Jiwei Xiao

Jiwei Xiao is Professor of Chinese and Cinema Studies in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Fairfield University. She is the author of Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (Routledge, 2022). Her scholarship on literature and film has been published in journals such as New Left Review, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and Rocky Mountain Review. She has also contributed film essays and interviews to magazines including Cineaste and New York Review of Books.

The project

Title: Asian Approaches to World Cinema: 1982-2022

"The New Asian Wave is neither an activist endeavor of a group of directors devoted to the promotion of an East Asian regional cinema nor is it a film movement that has a collective manifesto or agenda, but rather has organically evolved. It has been periodized by individual filmmakers’ high-profile successes at major film festivals, gaining influences in the global sphere of art cinema as well as in national-regional cultural scenes. The book investigates how the new Asian cinema produced between 1982 and 2022 absorbed the energy and materials from the profound social-political changes taking place in Asia and the world over the last four decades, how filmmakers have survived the double rejections from political censorship and commercial market by gaining crucial support from overseas, and how their daring films unsettled both international and national film establishments. My interest in the topic was sparked by two significant developments in global cinema that took place between 1982 and 2022: the rise of Asian cinema and the shift in film studies towards a more expansive view of world cinema. However, although Asian cinema has seen tremendous growth and immense popularity on a global scale, “Asian art cinema” has not received adequate attention and has primarily been analyzed within the framework of national cinema and with the approach of auteur study. My new book will address this gap by conducting a comprehensive examination of both individual styles and common features of Asian art cinema in the transnational mode. Through extensive research, including visiting archives and libraries, attending film festivals, and speaking with filmmakers and other film scholars and professionals, I hope to offer a fresh and nuanced perspective on the formation and development of a new dynamic Asian art cinema in both inter-Asian and international contexts."

Selective Bibliography

• Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature (Routledge, 2022; paperback, hardcover, & e-book)
• “The Novel of Details in Chinese Literary History.” New Left Review, Issue 145, Jan/Feb, 2024.
• “A Body of Her Own: An Interview with Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka.” Cineaste, Summer 2023, Vol. XL VIII, No. 3, pp. 28-33.
• “Make it New! An Interview with Qiu Jiongjiong on A New Old Play.” Cineaste, Winter 2022, Vol. XLVIII, No.1, pp. 20-25. 
• “Into the Uncharted Zone: Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake,” The New York Review of Books, March 14, 2020. 
• Jiwei Xiao & Dudley Andrew (Co-authors). “Poetics and the Periphery: The Journey of Kaili Blues.” Cineaste Web Exclusive, Summer 2019.
• “Creating a Cinema of Dream and Memory: An Interview with Bi Gan.” Cineaste, Vol. XLIV, No. 3, Summer 2019: pp. 17-21. (Essay and Interview)
• “China Unraveled: Violence, Sin and Art in Jia Zhangke’s Touch of Sin.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 4, Summer 2015, pp. 24-35.
• “A Traveler's Glance: Antonioni in China.” New Left Review, Issue 79, Jan/Feb 2013, pp.103-120. *This article has been translated into Spanish.