“Why My Robot Wife Divorced Me”: Genre and Labor in Post-Mao Chinese Literature

Join Paola Iovene for a talk on functions of science fiction in post-Mao China.

Featured Speaker: Paola Iovene, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

The speaker will discuss the functions of science fiction in post-Mao China, tracing parallels with popular science writings that circulated at the time of the Great Leap Forward and detailing the ways in which writers redefined the literary credentials of the genre. While allegedly promoting science, science fiction stories of the early 1980s recounted weird events and explored unconventional scenarios, thus helping expand the scope of non-realist writing. Most crucially, the genre introduced a new hierarchy between manual and mental labor. In contrast to the glorification of physical labor in the literature and arts of the previous decades, science fiction stories associated manual labor with vulgarity and uncouthness, or with a primitive stage of human evolution attributed to non-Chinese natives of distant lands, or, most frequently, with (female) robots. The laboring body was no longer the essential element that defined humanity, but rather an obstacle to future developments—the sub-human residue of a technological regime that was about to be overcome. The speaker suggests that at a time when new social and economic distinctions emerged, the main labor performed by the genre of science fiction was to celebrate the Chinese mind as disembodied intellect.