Academic CV
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. I also work as a freelance writer and editor. I've written about everything from Tohoku to turntablists to Taiwanese queer fiction and I've edited everything from Kickstarter copy to academic articles. If you have a project you'd like me to contribute to or to look at, get in touch!
My book project, Getting Electrocuted: Media and the Reconfiguration of Postsocialist Chinese Literature, argues that beginning in the late 1980s, Chinese writers articulated the problems of creative labor of the postsocialist era as problems of media. During this period, neoliberal reforms of Chinese culture industries pushed writers to find new roles as authors creating intellectual property, cultural entrepreneurs creating popular entertainment for the masses, curators assembling postmodern pastiches, or “hacks” writing simply to make a living. At the same time, the persistence of socialist institutions of cultural production meant that writers had to continue to grapple with, but could also borrow and adapt, the legacies of the socialist era. Television, film, and digital media provided alternative models for creative work and for how creators and their audience could relate to each other. As a result, not only did Chinese writers look to these media to expand their creative practices, they also used television, film, and the internet as productive metaphors for the reconfiguration of Chinese literature that took place during this period. More concretely, I spend a lot of time writing and thinking about early 1990s Chinese television; knock-offs of Jia Pingwa's Ruined City; Wang Anyi, Yan Geling, and the “cultural work troupe” 文工团; Zhu Wen’s "film literature”; and the links between the “capitalist realism” of Lu Yao and the internet fantasies of Maoni. More generally, I'm interested in media ecology, book history, industrial theorizing, ideologies of popular culture, adaptation theory, realism, broadcasting, the early internet, and piracy.
Apart from my academic work, I write essays and reviews, mostly about Chinese literature, and most frequently as a contributing editor for Asymptote, a journal focusing on literature in translation. I was an assistant editor for Harvard University Press's New Literary History of Modern China. I grew up in Brooklyn, and the topics I get excited about other than Chinese literature include: New York politics; Chinese food; garage rock, punk, and sixties-seventies soul music; and, when possible, the New York Jets. Oh, and Suher is pronounced Shore, like "sea shore." Don't sweat it, I'm used to it.
You can e-mail me at:
dylan.suher[at symbol]gmail.com