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A tribute by Dongyang Li

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As I write these words, I unfold the fragile pages of memory—each crease a testament to your distinctive hand, inked across the drafts of my doctoral thesis. Like the margins of your own cherished books, these pages bear your candid voice: ‘Dear Dongyang, sorry to be blunt, but how many times have I told you…’ Those sharp, tender admonitions will resonate with every student you guided—a chorus of scholars who recall the nights spent rewriting papers, the dawns where we grew beneath the rigour of your teaching. These fragments of nostalgia constantly define and redefine what we long for, who we are, and where we belong(Probyn, Outside Belongings, 1996).

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My memories of you have become a complex affective archive, shimmering with often unspeakable, unindexed fragments. I remember our first encounter: you praised my “fancy” style of daily dressing code. In the future days when you supervise me, however, you chided my writing for mirroring those same ornate threads. ‘Write simply, frankly—you’re fancy enough in life!’ In that funny command, you taught me to see prose as an extension of selfhood—to celebrate my writing as I celebrate my being, embracing every gendered, embodied reflection (Probyn, Sexing the Self, 1993).

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When your interests turned toward the oceans, I was fortunate to sail alongside you. We traced the affective currents between human and the more-than-human oceans. ‘We eat the ocean,’ you declared, ‘because eating is relating—an act that reveals how deeply we care for the waters that sustain us’ (Probyn, Eating the Ocean, 2016). Our bond, woven through shared hungers, anchored me during the Covid-19 pandemic. Trapped in my island-like Australian rental, devoured by loneliness and frozen words, your voice would pierce the silence: ‘Hey, don’t disappear—I know where you live! Send me materials!’ As I wrestled with an article on viruses and bat consumption, my body trembling with illness and fear, you shared your own battle with anorexia—a tough memory of disgust and shame—teaching me to reconceive eating as embodied politics, identity as affective praxis (Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 2000).

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For five years, from my master’s to my Ph.D, we navigated the oceanic depths of cultural studies. Your works, alive with possibility, continually shattered my intellectual horizons. ‘Do people without cultural studies care for the ocean? No,’ you’d insist. ‘It falls to you to expand what cultural studies means. Start your research first—now.’ Through you, the Anthropocene, more-than-human, deep-sea temporalities, as well as many other “fancy” concepts ceased to be abstract; they became embodied reckonings in current and ordinary politics (Probyn, ‘Aqua/geopolitical conjuncture and disjuncture,’ 2023).

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Yet it was Blush: Faces of Shame (2005) that truly and deeply reshaped me. I still see you grinning over drinks with our friends, teasing: ‘It’s easy to make Dongyang blush—but that blush is a precious promise.’ Your words, like your scholarship, unveiled shame’s, but also my, productive potential:

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‘Shame illuminates . . our desire to be connected with others, and the knowledge that . . . we will sometimes fail in our attempts to maintain those connections . . . [S]hame is always productive… It produces effects-more shame, more interest-which may be felt at a physiological, social, or cultural level. (Probyn 2005, 14-15).

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Thank you, Elspeth—for your teaching, your guidance, your fierce art of care. I still blush often, but no longer flinch from the shame that marks me as what you called ‘a feminist boy aflame with feeling.’ It is my compass in cultural studies, my commitment to myself, and to you.

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Vale, dearest Elspeth—my friend, my ‘lifelong supervisor,’ my irreplaceable intellectual mother.