The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. From China’s long twentieth century scarred by imperialist encroachments and national humiliation, the War remains one of the most traumatic and consequential historical experiences. In contemporary cultural memory, the War is often remembered for immense human costs and brutal violence. Without losing sight of these human or inhuman realities, this talk invites the audience to revisit the War and its legacies from the perspective of nonhuman animals.
Animals play various roles in war, serving as messengers, sources of nutrition, beasts of burden, and companions to human soldiers. Following a pigeon, a cow, and an elephant, this talk examines how animals figure in literary and filmic imaginations of the War, and how they sometimes resist or exceed the roles assigned to them. These case studies also reveal how Chinese-speaking writers and filmmakers from the early 20th century to the present construct memories of the War by positioning the human condition in relation to other forms of life. By reimagining the Second Sino-Japanese War with animals, this talk seeks to unpack both the promises and perils of ecological connection in times of conflict, division, and destruction.
About the Speaker
Dingru Huang is an assistant professor at the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese literature from Harvard University. Her research and teaching engage with literary modernism, wartime cultural production, posthumanism, and environmental humanities in China and Global East Asia, with particular attention to the roles played by nonhuman animals. Her scholarly work has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Comparative Literature in China, Chung-wai Literary Quarterly, and Ex-position. Aside from academic research, she enjoys writing short stories about both human and nonhuman animals. Her stories can be found in Shanghai Literature and UNITAS.