper “Provocative Prototypes: He Youzhi and the artistic turn in early Reform era Chinese comic books” which looks at an attempt to square the circle of art and pop culture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts ca 1980.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
My co-panelists will be Kang Jiaqi and Wei Hao Goh, and our chair will be Joshua Jiehong Jiang (Centre for Chinese Visual Arts, Birmingham City University). You can find us in the SE wing of Bush House, floor 2, room 12 from 16:00-18:00 on Friday 8 Sept.
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Nick Stember @beckminster.bsky.social · 06/09/2023
For anyone who will be attending the British Association of Chinese Studies conference King's College London (Thur 7– Fri 8 Sept), I will be presenting a paper for panel F8: Making Do: Politics, Tradition, and Identity in Postsocialist Chinese Visual Cultures. #BACS2023 (thread)
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