Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World

Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World examines reportage as an important aesthetic form of cultural production in the Sinophone world. Originating as a proletarian fiction in interwar Europe, reportage spread around the world, coming into its own in the Sinophone world from the 1930s to today. Going beyond fact-based journalism, reportage is pursued through a variety of artistic forms and media, from nonfiction writing to photography to documentary film. Reportage's plurimedial representations facilitate and amplify intersectional struggles against multiple forms of social and political oppression. Engaging its audiences in affectives ethico-political exchanges with (human or non-human) subjects, reportage promotes audiences' empathetic responses to the democratic appeals of marginalized groups whose status, identity, or situation manifest emergent ethical challenges in the society of their time.

This work offers new understandings of reportage's dialectical relationship with its readership, by evoking sympathetic identifications with personal contemplations of place, hearth, and senses of belonging. Covering a breadth of media across mainland China, Taiwan, and the Sinophone diaspora in the US and Japan, this book examines how intermediality cultivates distinctive expressions in reportage, cross-cultural empathy, and ethico-political relationships between the reporter, photographer, filmmaker, and their surroundings.