This panel, featuring four scholars, examines how body, representation, and narrative transcend the boundaries between East and West, shedding light on the intricate cultural, historical, and geographical interplay within the contemporary globalized world.

In “The Vietnamese-American Body in Motion: Diasporic Identity and Embodiment in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” Kai-su Wu, using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, analyzes the narrator’s body as a metaphor for diasporic dislocation and identity navigation. Wu examines how the narrator adopts embodied communication to connect his lived experience in the U.S. with the enduring, haunting memories of his family’s past in Vietnam.

Liying Wang, in her presentation titled “When Mulan Crosses the Pacific Ocean: The Chances and Challenges,” discusses several Mulan-themed adaptations in the post-Disney era (since 1998), investigating how American cultural imperialism both blessed and cursed the story of this Chinese heroine. While globalization transformed Mulan’s legend from Chinese national literature into world literature, it also posed a challenge for China to reclaim her by initiating a series of ideological, generic, transmedial, and narratological modifications.

Lijun Wang’s paper, “Shangri-La in American Apocalypse: Toward a Contemporary Tibetan Orientalism,” aims to renew and complicate our understanding of how Tibet is reimagined in contemporary American apocalyptic fantasies. By focusing on disaster films and science fiction such as 2012 (2009), The Creator (2023), and Zero K (2016), Wang argues that while the Western convention of romanticizing Tibet continues to permeate, the patterns observed by Donald Lopez Jr. have notably evolved. Although Tibet remains idealized as a utopia, the West is now portrayed as a dystopia, with Westerners depicted as destroyers of the world while Tibetans emerge as saviors.

In “The Western Tentacles and the Chinese Great Serpent: Cthulhu Literature in China,” Jingyun Xiao traces how Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos was introduced into China and gave birth to a genre that might be called “Chinese Cthulhu literature” over the last few decades. By comparing four Chinese Cthulhu tales with Lovecraft’s original works, Xiao argues that Cthulhu, the evil god originating from Western modernism, has intertwined with Chinese mythology, history and culture, contributing to transnational circulations within the globalized mediascape of Cthulhu.

Together, these four panelists engage with border-crossings of the body, representation, and narrative between the East and the West, offering rich insights into the globalized nature of comparative literature and culture.

The large-scale release of Chinese women’s book series in the 1990s, is often regarded as a sign of the prosperity of local women’s literature. Yet from most critics’ perspective, gender, as a cultural capital, was possibly named, interpreted and manipulated by the cultural market, undermining the radicality of its representations and hindering the generation of gender politics. Firstly, this paper sorts out the representative women’s book series published during this period. By focusing on the related cultural producers(female authors and editors) and their texts, this paper then outlines their differentiated ways of articulating western feminism and local femininity, as well as their ambivalent attitudes towards cultural consumption.

Thereafter, the “Red Poppy” series, one of the largest book series of female authors edited by male, serves as the main case. The “red poppy” imagery which denotes threat, seduction and revolution in western culture and Chinese experiences of modernity, seemingly empowers female discourse, but might once again stereotype women as the mystic and heterogeneous other. The second volume of this series initiates the “yingji” form, which extensively displays female authors’ own photographs. Through the innovative text-image interplay(laying out and describing these photos), the female authors tentatively construct their self-image, identity and private history. During this process, women are not always in the passive position of “being edited/watched”; their everyday interpretations unveil and even rebel against the disciplines of body imposed by national ideologies in the Chinese visual and textual tradition. The practice, to some extent, adjusts the deviating representations about femininity and its cultural potentials primarily manifested by “red poppy”. And its trans-media trait, has henceforth become common in Chinese female authors’ strive for their discourse resources.

This paper examines the auto-orientalizing discourse articulated by the eroticized Chinese female body in Shan Sa’s novel Les Conspirateurs and Angelin Preljocaj’s choreographic work The Fresco, both of which depict inter-racial love stories that navigate between East and West, Self and Other. Les Conspirateurs unfolds as a psychological and political thriller where an American spy and a Chinese spy engage in a complex game of disguise, deception, and seduction. Their encounter blurs the boundaries between lies and realities, and layers of identity intersect and dissolve. In The Fresco, inspired by a traditional Chinese legend, Preljocaj reimagines the motif of the "journey to the Orient." The story follows two British travelers who become mesmerized by a woman depicted on a fresco and are drawn into an illusory, fantastical realm where imagination and desire intertwine.

Both works traverse the cultural and emotional complexities of cross-cultural encounters, depicting the Chinese female body as a contested site for external gaze, desire, and agency. Despite reflecting contradictions generated by orientalist discourse, these bodies also become spaces for negotiation and transformation.

Addressing a key research gap, this study explores how the legacy of orientalist representations continues to shape modern intercultural narratives across literature and dance. While much scholarship focuses on 19th and 20th-century dichotomies of orientalism, there is limited attention to how these dynamics endure and evolve in contemporary contexts. By employing postcolonial theories, including Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and Édouard Glissant’s chaos-monde, the paper argues that these works represent a shift from rigid dichotomies to fluid hybridization. The Chinese female body emerges not only as a symbol of contradiction but as a locus of creative potential, articulating a vision of cultural intermixing where identities blend, disrupt, and reimagine themselves in a globalized artistic landscape.