The Melancholy of Kinship in Post-reform China and Postcolonial Literature, brings post-reform Chinese cultural texts into conversation with postcolonial novels from Africa and Asia to examine the shared experiences of kinship loss as a response to historical trauma, state violence, and socioeconomic dispossession. Looking beyond Eurocentric paradigms of kinship shaped by Western liberalism, structural anthropology, and Freudian-informed psychoanalysis, this book argues that literary and cultural spheres of the Global South are reclaiming kinship as a form of political sociality rooted in decolonial traditions, precisely through mourning its loss. Ultimately, it draws attention to the ways that narratives from the Global South open up new possibilities for emancipation in a postsocialist and postcolonial world marked by enduring and emerging forms of unfreedom.

Yawen Li is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. Yawen’s scholarly work has appeared in The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Memory Studies, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, Made in China Journal, COVID-19 in International Media, and Crossroads. She also writes for Sinophone platforms such as Initium Media, The Paper, and Jiemian News on postcolonial literary criticism, racial politics, labour culture, feminist imaginaries, and transnational activism.