Organizer: Sheng-Tai Chang, South Puget Sound College
Chair: Leo Ou-fan Lee, Harvard University
Discussants: Dominic Cheung, University of Southern California; Leo Ou-fan Lee,
Harvard University
The fundamental assumption of this panel is that the geographical dimension of literature is very important to an understanding of literature as an institution and that literary geography is a necessary complementation of literary history. The topics that literary geography examines include not only the geographical background of authors and texts but also roles played by geographically based literary production in the overall institution of literature and in the cultural or even political power balance in regional and national life. In short, literary geography deals with what may be called "'literary geopolitics."
For the past decade or more, there has been a growing tendency in social sciences, including human geography, to challenge the traditional privileging of the temporal or historical imagination over the spatial or geographical imagination. Echoing this trend, participants in this panel will adopt a spatial approach, a mode of thinking that gives prominence to the spatial dimension of human experience, to the literary worlds some modern Chinese writers and filmmakers create. One important distinction between our approach and the hitherto study of regional literature or "local color" is that we assume that all literature is regional and that the label "regional" as an antonym of "center" or "metropolitan" reflects the biases of most literary histories. Associating spatiality with moral visions, cultural diversities, nationalism, and modern Chinese politics, various panelists will not only use geographical discourse to counter the tyranny of historical discourse, but also problematize the picture of a "unitary" Chinese culture depicted by the majority of China scholars.
The Construction of A Geomoral Landscape: Shen Congwen and his
"Regional" Writings
Sheng-Tai Chang, South Puget Sound College
This paper on Shen Congwen demonstrates the complex interactions among "regions" of modern China. Shen is identified with West Hunan in the modern Chinese literary imagination. West Hunan in Shen's work represents not just a spatial expansion of the literary landscape of modern China; it also signifies an alternative vision of China from the perspective of a "peripheral" region. Shen's literary world adds a different facet to modern Chinese literary discourses dominated by the May Fourth ideology. As a West Hunan writer, Shen lived and wrote most of his lifetime outside the region in Beijing and Shanghai, two literary powerhouses of modern China. A close examination of Shen's writing career reveals certain tensions between his "regional"/"ethnic" aspect and his "mainstream" aspect. Shen's "exile" status shows a complicated negotiation between the enabling and containing powers of the "center": it both enabled him to achieve national recognition for his regional work and absorbed him to the literary mainstream dominated by the May Fourth discourse.
Based on the above observation, the author will further place Shen's work in the context of the geopolitics of regional cultures in modern China. By claiming lineage with the ancient civilization of Chu, the author argues, Shen upholds the secondary traditions of Chinese culture, such as Taoism and the Chuci, vis-à-vis dominating Confucianism and the Shijing. Shen's regionalist agenda culminates in his virtual demand for political autonomy for West Hunan.
Haipai and Chinese Nationalism: Reconsidering Shanghai as a Cultural Space
Shao-yi Sun, University of Southern California
The Miao village of West Hunan and the foreign concessions of Shanghai represent two extreme ends of the sociohistorical differentiation of modern China, which are first of all geographical. Shao-yi Sun's paper is an attempt to relate the hostile attitude toward the Haipai (Shanghai Style) to the perplexity of the question of Chinese nationalism. Through the analysis of both literary and cinematic texts of the 1920s and the 1930s, Sun intends to argue that, although most "progressive" writers and filmmakers during the Chinese Republic (1911-1949) chose Shanghai as their cultural base, few of them, even including some "apolitical" writers such as the members of the "New Perception School," felt happy with this "alien," "shallow," and "immoral" space. The paper will discuss how "progressive" intellectuals dealt with the urban space of Shanghai and, through the repudiation of it, how a discourse of Chinese nationalism was constructed. It will further argue that to demonize the urban space of Shanghai and to deny the cultural contributions of the Haipai were the ways that the "progressive" intellectuals packaged their ideological messages and struggled for political and cultural authority. In the eyes of these writers and filmmakers, the presence of this "decadent," "erotic," and "vicious" metropolis was a "necessary evil," so to speak, in articulating an "authentic" national culture as well as modern Chinese revolutionary nationalism. To some extent, Shanghai's role in the Republic era shows that the regional differences reflect historical differences, which eventually affect the power balance among regions of China.
The Mystical Against the Mythical: Tibetan Fiction of Tashi Dawa and Ma Yuan
Xiaobin Yang, Yale University
This paper offers an alternative reading of Tashi Dawa's and Ma Yuan's fictional worlds, the two "avant-gardists" in contemporary China. The author will argue that, from 1985 to 1989, Ma Yuan's novellas and short stories about Tibet are among the most influential works of Chinese "avant-garde" fiction for their formalistic experiments that subvert the central discourse of realism in modern Chinese literature. However, it is rarely noted that, living in a culturally "alien" space, Tibet, during the 1980s, Ma Yuan's fiction is greatly imbued with Tibetan culture, especially religious mysticism. The experiences of a Han national in Tibet are narrated in a structural labyrinth which not only problematizes the representational totality but also creates a cultural space in opposition to the rest of Chinese regions.
Similarly, Tashi Dawa, a native Tibetan, is another important figure in the literary scene of contemporary Chinese "avant-garde." His fictional genealogies against the background of Tibet become a challenge against the official historiographical writing. A textual analysis will show that the mystical temporality in his stories becomes a disruption of the linear history established by the myth of Maoist discourse. While modern Chinese literature is by and large under the sway of Maoist's discursive/narrative myth of subjective/objective totalities, Tashi Dawa and Ma Yuan, inspired by Tibetan mystique and Tibet itself as a marginal and "alien" space, interrupt the myth with their own narrative and political strategies.
Fantasy and Tragedy in Exile: Jia Pingwa's The Decadent Capital and Gu Cheng's
Ying'er
Jianhua Chen, Harvard University
By investigating the self-exile of Jia and Gu in the context of the world in the fin de siècle, the concept of "literary geopolitics" will be explored in terms of imaginary spatiality. Though in different geographical locations, their experiences of exile were juxtaposed: alienated from modern life, yearning to return to nature, and creating fictional spaces in which they seek for home, love, and an ideal way of life, mixed with fantasy and agony. In The Decadent Capital which Jia wrote in a state of exile on his homeland, the protagonist, after experiencing the decadent urban life in the Western Capital, eventually left it. While staying in Germany Gu finished Ying'er in which he depicted his exiled life in New Zealand: how he was building a home in which he will happily live with his wife and concubine, and how meanwhile his self was splitting between reality and dream.
The two novels can largely be regarded as autobiographical confessions, imbued with sexual ecstasy, self-remorse, and tragic sense. When the heroes fantasize and invest their male desire through the female body, they tend to appreciate the ethics and aesthetics of traditional Chinese literati. Jia and Gu had their literary journey to transcend modernity and history, yet they were burdened with the memory of their nightmarish past and political repression, which were inscribed by geographical characteristics. However, their consciousness of exile and fictional discourse complicated geographical imagination as well as the relation of history and geography.