Papers by XUENAN CAO
On Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scene
On Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scene, by Heather Inwood. Seattle: University of Wash... more On Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scene, by Heather Inwood. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Pp. 274. $30.00 (paper), $75.00 (cloth)."Why is contemporary poetry so lonely" (4) in a time of commercialization and mass media? Along with such poignancy is a paradoxical need to safeguard the elite literary tradition of poetry through blatant collusions with the market and mass media. In a nation with a long tradition in and cultural memory tethered to poetry, contemporary poetry in China has supposedly failed in its dual mission of history--- writing and nation---building, and has thereby lost the aura of the art. As much as these sentiments may echo claims of the "death of poetry," Heather Inwood has found an altered but vibrant poetry scene in contemporary China.Verse Going Viral showcases uproarious poetry scenes online, in print, in oral forms, and in the news. This book defers aesthetic judgments; rather, it challenges readers' assumpt...
Mythorealism and Enchanted Time: Yan Lianke’s Explosion Chronicles
Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 2016
In The Explosion Chronicles (Zhalie zhi 炸裂志), Yan Lianke combines ancient and contemporary practi... more In The Explosion Chronicles (Zhalie zhi 炸裂志), Yan Lianke combines ancient and contemporary practices of constructing and destructing, building and burning, in a literary style he calls mythorealism. The fictional chronicles relay a history of development written in the modern language of growth, documenting the development of a community called Explosion, which subsumes a discussion of economic growth within a theme of twisted temporality. This article uses The Explosion Chronicles to interrogate the temporal assumptions inherent in contemporary discourses of economic development in China. At the heart of my analysis of these tropes is a critique of the ideological function of linear time. Time can be arrested in economic growth, becoming an interface that activates intersubjective gazes before narratives mature.
Theory, Culture & Society, 2019
For theorists interested in screen cultures and the digital economy, looking beyond Facebook and ... more For theorists interested in screen cultures and the digital economy, looking beyond Facebook and YouTube prompts a more refined conceptualization of participation and monetization on social networks. This paper examines YY as representative of Chinese platforms that monetize spectacles of social inequality. I first discuss why these financially successful platforms have eluded the attention of media and cultural critics, and then explain how these social network platforms blend subversive texting with streaming through a format called ‘bullet screen’. This format collapses social inequality into a spectacle of money flowing and vanishing on screen. This investigation contributes to the theoretical discussion of mixed-semiotics, reorients several Marxian neologisms and explains what texting means on screen in both semiotic and economic terms.
The Multiple Bodies of The Three-Body Problem
Extrapolation, 2019
Unbeknownst to most anglophone readers, Cixin Liu’s acclaimed Santi trilogy has been published in... more Unbeknownst to most anglophone readers, Cixin Liu’s acclaimed Santi trilogy has been published in three discrete versions, each one with unique features. In its earliest incarnation, the first nove...
ArXiv, 2022
The right to AI explainability has consolidated as a consensus in the research community and poli... more The right to AI explainability has consolidated as a consensus in the research community and policy-making. However, a key component of explainability has been missing: extrapolation, which describes the extent to which AI models can be clueless when they encounter unfamiliar samples (i.e., samples outside a “convex hull” of their training sets, as we will explain down below). We report that AI models extrapolate outside their range of familiar data, frequently and without notifying the users and stakeholders. Knowing whether a model has extrapolated or not is a fundamental insight that should be included in explaining AI models in favor of transparency and accountability. Instead of dwelling on the negatives, we offer ways to clear the roadblocks in promoting AI transparency. Our analysis commentary accompanying practical clauses useful to include in AI regulations such as the National AI Initiative Act in the US and the AI Act by the European Commission.
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 2016
Yan Lianke (b. 1958) is one of China's foremost contemporary writers of fiction and short stories... more Yan Lianke (b. 1958) is one of China's foremost contemporary writers of fiction and short stories, winning the Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2000 and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014. This paper will examine the villages in Yan's three novels, Ri Guang Liu Nian (Time That Flows, 1998), Lenin's Kisses (2013) and The Explosion Chronicles ( ), and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites are unbounded by a ruralurban distinction. In his original style off mythorealism (shenshi zhuyi 神实主义),Yan exposes the flesh and blood of peasants against the historical backdrop of traumatic urbanisation in China through a rhetorical excess of both monstrous bodies and inanimate mannequins, showcasing a paradoxically professed non-existence of biological limits, such as illness and death. Yan's works challenge the framework of biopolitics and its theoretical implication on the topic of neo-liberal governmentality in post-1949 China. Biopolitics works on the basis of keeping life and death in binary opposite categories. Yet in Yan's novels, the sharp distinction between life and death is destabilised.The villagers' bodies are neither secure nor precarious. These liminal existences drive economic growth in the space between the rural and the urban.
Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, 2016
and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites... more and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites are unbounded by a ruralurban distinction. In his original style off mythorealism (shenshi zhuyi 神实主义),Yan exposes the flesh and blood of peasants against the historical backdrop of traumatic urbanisation in China through a rhetorical excess of both monstrous bodies and inanimate mannequins, showcasing a paradoxically professed non-existence of biological limits, such as illness and death. Yan's works challenge the framework of biopolitics and its theoretical implication on the topic of neo-liberal governmentality in post-1949 China. Biopolitics works on the basis of keeping life and death in binary opposite categories. Yet in Yan's novels, the sharp distinction between life and death is destabilised.The villagers' bodies are neither secure nor precarious. These liminal existences drive economic growth in the space between the rural and the urban.
To what extent should we trust AI models when they extrapolate?
ArXiv, 2022
Many applications affecting human lives rely on models that have come to be known under the umbre... more Many applications affecting human lives rely on models that have come to be known under the umbrella of machine learning and artificial intelligence. These AI models are usually complicated mathematical functions that make decisions and predictions by mapping from an input space to an output space. Stakeholders are interested to know the rationales behind models’ decisions; that understanding requires knowledge about models’ functional behavior. We study this functional behavior in relation to the data used to create the models. On this topic, scholars have often assumed that models do not extrapolate, i.e., they learn from their training samples and process new input by interpolation. This assumption is questionable: we show that models extrapolate frequently; the extent of extrapolation varies and can be socially consequential. We demonstrate that extrapolation happens for a substantial portion of datasets more than one would consider reasonable. How can we trust models if we do n...
On Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scene
On Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scene, by Heather Inwood. Seattle: University of Wash... more On Verse Going Viral: China's New Media Scene, by Heather Inwood. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Pp. 274. $30.00 (paper), $75.00 (cloth)."Why is contemporary poetry so lonely" (4) in a time of commercialization and mass media? Along with such poignancy is a paradoxical need to safeguard the elite literary tradition of poetry through blatant collusions with the market and mass media. In a nation with a long tradition in and cultural memory tethered to poetry, contemporary poetry in China has supposedly failed in its dual mission of history--- writing and nation---building, and has thereby lost the aura of the art. As much as these sentiments may echo claims of the "death of poetry," Heather Inwood has found an altered but vibrant poetry scene in contemporary China.Verse Going Viral showcases uproarious poetry scenes online, in print, in oral forms, and in the news. This book defers aesthetic judgments; rather, it challenges readers' assumpt...
Discourses on urbanism: "Reality televisions" by Jiangsu Satellite Television since 2010
Since 2004, the Chinese media scene has been dominated by what is called the “pan-reality televis... more Since 2004, the Chinese media scene has been dominated by what is called the “pan-reality television” trend. Reality television is capable of synchronizing the effects of all the political, economic, and cultural factors into the participants’ actions and becoming a powerful reconstruction of the social environment from which it emerges. The thesis takes Jiangsu Satellite TV (JSTV)’s golden hour reality televisions as the case to address the question of how they express, reflect and formulate the imaginations and understandings of urban living, focusing on the cultural, social, and political specificities of these reality television shows. The thesis is an attempt to bring into discussions ignored aspects of popular television culture that can be potential source for furthering the understanding of urban conditions in China. The thesis finds that the images, the discursive fields, and the procedures of the games in the reality television shows and the governmental regulations impose...
Book Review: The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 By Shaoling Ma
MCLC, 2021
The Stone and the Wireless is a convincing critique of the notion that China lacked communication... more The Stone and the Wireless is a convincing critique of the notion that China lacked communication networks before the advent of Western technoscience. The book undermines any simplistic answer to the Needham Question (a.k.a., “the ‘Needham paradigm’ postulating the supposed absence of modern science in China,” 10), instead tracing a complex web of media technologies in the late Qing period (1861-1906). Ma documents the variety of strategies Qing diplomats, writers, poets, and other media practitioners employed in their efforts to make sense of the era by tinkering with existing technologies through the practical use of technoscience. Ma sheds light on imaginary strategies as well—unrealized media scenarios that nonetheless helped shape the narrative of communication in the late Qing, as found in (gendered) Techno-utopian visions of the future.
Extrapolation, 2019
Unbeknownst to most anglophone readers, Cixin Liu's acclaimed Santi trilogy has been published in... more Unbeknownst to most anglophone readers, Cixin Liu's acclaimed Santi trilogy has been published in three discrete versions, each one with unique features. In its earliest incarnation, the first novel of the Santi trilogy was published serially in a Chinese sf magazine before appearing in novel form in Chinese. The third iteration, an English translation titled The Three-Body Problem, was primarily based on the initial serialized version. In each version, the title is reimagined, pages are shuffled around, and the narrative rhythm is modified. Taking The Three-Body Problem as its key example, this paper provides perspectives on how to approach a fiction that has not one but multiple "bodies."
Bullet Screens (Danmu): Texting, Online Streaming, and the Spectacle of Social Inequality on Chinese Social Networks.
Theory, Culture & Society, 2021
For theorists interested in screen cultures and the digital economy, looking beyond Facebook and ... more For theorists interested in screen cultures and the digital economy, looking beyond Facebook and YouTube prompts a more refined conceptualization of participation and monetization on social networks. This paper examines YY as representative of Chinese platforms that monetize spectacles of social inequality. I first discuss why these financially successful platforms have eluded the attention of media and cultural critics, and then explain how these social network platforms blend subversive texting with streaming through a format called ‘bullet screen’. This format collapses social inequality into a spectacle of money flowing and vanishing on screen. This investigation contributes to the theoretical discussion of mixed-semiotics, reorients several Marxian neologisms and explains what texting means on screen in both semiotic and economic terms.
and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites... more and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites are unbounded by a ruralurban distinction. In his original style off mythorealism (shenshi zhuyi 神实主义),Yan exposes the flesh and blood of peasants against the historical backdrop of traumatic urbanisation in China through a rhetorical excess of both monstrous bodies and inanimate mannequins, showcasing a paradoxically professed non-existence of biological limits, such as illness and death. Yan's works challenge the framework of biopolitics and its theoretical implication on the topic of neo-liberal governmentality in post-1949 China. Biopolitics works on the basis of keeping life and death in binary opposite categories. Yet in Yan's novels, the sharp distinction between life and death is destabilised.The villagers' bodies are neither secure nor precarious. These liminal existences drive economic growth in the space between the rural and the urban.
“Mythorealism and Enchanted Time: Yan Lianke’s Explosion Chronicles,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China. 10.1 (2016): 103-112.
Book Reviews by XUENAN CAO
On The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906, by Shaoling Ma
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 2021
“Book Review: Verses Going Viral by Heather Inwood,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, and Reviews. 37 (2015).
Teaching Documents by XUENAN CAO
This course aims to examine stories we tell ourselves about China. How do popular fictions, films... more This course aims to examine stories we tell ourselves about China. How do popular fictions, films, search engines, and social media shape the concept of China? What are the social, technological, political, and economic contexts of Chinese media and communication systems? Why do the U. S. media produce either a "sunshine" or a "noir" version of the Chinese state? How do international politics influence the transnational circulation of cultural products from China? As a broad, accessible seminar on contemporary China (1979-), this course introduces salient themes in the studies of the political economy of Chinese popular culture.