Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Asian Studies at Colgate University
Professor Crespi has taught courses in Chinese language, literature, and culture at Colgate University since 2002. He began his scholarly career studying modern Chinese poetry, and in 2009 published the book Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China (University of Hawai’i Press). While exploring archives and used bookshops in China for Voices in the 1990s, he began to encounter a very different, and often quite visually arresting, kind of material: China’s cartoons, or “manhua” (漫画) from the middle decades of the 20th Century. His first publication on manhua introduces and explores the magazine Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua 时代漫画), published in Shanghai from 1934-1937. That richly illustrated essay can be found at the MIT Visualizing Cultures website.
His most recent book, Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn (University of California Press, 2020), is the culmination of a decade of work spent tracking down and examining rare magazines and other ephemeral materials where manhua appeared from the 1920s through the 1950s. Manhua Modernity explores the intersection of manhua, magazines, and modernity in China across the forty years when these polymorphic pictures figured prominently in popular periodicals dedicated to everything from introducing cosmopolitan city life in Shanghai, to promoting national defense against the Japanese invasion, to mobilizing the masses for political campaigns related to the Korean War, the Hundred Flowers movement, and the Great Leap Forward. Manhua gave visual form to evolving imaginations of fashion, humor, satire, propaganda, and much more. Across all these topics, he argues that to truly understand manhua, one has to go beyond the notion of the “cartoon” or “comic” to see how these images thrived on the lively pages of China’s popular magazines.
He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2001. Aside from his two books, Crespi has published translations and scholarly articles in range of journals and edited volumes.
Panel 6 | Figural Representations of the Past and the Future
Reality and Seriality in The Wandering Life of Sanmao, 1947–1948
Abstract
In the year 1947, as civil war raged in China and the Cold War cast a chill over the globe, a wordless comic featuring a gourd-headed, homeless waif named Sanmao captured the imagination of Chinese newspaper readers.
The appeal of the strip, The Wandering Life of Sanmao, was due in no small part to its creator Zhang Leping’s (1910-1992) skill as a visual storyteller. But what truly breathed life into Sanmao, making him for many readers a “real” person animated by their own hopes and fears, was the strip’s serial form.
Appearing over eighteen months in the local news section of the Shanghai daily Dagong bao, surrounded by stories of the city that echoed the stories in the strip, Sanmao was a child of serial narrative.
This conference presentation introduces my current NEH-supported project to both analyze and reconstruct the serial symbiosis of fact and fiction in the Sanmao comics of 1947-1948.
On the one hand, I consider the audience affect of Wandering Life as generated by attributes of serial narrative, such as temporal gaps in storytelling, refusal of closure, concurrent reading of other serials, real-time interaction with current events, physical placement of a strip within a newspaper, and ritualized, collaborative reading practices.
On the other, I describe my attempt to graphically recreate some of these attributes in a translation that recreates for today’s readers the historical precarity that Zhang Leping’s strip represented to Chinese readers on the eve of the communist takeover and, more importantly, the birth of a certain celebrated historian.
