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Sheng-Mei Ma

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specialising in Asian Diaspora and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of ten books: On East-West (2021); Off-White (2019); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); and Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). He is also the co-editor of four books, including Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile (2018), and the author of a collection of poetry in Chinese.

Covid-19 Triumphalism in China’s 2020 Docudramas

Just as Trump vociferated throughout 2020 regarding the “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu,” China was slowly turning international bad publicity to its advantage. Weiji, or crisis in the Chinese language, comprises two words: danger and opportunity. Flipping the former into the latter, Chinese propaganda for domestic consumption does not help Asian minorities in the United States; rather, they exacerbate Sinophobia within U.S. conservative media and the echo chamber of nearly half of U.S. voters favouring Trumpism in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. From the perspective of an Asian immigrant in the United States, one who had pledged the unnatural “Naturalization Oath” of renouncing “all [former] allegiance and fidelity,” Covid-19 encapsulates a quandary, sharpening one’s identity, shall we say, neither here nor there. (“Former” implied in the oath may as well be “formal,” as informal—affective and psychic—filaments linger long after overt political acts.) In the eyes of the fatherland, those […]