Journal articles on the topic 'Gong gong guan xi'

Cultural practice is a kind of expression and reflection of real livelihood into human mind and experience, is a set of knowledge, values, faiths and social standards constructed by the whole community; therefore, it contains the rhythm and breath of life and can be changed to meet the demands. Regarding socialenvironment, the communities always keep going on the processes of developing and diversifying their culture through acculturation, exchange and localization, which finally constructs the social norms, goals and driving forces for their advancement. Among various approaches and methodologies, the change in empowerment in cultural practices actively offers the optimized values in functional standardization and implementation. The final value is undoubtedly the social capital. This research is to investigate the introduction, development, change and empowerment of the Chinese-rooted Guan Gong belief in Vietnam, through which emphasizes the process and nature of the cult during the deep absorption in Vietnamese history of anti-foreign invasions throughout the last two centuries, and enriches local values of a characteristic belief and a symbolic icon of multicultural exchanges in Vietnam, especially in the Southern region. Thispaper applies the theories of deconstruction and empowerment under cultural studies perspective in order to analyze and explain the processes of deconstruction, restructuring and empowerment in the cult of Guan Gong in Southern Vietnam as well as extract the regular principle of cultural exchanges locally.

Multicultural education is education that promotes diversity, difference, and tolerance. The values of multicultural education that are implanted are expected to be a solution to resolve or avoid cases that often occur in Indonesia because of the background of cultural differences in society. The planting of multicultural education values must be applied to the general public, especially to students as early as possible. The values of multicultural education can be done in various ways, one of them is using animated film media, namely the Upin Ipin animated film. children in general will better understand what they often see. Upin Ipin's animated film tomorrow's episodes, gong xi fa cai, and deepavali illustrate how peaceful and peaceful multicultural life. Where in the film illustrates how the reality of multicultural life that lives peacefully even with different cultural backgrounds. In addition, in the animated film Upin Ipin tomorrow's episodes, gong xi fa cai, and deepavali there are multicultural education values namely tolerance, democratic values, help please values, pluralism values, justice values, equality values, equality values, humanism values, and the value puts the dialog first.Keywords: Multicultural Values, Tomorrow's Holiday, Gong Xi Fa Cai, and Deepavali

In this article, we used standard dumbbell specimen (SDS), compact tension specimen (CTS) and Double edge notched specimen (DENS) which made of materials of modified double-base propellant to do the uniaxial tensile experiments under different tensile rates. In comparison, three kinds of specimen whoes geometric features are similar with the specimen above but the thickness is smaller, were also used to get the relationship of force (F) and displacement (l). After analysis of these relationship, we confirmed that the plane stress and stress concentration influence the use of EWF method. The experimental results prove that the geometric features of the specimen which are proposed by B.cotterell and J.K.reddel are absolutely right. But for the thicker specimen used by GUAN GONG and other researchers, we can just know the trend is correct, and should do further research to know the influence which specimen’s geometric characteristics bring to experiment.

Animation Film of Upin and Ipin is a LES COPAQOE production of Malaysian animation movie science and education movie for children. In Indonesia, 'Upin and Ipin' is broadcast in SCTV. This movie is not only suitable for children, but also for all ages. There are a lot of messages that we can absorb from this movie, such as family matter, friendship, and culture. This movie provides good lessons about social issues for its audience. The purpose of this research is to find out more about the characterizations of every cast, and the meaning of Imlek celebration in Upin and Ipin film. The film shows heterogeneous characters in every cast. This research takes an episode of Gong Xi Fa Cai in Upin and Ipin series. The film is attractive because it talks about the relationship of diversity. The meaning of Imlek Celebration in Upin and Ipin film is a spiritual celebration and the life core of Chinese people. The spiritual meaning of Imlek celebrations is not merely celebrated by Chinese people, but it is also celebrated by other tribes in this film. The film shows about sharing happiness in line with the meaning of Imlek namely the spirit and ability to share with others, help each other, and live in peace.

El número de actores chinos en escenarios internacionales es cada vez mayor y su abanico de intereses también es creciente. Durante 2017 se fortalecieron dos de sus características esenciales: primero, la mundialización, están en prácticamente todo el planeta, segundo, sus campos de acción que, alentados por sus intereses, son multidimensionales. Durante el año pasado, trataron de posicionarse como una fuerza esencial para resolver problemas. Incluso, hacen todo lo necesario para involucrarse en escenarios de dominio tradicional de los poderes surgidos en la segunda posguerra. El mejor ejemplo de ello es la propuesta de Xi Jinping, presidente de China, compuesta de cuatro puntos¹ para el conflicto entre Palestina e Israel: lograr la existencia de dos Estados basados en las fronteras de 1967 y el este de Jerusalén como capital palestina, finalizar el levantamiento de nuevos asentamientos judíos y terminar con la violencia contra los civiles, alentar la cooperación internacional para promover medidas pacíficas, promover la paz entre Israel y Palestina mediante el desarrollo y la cooperación. La propuesta, una de las primeras en materia de política exterior hechas por Xi a su llegada al poder en 2013, fue presentada el año pasado como algo bienvenido por las partes involucradas; incluso Israel aceptaría una mayor influencia de Beijing, por lo menos en la versión del enviado especial chino para la región, Gong Xiaosheng.²

Gong xi facai is a Chinese New Year greeting that is commonly spoken, heard, and written by people. Even if we don't know what it means, we guess the meaning must be good. The problem is what is the meaning of each word and the meaning of the sentence as a whole so that it can be concluded that the sentence is an expression of a joyful? Are there no other feelings? Since the sentence is considered a text, it will be examined which words express emotion, what kind of emotions they are. The goal is to express clearly what is meant by that sentence. To find out what kind of emotions it contains, Santangelo's theory (2000) will be used to detect which words express emotion and belong to which class. The data are Chinese Lunar New Year greetings written in Han characters. There is Indonesian-language data in the form of Chinese New Year pantun. Based on the analysis of the meaning components of emotions, the data are classified into several domains, such as Chinese New Year greeting, success in business, health, family, education, etc. The novelty of this research is to analyze the meaning components of emotional sentences so that emotional content can be identified precisely. This research will enrich research on emotions in the field of greetings for the Chinese New Year that has not been done much.

Gao, Bao-Xi, Gong Cheng, and Lea Ziskind-Conhaim. Development of spontaneous synaptic transmission in the rat spinal cord. J. Neurophysiol. 79: 2277–2287, 1998. Dorsal root afferents form synaptic connections on motoneurons a few days after motoneuron clustering in the rat lumbar spinal cord, but frequent spontaneous synaptic potentials are detected only after birth. To increase our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the differentiation of synaptic transmission, we examined the developmental changes in properties of spontaneous synaptic transmission at early stages of synapse formation. Spontaneous postsynaptic currents (PSCs) and tetrodotoxin (TTX)-resistant miniature PSCs (mPSCs) were measured in spinal motoneurons of embryonic and postnatal rats using whole cell patch-clamp recordings. Spontaneous PSC frequencies were higher than mPSC frequencies in both embryonic and postnatal motoneurons, suggesting that even at embryonic stages, when action-potential firing rate was low, presynaptic action potentials played an important role in triggering spontaneous PSCs. After birth, the twofold increase in spontaneous PSC frequency was attributed to an increase in action-potential–independent quantal release rather than to a higher rate of action-potential firing. In embryonic motoneurons, the fluctuations in peak amplitude of spontaneous PSCs were normally distributed around single peaks with modal values similar to those of mPSCs. These data indicated that early in synapse differentiation spontaneous PSCs were primarily composed of currents generated by quantal release. After birth, mean mPSC amplitude increased by 50% but mean quantal current amplitude did not change. Synchronous, multiquantal release was apparent in postnatal motoneurons only in high-K+ extracellular solution. Comparison of the properties of miniature excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic currents (mEPSCs and mIPSCs) demonstrated that mean mEPSC frequency was higher than mIPSC frequency, suggesting that either excitatory synapses outnumbered inhibitory synapses or that the probability of excitatory transmitter release was higher than the release of inhibitory neurotransmitters. The finding that mIPSC duration was several-fold longer than mEPSC duration implied that despite their lower frequency, inhibitory currents could modulate motoneuron synaptic integration by shunting incoming excitatory inputs for prolonged time intervals.

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Background:Takayasu arteritis (TA) is a chronic granulomatous large-vessel vasculitis most commonly seen in women under 50 years of age[1]. The pulmonary arteries are less often involved, with the frequency of involvement varying widely between countries (from 4% to >50%) [2–5]. Respiratory symptoms or signs and pulmonary imaging findings in TA have not been fully investigated [6–7].Objectives:This study aimed to describe pulmonary high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) findings in TA and to determine possible causes.Methods:A total of 243 TA patients were enrolled from a prospective cohort after excluding 260 patients with other pulmonary disorders or incomplete data. Clinical data including symptoms, lab results, imaging information were collected. Pulmonary HRCT were interpreted by two radiologist who were blinded to patients’ clinical information. Abnormal pulmonary features were recorded as nodules, stripe opacity (linear opacity), patchy opacity, ground-glass opacity, pleural thickening, pleural effusion, pulmonary infarction, mosaic attenuation, pulmonary bronchiectasis, pulmonary oedema. After evaluation, patients were divided into two groups: those with normal lung HRCT and those with abnormal lung HRCT. Clinical characteristics were compared between groups and binary logistic regression analysis was applied to identify potential risk factors for the lung lesions. Follow-up HRCT (obtained in 64 patients) was analysed to study changes in pulmonary lesions after at least 6 months’ treatment.Results:Of the 243 patients, 107 (44.0%) had normal lung HRCT while 136 (56.0%) had abnormal lung HRCT, including stripe opacity (60.3%), nodules (44.9%), patchy opacity (25.0%), pleural thickening (15.4%), pleural effusion (10.3%), ground-glass opacity (8.1%), pulmonary infarction (6.6%), mosaic attenuation (4.4%), bronchiectasis (3.7%), and pulmonary oedema (2.2%). Patients with abnormal HRCT were significantly more likely to have type II arterial involvement (25% vs. 12.2%, P = 0.04), pulmonary arterial involvement (PAI; 21.3% vs. 5.6%, P < 0.001), pulmonary hypertension (20.6% vs. 8.4%, P = 0.01), and abnormal heart function (27.9% vs. 7.6%, P < 0.001). Logistic regression analysis demonstrated that PAI (OR = 3.0, 95% CI= 1.1-8.4, P=0.03), worsened heart function (OR = 2.7, 95% CI = 1.1-6.6, P=0.03), and age (OR = 1.1, 95% CI = 1.0-1.1, P<0.01) were associated with presence of pulmonary lesions. Pulmonary infarction, pleural effusion, and patchy opacities improved partially after treatment.Conclusion:Pulmonary lesions are not rare in patients with TA. Age, PAI, and worsened heart function are potential risk factors for presence of pulmonary lesions in TA.References:[1]Jennette JC, Falk RJ, Bacon PA, et al. 2012 Revised International Chapel Hill Consensus Conference Nomenclature of Vasculitides. Arthritis Rheum 2013;65:1-11.[2]Kong X, Ma L, Wu L, et al. Evaluation of clinical measurements and development of new diagnostic criteria for Takayasu arteritis in a Chinese population. Clin Exp Rheumatol. 2015; 33(2 Suppl 89): S-48-55.[3]Nooshin D, Neda P, Shahdokht S, Ali J. Ten-year Investigation of Clinical, Laboratory and Radiologic Manifestations and Complications in Patients with Takayasu’s Arteritis in Three University Hospitals. Malays J Med Sci. 2013; 20(3):44-50.[4]Bicakcigil M, Aksu K, Kamali S, et al. Takayasu’s arteritis in Turkey – clinical and angiographic features of 248 patients. Clin Exp Rheumatol. 2009; 27(1 Suppl 52):S59-64.[5]Kechaou M, Frigui M, Ben Hmida M, Bahloul Z. Takayasu arteritis in Southern Tunisia a study of 29 patients. Presse Med. 2009; 38(10):1410-4.[6]Dou JB, Gong JN, Ma ZH, Kuang TG, Yang YH. The analysis of the clinical records diagnosed as Takayasu’s arteritis with pulmonary vascular involvement. Zhonghua Jie He Hu Xi Za Zhi. 2016; 39(8):603-7.[7]Nd Perera G, C Jayasinghe A, D Dias L, Kulatunga A. Bronchiectasis and hoarseness of voice in takayasu arteritis: a rare presentation. BMC Res Notes. 2012; 5:447.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

В данной работе продемонстрирована возможность применения ИК-микроспектроскопии для многомерной визуализации и анализа интеграции с нативными твердыми тканями зуба человека нового поколения биомиметических материалов, воспроизводящих минералорганический комплекс эмали и дентина.На основе ИК-картирования интенсивности конкретной функциональной молекулярной группы с использованием синхротронного излучения найдены и визуализированы характеристические особенности биомиметического переходного слоя в межфазной области эмаль/стоматологический материал и определено расположение функциональных групп, отвечающих процессам интеграции биомиметического композита REFERENCES Rohr N., Fischer J. Tooth surface treatment strategies for adhesive cementation // The Journal of Advanced Prosthodontics, 2017, v. 9(2), pp. 85–92. https://doi.org/10.4047/jap.2017.9.2.85 Pereira C. N. de B., Daleprane B., Miranda G. L. P. de, Magalhães C. S. de, Moreira A. N. 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The pandemic of COVID-19 has afflicted every individual and has initiated a cascade of directly or indirectly involved events in precipitating mental health issues. The human species is a wanderer and hunter-gatherer by nature, and physical social distancing and nationwide lockdown have confined an individual to physical isolation. The present review article was conceived to address psychosocial and other issues and their aetiology related to the current pandemic of COVID-19. The elderly age group has most suffered the wrath of SARS-CoV-2, and social isolation as a preventive measure may further induce mental health issues. Animal model studies have demonstrated an inappropriate interacting endogenous neurotransmitter milieu of dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and opioids, induced by social isolation that could probably lead to observable phenomena of deviant psychosocial behavior. Conflicting and manipulated information related to COVID-19 on social media has also been recognized as a global threat. Psychological stress during the current pandemic in frontline health care workers, migrant workers, children, and adolescents is also a serious concern. Mental health issues in the current situation could also be induced by being quarantined, uncertainty in business, jobs, economy, hampered academic activities, increased screen time on social media, and domestic violence incidences. The gravity of mental health issues associated with the pandemic of COVID-19 should be identified at the earliest. Mental health organization dedicated to current and future pandemics should be established along with Government policies addressing psychological issues to prevent and treat mental health issues need to be developed. References World Health Organization (WHO) Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. 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AbstractIn 2017 to 2018, Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and other institutions excavated the Taizicheng city site. Assisted by coring, the fieldwork confirmed that there were 67 building foundations, 14 roads, and two drainage ditches in this city site; the foundation of the No. 9 building in the center of the south zone and the courtyard No. 3 in the center of the north zone formed a tandem arrangement of “qian chao hou qin” [in front, audience hall; behind, resting chambers] along a symmetrical axis. In the unearthed artifacts, there are large numbers of bricks with stamps of “nei,” “gong,” and “guan,” white-glazed Ding wares with an inscription “shang shi ju,” fragments of chiwen-dragon heads on the main ridge, etc. Seen from the ranks of the artifacts and architectural sites, this city site would be the remains of an imperial residence of the mid through late Jin dynasty, which might be the Taihe Palace for Emperor Zhangzong of the Jin dynasty to hold summer nabo-imperial encampment. The excavation of the Taizicheng city site greatly improves the studies on the site selection of imperial encampments, construction regulations, utensil assemblage for the use of imperial courts, etc. of the Jin dynasty.

Penelitian ini memfokuskan pada kajian konsep model Connected melalui bahan ajar tari Beskalan dalam pembelajaran seni tari. Lokasi penelitian adalah di SMA Negeri Rancakalong Sumedang. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk menemukan konsep model pembelajaran Connected tari Beskalan melalui proses dan hasil pembelajaran Seni Budaya. Penelitian  tindakan (Action Research) merupakan metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini, dimana peneliti berperan sebagai ovserver partisipan yang berperan sebagai pelaku tindakan yang terlibat dalam proses penelitian dari awal dan melaporkan hasil penelitiannya. Penelitian dilakukan dalam dua siklus yang terdiri atas kegiatan apresiasi dan kreasi yang setiap siklusnya melalui empat tahapan yaitu perencanaan, tindakan, observasi, dan refleksi. Teknik pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan cara observasi, wawancara, angket, dan studi dokumentasi.Hasil penelitian ini adalah temuan tentang konsep Connected dalam pembelajaran seni tari dan musik, yang diawali dengan kegiatan apresiasi mengenai materi pola ritme musik dan tari beskalan, siswa mempraktekkan gerak tari dan mengimitasi pola permainan beberaa instrumen gamelan yang mengiringinya yaitu kethuk, kenong, kempul, gong, dan kendang. Hasil dari kegiatan apresiasi tersebut mereka kembangkan dan dijadikan stimulus dalam kegiatan kreasi membuat kreasi gerak tari dan iringan musiknya melalui tahap eksplorasi.Katakunci: Model Connected, musik, tari beskalan, kreasi

This study uses an in silico screening docking model to evaluate the ACE2 inhibitory activity of natural compounds and drugs. The study collected 49 compounds and evaluated the ACE2 inhibitory effect in silico. The study results show that 11 out of the 49 compounds had stronger inhibitory activity on ACE2 than MLN-4760. Lipinski’s rule of five criteria and predictive pharmacokinetic-toxicity analysis show that eight compounds including quercetin, galangin, quisinostat, fluprofylline, spirofylline, RS 504393, TNP and GNF-5 had drug-likeness. These compounds could be potential drug for the Covid-19 treatment. Keywords SARS-CoV-2S, Covid-19, ACE2, molecular docking, in silico. References [[1] C. Wang, P.W. Horby, F.G. Hayden, G.F. Gao. A novel coronavirus outbreak of global health concern. The Lancet 395(10223) (2020) 470.[2] WHO. WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. WHO, 2020.[3] N. Chen, M. Zhou, X. Dong, J. Qu, F. Gong, Y. Han, et al. 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Nakayama, M.N. Hsu, A.G. Samaranayaka, E.C. Li-Chan. Angiotensin-I converting enzyme inhibitory activity of hydrolysates from oat (Avena sativa) proteins by in silico and in vitro analyses. Journal of agricultural and food chemistry 57(19) (2009) 9234.[14] T. Joshi, T. Joshi, P. Sharma, S. Mathpal, H. Pundir, V. Bhatt, et al. In silico screening of natural compounds against COVID-19 by targeting Mpro and ACE2 using molecular docking. European review for medical and pharmacological sciences 24(8) (2020) 4529.[15] S. Shahid, A. Kausar, M. Khalid, S. Tewari, T. Alghassab, T. Acar, et al. analysis of binding properties of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 through in silico molecular docking, 2018.[16] K. Teralı, B. Baddal, H.O. Gülcan. Prioritizing potential ACE2 inhibitors in the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from a molecular mechanics-assisted structure-based virtual screening experiment. J Mol Graph Model 100 (2020) 107697.[17] M. Muchtaridi, M. Fauzi, N.K. Khairul Ikram, A. Mohd Gazzali, H.A. Wahab. Natural Flavonoids as Potential Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2 Inhibitors for Anti-SARS-CoV-2. Molecules 25(17) (2020) 3980.[18] M.J. Huentelman, J. Zubcevic, J.A. Hernández Prada, X. Xiao, D.S. Dimitrov, M.K. Raizada, et al. Structure-based discovery of a novel angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 inhibitor. Hypertension (Dallas, Tex : 1979) 44(6) (2004) 903.[19] S. Choudhary, Y.S. Malik, S. Tomar. Identification of SARS-CoV-2 Cell Entry Inhibitors by Drug Repurposing Using in silico Structure-Based Virtual Screening Approach. Front Immunol 11((2020) 1664.[20] C.A. Lipinski. Lead-and drug-like compounds: the rule-of-five revolution. Drug Discovery Today: Technologies 1(4) (2004) 337.[21] B. Jayaram, T. Singh, G. Mukherjee, A. Mathur, S. Shekhar, V. Shekhar, Eds. Sanjeevini: a freely accessible web-server for target directed lead molecule discovery. Proceedings of the BMC bioinformatics; 2012. Springer (Year).[22] D.E. Pires, T.L. Blundell, D.B. Ascher. pkCSM: predicting small-molecule pharmacokinetic and toxicity properties using graph-based signatures. Journal of medicinal chemistry 58(9) (2015) 4066.[23] P. Towler, B. Staker, S.G. Prasad, S. Menon, J. Tang, T. Parsons, et al. ACE2 X-ray structures reveal a large hinge-bending motion important for inhibitor binding and catalysis. The Journal of biological chemistry 279(17) (2004) 17996.[24] N.A. Dales, A.E. Gould, J.A. Brown, E.F. Calderwood, B. Guan, C.A. Minor, et al. Substrate-based design of the first class of angiotensin-converting enzyme-related carboxypeptidase (ACE2) inhibitors. Journal of the American Chemical Society 124(40) (2002) 11852.[25] P. Pandey, J.S. Rane, A. Chatterjee, A. Kumar, R. Khan, A. Prakash, et al. Targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein of COVID-19 with naturally occurring phytochemicals: an in silico study for drug development. Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics (2020) 1.[26] C.A. Lipinski. Lead- and drug-like compounds: the rule-of-five revolution. Drug discovery today Technologies 1(4) (2004) 337.[27] R.O. Barros, F.L. Junior, W.S. Pereira, N.M. Oliveira, R.M. Ramos. Interaction of drug candidates with various SARS-CoV-2 receptors: An in silico study to combat COVID-19. Journal of Proteome Research (2020).

Three compounds were isolated from the rhizome part of Canna edulis for the first time including liquiritigenin, methyl caffeate and uracil. Their structures were elucidated by spectroscopic methods as MS and NMR. Keywords Canna edulis Ker Gawl, liquiritigenin, methyl caffeate, uracil. References [1] T. H. Vu, Q. U. Le, Edible Canna (Canna edulis Ker), A Potential Crop for Vietnam Food Industry, International Journal of Botany Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2019, pp. 58–59.[2] N. Tanakar, The Utilization of Edible Canna Plants in Southeastern Asia and Southern China, Economic Botany, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2004, 112–114.[3] A. S. A. Snafi, Bioactive Components and Pharmacological Effects of Canna indica - an Overview, International Journal of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2015, pp. 71–75.[4] X. J. Zhang, Z. W. Wang, Q. Mi, Phenolic Compounds from Canna edulis Ker Residue and Their Antioxidant Activity, LWT - Food Science Technology, Vol. 44, No. 10, 2011, pp. 2091–2096, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lwt.2011.05.021. [5] F. Xie, S. Gong, W. Zhang, J. Wu, Z. Wang, Potential of Lignin from Canna edulis Ker Residue in The Inhibition of α-d-glucosidase: Kinetics and Interaction Mechanism Merging with Docking Simulation, International Journal of Biology and Macromolecules, Vol. 95, 2017, pp. 592–602, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2016.11.100.[6] J. Zhang, Z. W. Wang, Soluble Dietary Fiber from Canna edulis Ker By-product and Its Physicochemical Properties, Carbohydrates Polymers, Vol. 92, No. 1, 2013, pp. 289–296, http:/doi.org/10.1016/j.carbpol.2012.09.067.[7] T. M. H. Nguyen, H. L. Le, T. T. Ha, B. H. Bui, N. T. Le, V. H. Nguyen, T. V. A. Nguyen, Inhibitory Effect on Human Platelet Aggregation and Coagulation and Antioxidant Activity of Canna edulis Ker Gawl Rhizhomes and Its Secondary Metabolites, Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Vol. 263, 2020, pp. 113-136, https:/doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2020.113136.[8] T. A. Y. Diaa, M. A. Ramada, A. A. Khalifa, Acetophenones, a Chalcone, a Chromone and Flavonoids from Pancratium Maritimum, Phytochemistry, Vol. 49, No. 8, pp. 1998, pp. 2579-2583, http:/doi.org/10.1016/S003109422(98)00429-4. [9] W. Koji, Y. Osanai, T. Imaizumi, S. Kanno, M. Takeshita, M. Ishikawa, Inhibitory Effect of The Alkyl Side Chain of Caffeic Acid Analogues on Lipopolysaccharide-induced Nitric Oxide Production in RAW264.7 Macrophages, Bioorganic Med. Chem., Vol. 16, No. 16, 2008, pp. 7795–7803, https:/doi.org/10.1016/j.bmc.2008.07.006.[10] C. Y. Wang, L. Han, K. Kang, C. L. Shao, Y. X. Wei, C. J. Zheng, H. S Guan, Secondary Metabolites From Green Algae Ulva Pertusa, Chemistry of Natural Compounds Vol. 46, No. 5, 2010, pp. 828-830.[11] C. T. Inh, N. T. H. Van, P. M. Quan, T. T. Q. Trang, T. A. Vien, N. T. Thuy, D. T. Thao, New Diterpenoid Isolated from Medicinal Plant Euphorbia tithymaloides (P.), Vietnam J. Chem., Vol. 54, 2016, pp. 274-279, https:/doi.org/10.15625/0866-7144.2016-00304 (in Vietnamese).[12] Q. Y. Li, H. Liang, B. Wang, Z. Z. Zhao, Chemical Constituents of Momordica charantia L, Yao Xue Xue Bao, Vol. 44, No. 9, 2009, pp. 1014-1018.[13] V. T. Diep, L. T. Loan, N. T. Thu, T. T. Ha, N. M. Khoi, N. H. Tuan, D. T. Ha, Triterpen, Flavonoid and Pyrimidine Compounds from The Aerial Parts of Dregea volubilis, Journal of Medicinal Materials, Vol. 24, No. 6, 2019, pp. 329-332.[14] H. M. Eid, D. Vallerand, A. Muhammad, T. Durst, P. S. Haddad, L. C. Martineau, Structural Constraints and the Importance of Lipophilicity for the Mitochondrial Uncoupling Activity of Naturally Occurring Caffeic Acid Esters with Potential for the Treatment of Insulin Resistance, Biochemical Pharmacology, Vol. 79, No. 3, 2010, pp. 444–454, https:/doi.org/10.1016/j.bcp.2009.08.026.[15] K. Takahashi, Y. Yoshioka, E. Kato, S. Katsuki, O. Iida, K. Hosokawa, J. Kawabata, Methyl Caffeate as a Glucosidase Inhibitor from Solanum Torvum fruits and the Activity of Related Compounds, Bioscience, Biotechnology and Biochemistry, Vol. 74, No. 4, 2010, pp. 741–745, https:/doi.org/10.1271/bbb.9087.[16] S. M. Fiuza, C. Gomes, L. J. Teixeira, M. T. G. D. Cruz, M. N. Cordeiro, N. Milhazes, F. Borges, M. P. Marques, Phenolic Acid Derivatives with Potential Anticancer Properties, a Structure-Activity Relationship Study Part 1: Methyl, Propyl and Octyl Esters of Caffeic and Gallic Acids, Bioorgan Med Chem, Vol. 12, No. 13, 2004, pp. 3581-3589, https:/doi.org/10.1016/j.bmc.2004.04.026.[17] S. P. Lee, G. Jun, E. Yoon, S. Park, C. Yang, Inhibitory Effect of Methyl Caffeate on Fos-Jun-DNA Complex Formation and Suppression of Cancer Cell Growth, Bulletin of Korean Chemical Society, Vol. 22, No. 10, 2001, pp. 1131-1135.

Graphene-based composites have received a great deal of attention in recent year because the presence of graphene can enhance the conductivity, strength of bulk materials and help create composites with superior qualities. Moreover, the incorporation of metal oxide nanoparticles such as Fe3O4 can improve the catalytic efficiency of composite material. In this work, we have synthesized a composite material with the combination of reduced graphene oxide (rGO), and Fe3O4 modified tissue-paper (mGO-PP) via a simple hydrothermal method, which improved the removal efficiency of the of methylene blue (MB) in water. MB blue is used as the model of contaminant to evaluate the catalytic efficiency of synthesized material by using a Fenton-like reaction. The obtained materials were characterized by SEM, XRD. The removal of materials with methylene blue is investigated by UV-VIS spectroscopy, and the result shows that mGO-PP composite is the potential composite for the color removed which has the removal efficiency reaching 65% in acetate buffer pH = 3 with the optimal time is 7 h. Keywords Graphene-based composite, methylene blue, Fenton-like reaction. References [1] Ma Joshi, Rue Bansal, Reng Purwar, Colour removal from textile effluents, Indian Journal of Fibre & Textile Research, 29 (2004) 239-259 http://nopr.niscair.res.in/handle/123456789/24631.[2] Kannan Nagar, Sundaram Mariappan, Kinetics and mechanism of removal of methylene blue by adsorption on various carbons-a comparative study, Dyes and pigments, 51 (2001) 25-40 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0143-7208(01)00056-0.[3] K Rastogi, J. N Sahu, B. C Meikap, M. N Biswas, Removal of methylene blue from wastewater using fly ash as an adsorbent by hydrocyclone, Journal of hazardous materials, 158 (2008) 531-540.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2008.01. 105.[4] Qin Qingdong, Ma Jun, Liu Ke, Adsorption of anionic dyes on ammonium-functionalized MCM-41, Journal of Hazardous Materials, 162 (2009) 133-139 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat. 2008.05.016.[5] Mui Muruganandham, Rps Suri, Sh Jafari, Mao Sillanpää, Lee Gang-Juan, Jaj Wu, Muo Swaminathan, Recent developments in homogeneous advanced oxidation processes for water and wastewater treatment, International Journal of Photoenergy, 2014 (2014). http://dx. doi.org/10.1155/2014/821674.[6] Herney Ramirez, Vicente Miguel , Madeira Luis Heterogeneous photo-Fenton oxidation with pillared clay-based catalysts for wastewater treatment: a review, Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, 98 (2010) 10-26 https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.apcatb.2010.05.004.[7] Guo Rong, Jiao Tifeng, Li Ruifei, Chen Yan, Guo Wanchun, Zhang Lexin, Zhou Jingxin, Zhang Qingrui, Peng Qiuming, Sandwiched Fe3O4/carboxylate graphene oxide nanostructures constructed by layer-by-layer assembly for highly efficient and magnetically recyclable dye removal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, 6 (2017) 1279-1288 https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b03635.[8] Sun Chao, Yang Sheng-Tao, Gao Zhenjie, Yang Shengnan, Yilihamu Ailimire, Ma Qiang, Zhao Ru-Song, Xue Fumin, Fe3O4/TiO2/reduced graphene oxide composites as highly efficient Fenton-like catalyst for the decoloration of methylene blue, Materials Chemistry and Physics, 223 (2019) 751-757 https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.matchemphys.2018.11.056.[9] Guo Hui, Ma Xinfeng, Wang Chubei, Zhou Jianwei, Huang Jianxin, Wang Zijin, Sulfhydryl-Functionalized Reduced Graphene Oxide and Adsorption of Methylene Blue, Environmental Engineering Science, 36 (2019) 81-89 https://doi. org/10.1089/ees.2018.0157.[10] Zhao Lianqin, Yang Sheng-Tao, Feng Shicheng, Ma Qiang, Peng Xiaoling, Wu Deyi, Preparation and application of carboxylated graphene oxide sponge in dye removal, International journal of environmental research and public health, 14 (2017) 1301 https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14111301.[11] Yu Dandan, Wang Hua, Yang Jie, Niu Zhiqiang, Lu Huiting, Yang Yun, Cheng Liwei, Guo Lin, Dye wastewater cleanup by graphene composite paper for tailorable supercapacitors, ACS applied materials & interfaces, 9 (2017) 21298-21306 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.7b05318.[12] Wang Hou, Yuan Xingzhong, Wu Yan, Huang Huajun, Peng Xin, Zeng Guangming, Zhong Hua, Liang Jie, Ren MiaoMiao, Graphene-based materials: fabrication, characterization and application for the decontamination of wastewater and wastegas and hydrogen storage/generation, Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, 195 (2013) 19-40 https://doi. org/10.1016/j.cis.2013.03.009.[13] Marcano Daniela C, Kosynkin Dmitry V, Berlin Jacob M, Sinitskii Alexander, Sun Zhengzong, Slesarev Alexander, Alemany Lawrence B, Lu Wei, Tour James M, Improved synthesis of graphene oxide, ACS nano, 4 (2010) 4806-4814 https://doi.org/10.1021/nn1006368.[14] Zhang Jiali, Yang Haijun, Shen Guangxia, Cheng Ping, Zhang Jingyan, Guo Shouwu, Reduction of graphene oxide via L-ascorbic acid, Chemical Communications, 46 (2010) 1112-1114 http://doi. org/10.1039/B917705A [15] Gong Ming, Zhou Wu, Tsai Mon-Che, Zhou Jigang, Guan Mingyun, Lin Meng-Chang, Zhang Bo, Hu Yongfeng, Wang Di-Yan, Yang Jiang, Nanoscale nickel oxide/nickel heterostructures for active hydrogen evolution electrocatalysis, Nature communications, 5 (2014) 4695 https:// doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5695.[16] Wu Zhong-Shuai, Yang Shubin, Sun Yi, Parvez Khaled, Feng Xinliang, Müllen Klaus, 3D nitrogen-doped graphene aerogel-supported Fe3O4 nanoparticles as efficient electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 134 (2012) 9082-9085 https://doi.org/10.1021/ja3030565.[17] Nguyen Son Truong, Nguyen Hoa Tien, Rinaldi Ali, Nguyen Nam Van, Fan Zeng, Duong Hai Minh, Morphology control and thermal stability of binderless-graphene aerogels from graphite for energy storage applications, Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering Aspects, 414 (2012) 352-358 https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.colsurfa.2012.08.048.[18] Deng Yang, Englehardt James D, Treatment of landfill leachate by the Fenton process, Water research, 40 (2006) 3683-3694 https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.watres.2006.08.009.

“What is the point of stories in such a moment”, asks author and critic James Bradley, writing about climate extinction: Bradley emphasises that “climatologist James Hansen once said being a climate scientist was like screaming at people from behind a soundproof glass wall; being a writer concerned with these questions often feels frighteningly similar” (“Writing”). If the impact of climate change asks humans to think differently, to imagine differently, then surely writing—and reading—must change too? According to writer and geographer Samuel Miller-McDonald, “if you’re a writer, then you have to write about this”. But how are we to do that? Where might it be done already? Perhaps not in traditional (or even post-) Modernist modes. In the era of the Anthropocene I find myself turning to non-traditional, un-real models to write the slow violence and read the deep time that is where we can see our current climate catastrophe.At a “Writing in the Age of Extinction” workshop earlier this year Bradley and Jane Rawson advocated changing the language of “climate change”—rejecting such neutral terms—in the same way that I see the stories discussed here pushing against Modernity’s great narrative of progress.My research—as a reader and writer, is in the fantastic realm of speculative fiction; I have written in The Conversation about how this genre seems to be gaining literary popularity. There is no doubt that our current climate crisis has a part to play. As Margaret Atwood writes: “it’s not climate change, it’s everything change” (“Climate”). This “everything” must include literature. Kim Stanley Robinson is not the only one who sees “the models modern literary fiction has are so depleted, what they’re turning to now is our guys in disguise”. I am interested in two recent examples, which both use the strongly genre-associated time-travel trope, to consider how science-fiction concepts might work to re-imagine our “deranged” world (Ghosh), whether applied by genre writers or “our guys in disguise”. Can stories such as The Heavens by Sandra Newman and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” by Ted Chiang—which apply time travel, whether as an expression of fatalism or free will—help us conceive the current collapse: understand how it has come to pass, and imagine ways we might move through it?The Popularity of Time TravelIt seems to me that time as a notion and the narrative device, is key to any idea of writing through climate change. “Through” as in via, if the highly contested “cli-fi” category is considered a theme; and “through” as entering into and coming out the other side of this ecological end-game. Might time travel offer readers more than the realist perspective of sweeping multi-generational sagas? Time-travel books pose puzzles; they are well suited to “wicked” problems. Time-travel tales are designed to analyse the world in a way that it is not usually analysed—in accordance with Tim Parks’s criterion for great novels (Walton), and in keeping with Darko Suvin’s conception of science fiction as a literature of “cognitive estrangement”. To read, and write, a character who travels in “spacetime” asks something more of us than the emotional engagement of many Modernist tales of interiority—whether they belong to the new “literary middlebrow’” (Driscoll), or China Miéville’s Booker Prize–winning realist “litfic” (Crown).Sometimes, it is true, they ask too much, and do not answer enough. But what resolution is possible is realistic, in the context of this literally existential threat?There are many recent and recommended time-travel novels: Kate Atkinson’s 2013 Life after Life and Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2014 End of Days have main characters who are continually “reset”, exploring the idea of righting history—the more literary experiment concluding less optimistically. For Erpenbeck “only the inevitable is possible”. In her New York Times review Francine Prose likens Life after Life to writing itself: “Atkinson sharpens our awareness of the apparently limitless choices and decisions that a novelist must make on every page, and of what is gained and lost when the consequences of these choices are, like life, singular and final”. Andrew Sean Greer’s 2013 The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells also centres on the WorldWar(s), a natural-enough site to imagine divergent timelines, though he draws a different parallel. In Elan Mastai’s 2017 debut All Our Wrong Todays the reality that is remembered—though ultimately not missed, is more dystopic than our own time, as is also the way with Joyce Carol Oates’s 2018 The Hazards of Time Travel. Oates’s rather slight contribution to the subgenre still makes a clear point: “America is founded upon amnesia” (Oates, Hazards). So, too, is our current environment. We are living in a time created by a previous generation; the environmental consequence of our own actions will not be felt until after we are gone. What better way to write such a riddle than through the loop of time travel?The Purpose of Thought ExperimentsThis list is not meant to be comprehensive. It is an indication of the increasing literary application of the “elaborate thought experiment” of time travel (Oates, “Science Fiction”). These fictional explorations, their political and philosophical considerations, are currently popular and potentially productive in a context where action is essential, and yet practically impossible. What can I do? What could possibly be the point? As well as characters that travel backwards, or forwards in time, these titles introduce visionaries who tell of other worlds. They re-present “not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind”: Margaret Atwood’s “Ustopias” (Atwood, “Road”). Incorporating both utopian and dystopian aspects, they (re)present our own time, in all its contradictory (un)reality.The once-novel, now-generic “novum” of time travel has become a metaphor—the best possible metaphor, I believe, for the climatic consequence of our in/action—in line with Joanna Russ’s wonderful conception of “The Wearing out of Genre Materials”. The new marvel first introduced by popular writers has been assimilated, adopted or “stolen” by the dominant mode. In this case, literary fiction. Angela Carter is not the only one to hope “the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode”. This must be what Robinson expects: that Ken Gelder’s “big L” literature will be unable to contain the wine of “our guys”—even if it isn’t new. In the act of re-use, the time-travel cliché is remade anew.Two Cases to ConsiderTwo texts today seem to me to realise—in both senses of that word—the possibilities of the currently popular, but actually ancient, time-travel conceit. At the Melbourne Writers Festival last year Ted Chiang identified the oracle in The Odyssey as the first time traveller: they—the blind prophet Tiresias was transformed into a woman for seven years—have seen the future and report back in the form of prophecy. Chiang’s most recent short story, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”, and Newman’s novel The Heavens, both of which came out this year, are original variations on this re-newed theme. Rather than a coherent, consistent, central character who travels and returns to their own time, these stories’ protagonists appear diversified in/between alternate worlds. These texts provide readers not with only one possible alternative but—via their creative application of the idea of temporal divergence—myriad alternatives within the same story. These works use the “characteristic gesture” of science fiction (Le Guin, “Le Guin Talks”), to inspire different, subversive, ways of thinking and seeing our own one-world experiment. The existential speculation of time-travel tropes is, today, more relevant than ever: how should we act when our actions may have no—or no positive, only negative—effect?Time and space travel are classic science fiction concerns. Chiang’s lecture unpacked how the philosophy of time travel speaks uniquely to questions of free will. A number of his stories explore this theme, including “The Alchemist’s Gate” (which the lecture was named after), where he makes his thinking clear: “past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully” (Chiang, Exhalation). In “Story of Your Life”, the novella that the film Arrival is based on, Chiang’s main character-narrator embraces a future that could be seen as dystopic while her partner walks away from it—and her, and his daughter—despite the happiness they will offer. Gary cannot accept the inevitable unhappiness that must accompany them. The suggestion is that if he had had Louise’s foreknowledge he might, like the free-willing protagonist in Looper, have taken steps to ensure that that life—that his daughter’s life itself—never eventuated. Whether he would have been successful is suspect: according to Chiang free will cannot foil fate.If the future cannot be changed, what is the role of free will? Louise wonders: “what if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?” In his “story notes” Chiang says inspiration came from variational principles in physics (Chiang, Stories); I see the influence of climate calamity. Knowing the future must change us—how can it not evoke “a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation”? Even if events play out precisely as we know they will. In his talk Chiang differentiated between time-travel films which favour free will, like Looper, and those that conclude fatalistically, such as Twelve Monkeys. “Story of Your Life” explores the idea that these categories are not mutually exclusive: exercising free will might not change fate; fatalism may not preclude acts of free will.Utopic Free Will vs. Dystopic Fate?Newman’s latest novel is more obviously dystopic: the world in The Heavens is worse each time Kate wakes from her dreams of the past. In the end it has become positively post-apocalyptic. The overwhelming sadness of this book is one of its most unusual aspects, going far beyond that of The Time Traveler’s Wife—2003’s popular tale of love and loss. The Heavens feels fatalistic, even though its future is—unfortunately, in this instance—not set but continually altered by the main character’s attempts to “fix” it (in each sense of the word). Where Twelve Monkeys, Looper, and The Odyssey present every action as a foregone conclusion, The Heavens navigates the nightmare that—against our will—everything we do might have an adverse consequence. As in A Christmas Carol, where the vision of a possible future prompts the protagonist to change his ways and so prevent its coming to pass, it is Kate’s foresight—of our future—which inspires her to act. History doesn’t respond well to Kate’s interventions; she is unable to “correct” events and left more and more isolated by her own unique version of a tortuous Cassandra complex.These largely inexplicable consequences provide a direct connection between Newman’s latest work and James Tiptree Jr.’s 1972 “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket”. That tale’s conclusion makes no “real” sense either—when Dovy dies Loolie’s father’s advisers can only say that (time) paradoxes are proliferating—but The Heavens is not the intellectual play of Tiptree’s classic science fiction: the wine of time-travel has been poured into the “depleted” vessel of “big L” literature. The sorrow that seeps through this novel is profound; Newman apologises for it in her acknowledgements, linking it to the death of an ex-partner. I read it as a potent expression of “solastalgia”: nostalgia for a place that once provided solace, but doesn’t any more—a term coined by Australian philosopher Glen Albrecht to express the “psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change” (Albrecht et al.). It is Kate’s grief, for a world (she has) destroyed that drives her mad: “deranged”.The Serious Side of SpeculationIn The Great Derangement Ghosh laments the “smaller shadow” cast by climate change in the landscape of literary fiction. He echoes Miéville: “fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals; the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or short story to the genre of science fiction” (Ghosh). Time-travel tales that pose the kind of questions handled by theologians before the Enlightenment and “big L” literature after—what does it mean to exist in time? How should we live? Who deserves to be happy?—may be a way for literary fiction to take climate change “seriously”: to write through it. Out-of-time narratives such as Chiang and Newman’s pose existential speculations that, rather than locating us in time, may help us imagine time itself differently. How are we to act if the future has already come to pass?“When we are faced with a world whose problems all seem ‘wicked’ and intractable, what is it that fiction can do?” (Uhlmann). At the very least, should writers not be working with “sombre realism”? Science fiction has a long and established tradition of exposing the background narratives of the political—and ecological—landscapes in which we work: the master narratives of Modernism. What Anthony Uhlmann describes here, as the “distancing technique” of fiction becomes outright “estrangement” in speculative hands. Stories such as Newman and Chiang’s reflect (on) what readers might be avoiding: that even though our future is fixed, we must act. We must behave as though our decisions matter, despite knowing the ways in which they do not.These works challenge Modernist concerns despite—or perhaps via—satisfying genre conventions, in direct contradiction to Roy Scranton’s conviction that “Narrative in the Anthropocene Is the Enemy”. In doing so they fit Miéville’s description of a “literature of estrangement” while also exemplifying a new, Anthropocene “literature of recognition” (Crown). These, then, are the stories of our life.What Is Not ExpectedChiang’s 2018 lecture was actually a PowerPoint presentation on how time travel could or would “really” work. His medium, as much as his message, clearly showed the author’s cross-disciplinary affiliations, which are relevant to this discussion of literary fiction’s “depleted” models. In August this year Xu Xi concluded a lecture on speculative fiction for the Vermont College of Fine Arts by encouraging attendees to read—and write—“other” languages, whether foreign forms or alien disciplines. She cited Chiang as someone who successfully raids the riches of non-literary traditions, to produce a new kind of literature. Writing that deals in physics, as much as characters, in philosophy, as much as narrative, presents new, “post-natural” (Bradley, “End”) retro-speculations that (in un- and super-natural generic traditions) offer a real alternative to Modernism’s narrative of inevitable—and inevitably positive—progress.In “What’s Expected of Us” Chiang imagines the possible consequence of comprehending that our actions, and not just their consequence, are predetermined. In what Oates describes as his distinctive, pared-back, “unironic” style (Oates, “Science Fiction”), Chiang concludes: “reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilisation now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has”. The self-deception we need is not America’s amnesia, but the belief that what we do matters.ConclusionThe visions of her “paraself” that Nat sees in “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” encourage her to change her behaviour. The “prism” that enables this perception—a kind of time-tripped iPad that “skypes” alternate temporal realities, activated by people acting in different ways at a crucial moment in their lives—does not always reflect the butterfly effect the protagonist, or reader, might expect. Some actions have dramatic consequences while others have minimal impact. While Nat does not see her future, what she spies inspires her to take the first steps towards becoming a different—read “better”—person. We expect this will lead to more positive outcomes for her self in the story’s “first” world. The device, and Chiang’s tale, illustrates both that our paths are predetermined and that they are not: “our inability to predict the consequences of our own predetermined actions offers a kind of freedom”. The freedom to act, freedom from the coma of inaction.“What’s the use of art on a dying planet? What’s the point, when humanity itself is facing an existential threat?” Alison Croggon asks, and answers herself: “it searches for the complex truth … . It can help us to see the world we have more clearly, and help us to imagine a better one”. In literary thought experiments like Newman and Chiang’s artful time-travel fictions we read complex, metaphoric truths that cannot be put into real(ist) words. In the time-honoured tradition of (speculative) fiction, Chiang and Newman deal in, and with, “what cannot be said in words … in words” (Le Guin, “Introduction”). These most recent time-slip speculations tell unpredictable stories about what is predicted, what is predictable, but what we must (still) believe may not necessarily be—if we are to be free.ReferencesArrival. Dir. Dennis Villeneuve. Paramount Pictures, 2016.Albrecht, Glenn, et al. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australasian Psychiatry (Feb. 2007): 41–55. Atwood, Margaret. “The Road to Ustopia.” The Guardian 15 Oct. 2011 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia>.———. “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.” Medium 27 July 2015. <https://medium.com/matter/it-s-not-climate-change-it-s-everything-change-8fd9aa671804>.Bradley, James. “Writing on the Precipice: On Literature and Change.” City of Tongues. 16 Mar. 2017 <https://cityoftongues.com/2017/03/16/writing-on-the-precipice-on-literature-and-climate-change/>.———. “The End of Nature and Post-Naturalism: Fiction and the Anthropocene.” City of Tongues 30 Dec. 2015 <https://cityoftongues.com/2015/12/30/the-end-of-nature-and-post-naturalism-fiction-and-the-anthropocene/>.Bradley, James, and Jane Rawson. “Writing in the Age of Extinction.” Detached Performance and Project Space, The Old Mercury Building, Hobart. 27 July 2019.Chiang, Ted. Stories of Your Life and Others. New York: Tor, 2002.———. Exhalation: Stories. New York: Knopf, 2019.Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. London: Gollancz, 1983. 69.Croggon, Alison. “On Art.” Overland 235 (2019). 30 Sep. 2019 <https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-235/column-on-art/>.Crown, Sarah. “What the Booker Prize Really Excludes.” The Guardian 17 Oct. 2011 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/oct/17/science-fiction-china-mieville>.Driscoll, Beth. The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.Erpenbeck, Jenny. Trans. Susan Bernofsky. The End of Days. New York: New Directions, 2016.Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. London: Routledge, 2014.Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. India: Penguin Random House, 2018.Le Guin, Ursula K. “Introduction.” The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1979. 5.———. “Ursula K. Le Guin Talks to Michael Cunningham about Genres, Gender, and Broadening Fiction.” Electric Literature 1 Apr. 2016. <https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-talks-to-michael- cunningham-about-genres-gender-and-broadening-fiction-57d9c967b9c>.Miller-McDonald, Samuel. “What Must We Do to Live?” The Trouble 14 Oct. 2018. <https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2018/10/14/what-must-we-do-to-live>.Oates, Joyce Carol. Hazards of Time Travel. New York: Ecco Press, 2018.———. "Science Fiction Doesn't Have to be Dystopian." The New Yorker 13 May 2019. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/13/science-fiction-doesnt-have-to-be-dystopian>.Prose, Francine. “Subject to Revision.” New York Times 26 Apr. 2003. <https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/books/review/life-after-life-by-kate-atkinson.html>.Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Kim Stanley Robinson and the Drowning of New York.” The Coode Street Podcast 305 (2017). <http://www.jonathanstrahan.com.au/wp/the-coode-street-podcast/>.Russ, Joanna. “The Wearing Out of Genre Materials.” College English 33.1 (1971): 46–54.Scranton, Roy. “Narrative in the Anthropocene Is the Enemy.” Lithub.com 18 Sep. 2019. <https://lithub.com/roy-scranton-narrative-in-the-anthropocene-is-the-enemy/>.Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Walton, James. “Fascinating, Fearless, and Distinctly Odd.” The New York Review of Books 9 Jan. 2014: 63–64.Uhlmann, Anthony. “The Other Way, the Other Truth, the Other Life: Simpson Returns.” Sydney Review of Books. 2 Sep. 2019 <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/macauley-simpson-returns/>. Xu, Xi. “Speculative Fiction.” Presented at the International MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Vermont, 15 Aug. 2019.

IntroductionIn this article, I set out to accomplish two tasks. The first is to map coffee and cafés in Mainland China in different historical periods. The second is to focus on coffee and cafés in the socio-cultural milieu of contemporary China in order to understand the symbolic value of the emerging coffee/café-scape. Cafés, rather than coffee, are at the centre of this current trend in contemporary Chinese cities. With instant coffee dominating as a drink, the Chinese have developed a cultural and social demand for cafés, but have not yet developed coffee palates. Historical Coffee Map In 1901, coffee was served in a restaurant in the city of Tianjin. This restaurant, named Kiessling, was run by a German chef, a former solider who came to China with the eight-nation alliance. At that time, coffee was reserved mostly for foreign politicians and military officials as well as wealthy businessmen—very few ordinary Chinese drank it. (For more history of Kiessling, including pictures and videos, see Kiessling). Another group of coffee consumers were from the cultural elites—the young revolutionary intellectuals and writers with overseas experience. It was almost a fashion among the literary elite to spend time in cafés. However, this was negatively judged as “Western” and “bourgeois.” For example, in 1932, Lu Xun, one of the most important twentieth century Chinese writers, commented on the café fashion during 1920s (133-36), and listed the reasons why he would not visit one. He did not drink coffee because it was “foreigners’ food”, and he was too busy writing for the kind of leisure enjoyed in cafés. Moreover, he did not, he wrote, have the nerve to go to a café, and particularly not the Revolutionary Café that was popular among cultural celebrities at that time. He claimed that the “paradise” of the café was for genius, and for handsome revolutionary writers (who he described as having red lips and white teeth, whereas his teeth were yellow). His final complaint was that even if he went to the Revolutionary Café, he would hesitate going in (Lu Xun 133-36). From Lu Xun’s list, we can recognise his nationalism and resistance to what were identified as Western foods and lifestyles. It is easy to also feel his dissatisfaction with those dilettante revolutionary intellectuals who spent time in cafés, talking and enjoying Western food, rather than working. In contrast to Lu Xun’s resistance to coffee and café culture, another well-known writer, Zhang Ailing, frequented cafés when she lived in Shanghai from the 1920s to 1950s. She wrote about the smell of cakes and bread sold in Kiessling’s branch store located right next to her parents’ house (Yuyue). Born into a wealthy family, exposed to Western culture and food at a very young age, Zhang Ailing liked to spend her social and writing time in cafés, ordering her favourite cakes, hot chocolate, and coffee. When she left Shanghai and immigrated to the USA, coffee was an important part of her writing life: the smell and taste reminding her of old friends and Shanghai (Chunzi). However, during Zhang’s time, it was still a privileged and elite practice to patronise a café when these were located in foreign settlements with foreign chefs, and served mainly foreigners, wealthy businessmen, and cultural celebrities. After 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party established the People’s Republic of China, until the late 1970s, there were no coffee shops in Mainland China. It was only when Deng Xiaoping suggested neo-liberalism as a so-called “reform-and-open-up” economic policy that foreign commerce and products were again seen in China. In 1988, ten years after the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s policy, the Nestlé coffee company made the first inroads into the mainland market, featuring homegrown coffee beans in Yunnan province (China Beverage News; Dong; ITC). Nestlé’s bottled instant coffee found its way into the Chinese market, avoiding a direct challenge to the tea culture. Nestlé packaged its coffee to resemble health food products and marketed it as a holiday gift suitable for friends and relatives. As a symbol of modernity and “the West”, coffee-as-gift meshed with the traditional Chinese cultural custom that values gift giving. It also satisfied a collective desire for foreign products (and contact with foreign cultures) during the economic reform era. Even today, with its competitively low price, instant coffee dominates coffee consumption at home, in the workplace, and on Chinese airlines. While Nestlé aimed their product at native Chinese consumers, the multinational companies who later entered China’s coffee market, such as Sara Lee, mainly targeted international hotels such as IHG, Marriott, and Hyatt. The multinationals also favoured coffee shops like Kommune in Shanghai that offered more sophisticated kinds of coffee to foreign consumers and China’s upper class (Byers). If Nestlé introduced coffee to ordinary Chinese families, it was Starbucks who introduced the coffee-based “third space” to urban life in contemporary China on a signficant scale. Differing from the cafés before 1949, Starbucks stores are accessible to ordinary Chinese citizens. The first in Mainland China opened in Beijing’s China World Trade Center in January 1999, targeting mainly white-collar workers and foreigners. Starbucks coffee shops provide a space for informal business meetings, chatting with friends, and relaxing and, with its 500th store opened in 2011, dominate the field in China. Starbucks are located mainly in the central business districts and airports, and the company plans to have 1,500 sites by 2015 (Starbucks). Despite this massive presence, Starbucks constitutes only part of the café-scape in contemporary Chinese cities. There are two other kinds of cafés. One type is usually located in universities or residential areas and is frequented mainly by students or locals working in cultural professions. A representative of this kind is Sculpting in Time Café. In November 1997, two years before the opening of the first Starbucks in Beijing, two newlywed college graduates opened the first small Sculpting in Time Café near Beijing University’s East Gate. This has been expanded into a chain, and boasts 18 branches on the Mainland. (For more about its history, see Sculpting in Time Café). Interestingly, both Starbucks and Sculpting in Time Café acquired their names from literature, Starbucks from Moby Dick, and Sculpting in Time from the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s film diary of the same name. For Chinese students of literature and the arts, drinking coffee is less about acquiring more energy to accomplish their work, and more about entering a sensual world, where the aroma of coffee mixes with the sounds from the coffee machine and music, as well as the lighting of the space. More importantly, cafés with this ambience become, in themselves, cultural sites associated with literature, films, and music. Owners of this kind of café are often lovers of foreign literatures, films, and cultures, and their cafés host various cultural events, including forums, book clubs, movie screenings, and music clubs. Generally speaking, coffee served in this kind of café is simpler than in the kind discussed below. This third type of café includes those located in tourist and entertainment sites such as art districts, bar areas, and historical sites, and which are frequented by foreign and native tourists, artists and other cultural workers. If Starbucks cultivates a fast-paced business/professional atmosphere, and Sculpting in Time Cafés an artsy and literary atmosphere, this third kind of café is more like an upscale “bar” with trained baristas serving complicated coffees and emphasising their flavour. These coffee shops are more expensive than the other kinds, with an average price three times that of Starbucks. Currently, cafés of this type are found only in “first-tier” cities and usually located in art districts and tourist areas—such as Beijing’s 798 Art District and Nanluo Guxiang, Shanghai’s Tai Kang Road (a.k.a. “the art street”), and Hangzhou’s Westlake area. While Nestlé and Starbucks use coffee beans grown in Yunnan provinces, these “art cafés” are more inclined to use imported coffee beans from suppliers like Sara Lee. Coffee and Cafés in Contemporary China After just ten years, there are hundreds of cafés in Chinese cities. Why has there been such a demand for coffee or, more accurately, cafés, in such a short period of time? The first reason is the lack of “third space” environments in Mainland China. Before cafés appeared in the late 1990s, stores like KFC (which opened its first store in 1987) and McDonald’s (with its first store opened in 1990) filled this role for urban residents, providing locations where customers could experience Western food, meet friends, work, or read. In fact, KFC and McDonald’s were once very popular with college students looking for a place to study. Both stores had relatively clean food environments and good lighting. They also had air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter, which are not provided in most Chinese university dormitories. However, since neither chain was set up to be a café and customers occupying seats for long periods while ordering minimal amounts of food or drink affected profits, staff members began to indirectly ask customers to leave after dining. At the same time, as more people were able to afford to eat at KFC and McDonald’s, their fast foods were also becoming more and more popular, especially among young people. As a consequence, both types of chain restaurant were becoming noisy and crowded and, thus, no longer ideal for reading, studying, or meeting with friends. Although tea has been a traditional drink in Chinese culture, traditional teahouses were expensive places more suitable for business meetings or for the cultural or intellectual elite. Since almost every family owns a tea set and can readily purchase tea, friends and family would usually make and consume tea at home. In recent years, however, new kinds of teahouses have emerged, similar in style to cafés, targeting the younger generation with more affordable prices and a wider range of choices, so the lack of a “third space” does not fully explain the café boom. Another factor affecting the popularity of cafés has been the development and uptake of Internet technology, including the increasing use of laptops and wireless Internet in recent years. The Internet has been available in China since the late 1990s, while computers and then laptops entered ordinary Chinese homes in the early twenty-first century. The IT industry has created not only a new field of research and production, but has also fostered new professions and demands. Particularly, in recent years in Mainland China, a new socially acceptable profession—freelancing in such areas as graphic design, photography, writing, film, music, and the fashion industry—has emerged. Most freelancers’ work is computer- and Internet-based. Cafés provide suitable working space, with wireless service, and the bonus of coffee that is, first of all, somatically stimulating. In addition, the emergence of the creative and cultural industries (which are supported by the Chinese government) has created work for these freelancers and, arguably, an increasing demand for café-based third spaces where such people can meet, talk and work. Furthermore, the flourishing of cafés in first-tier cities is part of the “aesthetic economy” (Lloyd 24) that caters to the making and selling of lifestyle experience. Alongside foreign restaurants, bars, galleries, and design firms, cafés contribute to city branding, and link a city to the global urban network. Cafés, like restaurants, galleries and bars, provide a space for the flow of global commodities, as well as for the human flow of tourists, travelling artists, freelancers, and cultural specialists. Finally, cafés provide a type of service that contributes to friendly owner/waiter-customer relations. During the planned-economy era, most stores and hotels in China were State-owned, staff salaries were not related to individual performance, and indifferent (and even unfriendly) service was common. During the economic reform era, privately owned stores and shops began to replace State-owned ones. At the same time, a large number of people from the countryside flowed into the cities seeking opportunities. Most had little if any professional training and so could only find work in factories or in the service industry. However, most café employees are urban, with better educational backgrounds, and many were already familiar with coffee culture. In addition, café owners, particularly those of places like Sculpting in Time Cafe, often invest in creating a positive, community atmosphere, learning about their customers and sharing personal experiences with their regular clients. This leads to my next point—the generation of the 1980s’ need for a social community. Cafés’ Symbolic Value—Community A demand for a sense of community among the generation of the 1980s is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon in China, which paradoxically co-exists with their desire for individualism. Mao Zedong started the “One Child Policy” in 1979 to slow the rapid population growth in China, and the generations born under this policy are often called “the lonely generations,” with both parents working full-time. At the same time, they are “the generation of me,” labelled as spoiled, self-centred, and obsessed with consumption (de Kloet; Liu; Rofel; Wang). The individuals of this generation, now aged in their 20s and 30s, constitute the primary consumers of coffee in China. Whereas individualism is an important value to them, a sense of community is also desirable in order to compensate for their lack of siblings. Furthermore, the 1980s’ generation has also benefitted from the university expansion policy implemented in 1999. Since then, China has witnessed a surge of university students and graduates who not only received scientific and other course-based knowledge, but also had a better chance to be exposed to foreign cultures through their books, music, and movies. With this interesting tension between individualism and collectivism, the atmosphere provided by cafés has fostered a series of curious temporary communities built on cultural and culinary taste. Interestingly, it has become an aspiration of many young college students and graduates to open a community-space style café in a city. One of the best examples is the new Henduoren’s (Many People’s) Café. This was a project initiated by Wen Erniu, a recent college graduate who wanted to open a café in Beijing but did not have sufficient funds to do so. She posted a message on the Internet, asking people to invest a minimum of US$316 to open a café with her. With 78 investors, the café opened in September 2011 in Beijing (see pictures of Henduoren’s Café). In an interview with the China Daily, Wen Erniu stated that, “To open a cafe was a dream of mine, but I could not afford it […] We thought opening a cafe might be many people’s dream […] and we could get together via the Internet to make it come true” (quoted in Liu 2011). Conclusion: Café Culture and (Instant) Coffee in China There is a Chinese saying that, if you hate someone—just persuade him or her to open a coffee shop. Since cafés provide spaces where one can spend a relatively long time for little financial outlay, owners have to increase prices to cover their expenses. This can result in fewer customers. In retaliation, cafés—particularly those with cultural and literary ambience—host cultural events to attract people, and/or they offer food and wine along with coffee. The high prices, however, remain. In fact, the average price of coffee in China is often higher than in Europe and North America. For example, a medium Starbucks’ caffè latte in China averaged around US$4.40 in 2010, according to the price list of a Starbucks outlet in Shanghai—and the prices has recently increased again (Xinhua 2012). This partially explains why instant coffee is still so popular in China. A bag of instant Nestlé coffee cost only some US$0.25 in a Beijing supermarket in 2010, and requires only hot water, which is accessible free almost everywhere in China, in any restaurant, office building, or household. As an habitual, addictive treat, however, coffee has not yet become a customary, let alone necessary, drink for most Chinese. Moreover, while many, especially those of the older generations, could discern the quality and varieties of tea, very few can judge the quality of the coffee served in cafés. As a result, few Mainland Chinese coffee consumers have a purely somatic demand for coffee—craving its smell or taste—and the highly sweetened and creamed instant coffee offered by companies like Nestlé or Maxwell has largely shaped the current Chinese palate for coffee. Ben Highmore has proposed that “food spaces (shops, restaurants and so on) can be seen, for some social agents, as a potential space where new ‘not-me’ worlds are encountered” (396) He continues to expand that “how these potential spaces are negotiated—the various affective registers of experience (joy, aggression, fear)—reflect the multicultural shapes of a culture (its racism, its openness, its acceptance of difference)” (396). Cafés in contemporary China provide spaces where one encounters and constructs new “not-me” worlds, and more importantly, new “with-me” worlds. While café-going communicates an appreciation and desire for new lifestyles and new selves, it can be hoped that in the near future, coffee will also be appreciated for its smell, taste, and other benefits. Of course, it is also necessary that future Chinese coffee consumers also recognise the rich and complex cultural, political, and social issues behind the coffee economy in the era of globalisation. References Byers, Paul [former Managing Director, Sara Lee’s Asia Pacific]. Pers. comm. Apr. 2012. China Beverage News. “Nestlé Acquires 70% Stake in Chinese Mineral Water Producer.” (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://chinabevnews.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/nestle-acquires-70-stake-in-chinese-mineral-water-producer›. Chunzi. 张爱玲地图[The Map of Eileen Chang]. 汉语大词典出版 [Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe], 2003. de Kloet, Jeroen. China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth and Popular Music. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010. Dong, Jonathan. “A Caffeinated Timeline: Developing Yunnan’s Coffee Cultivation.” China Brief (2011): 24-26. Highmore, Ben. “Alimentary Agents: Food, Cultural Theory and Multiculturalism.” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 29.4 (2008): 381-98. ITC (International Trade Center). The Coffee Sector in China: An Overview of Production, Trade And Consumption, 2010. Liu, Kang. Globalization and Cultural Trends in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Liu, Zhihu. “From Virtual to Reality.” China Daily (Dec. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2011-12/26/content_14326490.htm›. Lloyd, Richard. Neobohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. London: Routledge, 2006. Lu, Xun. “Geming Kafei Guan [Revolutionary Café]”. San Xian Ji. Taibei Shi: Feng Yun Shi Dai Chu Ban Gong Si: Fa Xing Suo Xue Wen Hua Gong Si, Mingguo 78 (1989): 133-36. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007: 1-30. “Starbucks Celebrates Its 500th Store Opening in Mainland China.” Starbucks Newsroom (Oct. 2011) 31 Mar. 2012. ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=580›. Wang, Jing. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P, 1996. Xinhua. “Starbucks Raises Coffee Prices in China Stores.” Xinhua News (Jan. 2012). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-01/31/c_131384671.htm›. Yuyue. Ed. “On the History of the Western-Style Restaurants: Aileen Chang A Frequent Customer of Kiessling.” China.com.cn (2010). 31 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.china.com.cn/culture/txt/2010-01/30/content_19334964.htm›.

The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). They are sociocultural phenomena that emerge through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese imagination of “journeying abroad” from and to the country.ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.Bohlman, Philip V. “World Music at the ‘End of History’.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1–32.Davis, Sara L.M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Duan, Wenjie. “The History of Conservation of Mogao Grottoes.” International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: The Conservation of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and the Related Studies. Eds. Kuchitsu and Nobuaki. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1997. 1–8.Faxian. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.Herzfeld, Michael. 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As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.