Call for panelists for a paper at the American Association for Chinese Studies (AACS)

67nd Annual Conference, hosted by Adelphi University, Garden City, New York on October 24-26, 2025. According to the AACS conference description: the theme of the conference is “Charting New Paradigms: China and the Chinese Diaspora in a Changing World Order” in multiple aspects of culture, diplomacy, economy, education, health, history, literature, politics, and society.

Detecting New Paradigms: The Detective Genre in Contemporary Chinese Culture

The detective genre has recently made a very big comeback in Chinese popular culture, including films like this year’s Spring Festival release of Chinatown Detective 1900 (Tangtan1900）and dramas for television and streaming services. Detective fiction is a global genre that tends to police questions of morality, identity, and epistemology in a world where normative social conventions are thrown into crises and need to be salvaged by an unusual, crime-solving outsider. China is no stranger to the detective genre. From Northern Song Dynasty gong’an narratives to late-Qing Dynasty wuxia novels, detective genre conventions have enjoyed a long life in traditional Chinese literature. From translations of Sherlock Holmes to mystery novels written by Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School authors, like Cheng Xiaoqing, detective fiction has been one of the more dominant genres in popular modern Chinese literature. After a long period of being considered a subversive form, detective stories made a comeback during the Opening and Reform period and are now experiencing a renaissance in the ‘New Era.’

This panel seeks to interrogate the widespread return of the detective in Mainland Chinese popular culture, especially in film, television, literature, and new media formats including video games, and would like to invite papers from researchers, scholars, and graduate students to join this investigation. We are looking for papers that are interdisciplinary in nature, including global studies, cultural studies, new media studies, fan studies, gaming studies, and gender studies.

Papers may include, but are not limited to the following topics:

      • Hybridity between the detective genre and distinctive Mainland Chinese genres

      • Fanfiction and the detective in Mainland China

      • Ephemera surrounding the detective genre

      • Translation and adaptation as localization strategies of a global genre like the detective genre

      • The state of the Chinese star system as seen through the detective genre

      • Recent detective narratives and the “New Era”

      • Detective dramas on Mailand Chinese streaming services and their reception

      • The detective genre and gender 

      • Different contemporary iterations of the detective across the Sinophone world  

      • Detective narratives in Mainland Chinese video games

For those interested in joining this panel, please respond by March 27 with an abstract of 250 words or fewer and a brief bio (100 words or fewer).