This project examines the multi-layered interactions between Chinese and Western detective fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. I analyze Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the Chinese translations of Conan Doyle, and Cheng Xiaoqing's Huo Sang cases, using them as cultural lenses through which to read these interactions. Shaped by a variety of conflicting and indigenizing cultural elements, both Chinese and English detective discourses perform a profound identity crisis and a sense of haunting anxiety as they articulate interactive relationships between the Orient and the Occident. By constructing the Orient in his Holmes stories as a place of disease, contagion, disaster, barbarism, and chaos, Conan Doyle presents an imminent Oriental menacing force that threatens the superiority of the British Empire. But at the same time, ambiguities and textual tensions permeate Conan Doyle's Orientalist discourse that destabilize such modern conceptualizations as gender, race, identity, reason, science, and progress. Conan Doyle's desire to denationalize the discourse of Western modernity was intercepted by a simultaneous process of nationalization, manifested in the fears and anxieties of the Empire as it faced an emerging Orient that rebelled against colonial exploitations and strove for modernization and independence. By contrast, I perceive in the interactions between Chinese translators and Western writers an almost contrary trajectory. Chinese translators of Western detective fiction were obsessed with nationalism, using modern detective fiction as an educational tool to bring enlightenment to Chinese society. This process of nationalization co-existed with their denationalizing project of adopting the Western model of modernity that they saw embodied in the Holmes stories. Despite their advocacy of Western-style modernization, however, Chinese translators and writers of detective fiction offered an active response to modern conceptualizations such as science and progress through a subtle and complicated process of indigenization. Based on my analyses of the strategies used in translating Holmes and the ambiguities presented in Cheng Xiaoqing's Huo Sang cases, I argue that these marginalized May Fourth intellectuals, whether consciously or not, applied native Chinese detective genre gong-an and traditional cultural values as powerful tools in negotiating cultural difference with the Holmes detective discourse.

My dissertation bridges Chinese film studies, Sinophone studies, transnational feminism, and gender and sexuality studies through a comparative study of women's cinema in post-1976 China, post-1984 Hong Kong, and post-1987 Taiwan.

In my dissertation, I examine five Sinophone women's films--Huang Shuqin's Woman, Demon, Human (1987), Li Yu's Fish and Elephant (2001), Zero Chou's Spider Lilies (2007), Ann Hui's Song of the Exile (1990), and Mabel Cheung's The Soong Sisters (1997). I investigate socio-political influences on the filmmaking practices of Sinophone women directors and the receptions of these films in the global market. I argue that these films' innovative use of melodrama, re-excavation of repressed family stories, and representations of entanglements among gender, nation-state, modernization, and identity enact negotiations by these women directors of the forces of Confucianism, colonialism, socialism, patriarchal nationalisms, and heterosexual norms in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong at the turn of the century.

This project fills a lacuna in current scholarship on Sinophone women's cinema and intervenes in current debates on nationalism, gender, and sexuality in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the U.S.A.

This dissertation explores the poetics of water and liquidity in the works of some filmmakers, poets, and writers. With the help of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and cinema theory, I suggest that, at times, the image of water—on screen or on the page—becomes a sort of trace of the writer’s or filmmaker’s generativity. Furthermore, I propose that this “special use” of water both points to, and shapes, what I name “liquid visuality”: the actualization of a fluid and generative, if not “visionary,” mode of seeing.

In Chapter 1, I chart the course of the eye’s, as well as the cinema’s, relationship with water, and I show how certain poets, writers, and filmmakers, in line with Deleuze’s theory, allude to and engage a liquid mode of seeing. I suggest that liquid visuality dismantles reliance on what Deleuze calls solid perception, which often has violent undercurrents.

In Chapter 2, I argue that the sea acts as the forza generatrice, or generative force, of Italian director Federico Fellini’s cinema. Reimagining Millicent Marcus’s notion of Fellini’s “hyperfilm” as a Deleuzian-Guattarian “assemblage,” I suggest that the image of the sea within this liquid and metamorphosing intertext materializes the director’s creativity, while also calling upon and shaping the film-viewer’s liquid and generative vision.

Chapter 3 examines the prolific presence of water in Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s films. I argue that “Tarkovsky’s wash,” or what could be considered the director’s painting with water on screen, renders material his unique aesthetic of time. Furthermore, I show how this liquid materiality implicates the director’s spiritual “truth” as creative immanence.

In Chapter 4, I argue that the real protagonist of the Disney film Moana is liquid eco-intersubjectivity. Making use of, in addition to Deleuze’s theory, an array of Oceanian scholarship, Èdouard Glissant's “poetics of Relation,” and deep ecology, I show how the film works at dismantling the Western viewer’s solid perception with more liquid, relational modes of perceiving.

This dissertation is concerned with the role of desire in the aesthetic experience; more specifically, it focuses on the ways in which we project and respond affectively to a work of art as formative processes of subjectivity. Inspired by Maurice Blanchot's "The Gaze of Orpheus," which links desire to errancy and "errance" (the French for wandering) and situates them as constitutive artistic forces, the guiding hypothesis is that the aesthetic experience is channeled via the mechanics of language and the gaze by the "errancies of desire"--the wanderings and errs of the desiring subject. Consequently, because desire is fluid and unpredictable, it produces heterogeneous and nomadic forms of subjectivity that undermine essentialist notions of cultural difference and specificity.

Adopting a transnational perspective, this dissertation examines a culturally diverse corpus of contemporary works, including postmodern American fiction, postcolonial African novels, and Taiwanese Second Wave cinema. Methodologically, I first highlight the functions of the errancies of desire in each work as a twofold process of affective projection and response, and second, I analyze how instances of transnational intertextuality position contextual experiences of subjectivity in proximity to one another by bridging differences inscribed within geo-political time and space.

Two interconnected thematic lenses structure my approach, each corresponding to a section of the dissertation: the first section investigates the errancies of the viewer's desire in films by Michael Haneke, Spike Jonze, and Tsai Ming-Liang by focusing on the aesthetical and ethical dimensions of subjectivization in film spectatorship; the second analyzes the errancies of male desire in novels by Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, and Alain Mabanckou as it pertains to hegemonic constructs of masculinity and culturally-sanctioned forms of imperial violence.

By utilizing a comparative methodology to highlight the role of affect and desire and the effect of cross-cultural intertextuality on apperception, this dissertation demonstrates how each text unsettles perceptions of cultural difference by producing new transnational subjectivities. Therefore, the aesthetical inquiries of this project further contribute to the poststructuralist critique of metaphysics by investigating ethical issues of difference and subjectivity in specific instances wherein we bare witness to the virtual dissolution of national boundaries.

This dissertation explores how creative collaborative practice transforms subjectivity, before it is leveraged as an industrial resource. Raising key questions about the nature of collaborative practice itself, I discuss in detail the histories and processes of select collaborative groups in order to unfold an idea of intensity among participants that exceeds the boundaries of each artist without eradicating individuality. I argue that from the commingled exchange occurring in a material and discursive mash-up called "the mangle," emergent onto-epistemologies arise that disrupt static physical and identity formations. From this disruption, the ways in which language or sense-making functions are transformed and begin to include alternative ways of knowing that occur in bafflement, the inability to comprehend, and dysfunction. I work rigorously to transform the chaotic status of these negative terms into something that can be understood as lively, creative, and transformative in their own right and not merely opposites of order, understanding, clarity, and sanity. Overall, the project is highly trans-disciplinary in that I analyze art works and art practices, films, musical performances, composition techniques, and my own long-term creative collaborative work with a group called Multipoint. Further, in a very focused effort to transgress disciplinary boundaries, I place Material Feminism and post-Marxist theory alongside the philosophical works of Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Agamben, and Derrida. Divided into five chapters, the project addresses different aspects of intricate sharing and mangled time. The preface and the first chapter introduce the concept of trans-subjectivity and outline a chaotic, intense description of collaborative practice as I conceive it for this project, tracing a myopic history from the 1950s to the present to consider various forms of collaboration and their effects. The second chapter imagines networked, complex bodies in the video works of Natalie Bookchin and in installation art generally. The third considers the way language becomes complicated and remade through forms of virtuosity and incomprehensibility, while the fourth develops a theory of a-productivity involving lingering in conditions of highly queered time. The last chapter reads Giorgio Agamben's "whatever being" through Derrida's concept of impossible hospitality to envision the potentials for emergent forms of community.