Skip to main content

You Feng

Doctoral Fellow

 

Campus am Neuen Palais
Am Neuen Palais 10
Building 1, Room 0.15
14469 Potsdam
Germany

 

consulting hours
by appointment only

Dissertation Project

“Navigating the Fictioning of Time: Chronopolitics and Untimeliness in Contemporary Writings”

The general concern of this study revolves around questions and problematics of literary configurations of temporality, the spatiality of time in literature, and the underlying social and cultural complexities escorting different alternative narratives of time. Such inquiry comes from a continuous personal concern of how the performance of fictioning might constitute a counter-strategy against today's post-truth political terrain, and how chronopolitics is inter-knitted in the process of storytelling. This includes a careful review of narrative practices from different parts of the world that have resisted or negotiated with authoritarian futurism as well as any non-agential relationship to the idea of time, or the ways in which time is conceptualised, acted upon, and put into practice. There might be a clue in a review of those fictioning of temporality that together carry a variety of navigational agendas with regard to different regional micro-histories and cultural orientations, thus provide different outlooks upon the horizon of change, endurance, and survival, as well as attempts to suggest strategies for a re-construction and re-invented sense of chrono-collectivity.


Biography

After receiving my B.A. in English literature and Fine Arts at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2015, I continued to complete M.A. and M.Res. degrees at the Visual Cultures department of Goldsmiths, University of London. My research at that time stemmed from experience with (counter-)visual practice and dissonant image productions to a final dissertation focused on rethinking of networked relations centring on the diversity and complexity. Before arriving in Berlin in later 2019, I was based in China, working as editor and curator for various art and cultural collectives. I joined RTG Minor Cosmopolitanisms in October 2020. Besides academia, I also work as a translator, focusing especially on critical writings, poetry and short stories.


Research Interests

  • Future Studies
  • Worlding and Critical Cartography
  • Film Studies and Visual Arts
  • Network and Media Theory

Publications

“Therapeutic Caring: 2020 Berlin Biennale and Berlin Art Week” , Artforum (China), September 2020

Translator of Realismus Jetzt: Spekulative Philosophie und Metaphysik für das 21. Jahrhundert, edited by Armen Avanessian, collaborated between Merve Verlag Berlin, Pulsasir and Guangxi Science and Technology Press (forthcoming)

Translator of “Dad”, a short story by contemporary Chinese writer Zhao Song, Washington Square Review, New York, NY, Spring 2019                      

Editorial assistant, exhibition reader of Cosmopolis #1.5:Enlarged Intelligence, co-organized by Centre Pompidou and Mao Jihong Art Foundation, November 2018