Presenter: Liang Luo (University of Kentucky), Discussant: Ban Wang (Stanford University), Discussant: Howard Chiang (UC Davis)

The Global White Snake (University of Michigan Press, 2021) foregrounds the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels throughout East Asia, as well as in Southeast Asia and North America, from the late nineteenth century to the present, in print, on stage, in cinema and in digital media. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them to become repositories of diverse and complex meanings for a great number of people, serving as reservoirs for polyphonic expressions ranging from the attempts to consolidate authoritarian power to the celebrations of minority rights and activism, which are key issues confronting our contemporary world today.