China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Discussant: Ban Wang, SUNY, Stony Brook
Chair: Leo Ou-fan Lee, Harvard University
This panel focuses on literary writing as a form of historical understanding. It explores how fiction, memoir, narrative, and testimony are used in making meaningful connections with the past and in fashioning collective and personal identity. We address these questions: how History as an orderly, official pattern of meaning gives way to less coherent histories, how memory takes over as a way of dealing with past catastrophes, how the culturally prevalent narratives have proved inadequate to making sense of historical traumas, how aesthetic conventions function as expressions of conflict between tradition and modernity, and how a new historical consciousness emerges that disturbs and shapes contemporary China’s relation to its past.
Recent studies have offered sociological and historical analyses of the practices where official history clashes with repressed memories. With a more literary approach, we examine visions of the past by considering a few modern and contemporary writers. Embedded in their writings are narrative patterns, structures of feeling, clusters of themes, and imagery that orient the audience in a complex relation to the past and supply a livable sense of self within the community. These writers also draw on alternative histories of minority groups and marginal cultural resources in recovering the forgotten of history. It is our belief that private memory, ethnic tradition and the mainstream history-writing constantly intermesh, negotiate, and contest in creating various images and versions of history.
Xinmin Liu, Wesleyan University
With his feisty renunciation of the much too commercialized social settings in China today, Zhang Chengzhi stages a daring act of a spiritual and inward turn—reinventing his ethnic identity as a Muslim Chinese and uncovering the suppressed history of Jahriyya Muslims in Northwest China. What Zhang does is to deploy a quasi-historical narrative to give voice to the muted facts of how the Qing rulers bloodily quelled Jahriyya uprisings in 1781–82. He is thus compelled to unlearn his Han cultural upbringing and reconstrue his Muslim identity while retrieving this lost memory. In History of the Soul, he overcomes the void of a disoriented self by first recounting Jahriyya history via a "defamiliarized self" and then evoking the primordial impulse of religiosity to evoke in the individual the obscured awareness of ethnic origin. In The Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness, he captures key moments in his remembrance of carrying on a series of mental dialogues with Lu Xun, his intellectual mentor, to sort out his ambiguity towards the historicity of the ethnic identity and the spirituality of a nativist self.
Zhang’s effort rehearses a problematic characteristic of all self-fashioning: one cannot renew ethnic identities simply by token of an allegorical subject (as in nation-state) or a vitalist ethos (as in nativism); self-reinvention must be contested and negotiated via "the other" in the form of historical contingency as well as social interlocution. In the course of his negotiation with institutional hegemony, Zhang finds his memory work constantly destablized, mediated and refigured by, on the one hand, the necessity of interacting with institutional memory that threatens to annihilate ethnic differences and, on the other, the allure of a nativist telos that transcends the circumstantial and neglects the individual. His ambiguity towards a self/other reversal leaves one in question about his ability to avert possible pitfalls of vitalism and his readiness to continue a fluid, open-ended pursuit of ethnic identity.
Jie Lu, University of the Pacific
In this paper I will discuss how contemporary Chinese writers use memory to create fictional histories, how memory functions as a trope for representation, and how it enacts an alternative way of looking at Chinese historical past which not only "interacts and clashes" with official history, but also redresses its historical amnesia, and therefore has changed our historical consciousness.
As we approach the end of the twentieth century, our gaze seems to turn backwards ever more frequently, and in this backward turn, memory figures ever more prominently. How can we make sense of this current obsession with memory and past that has pervaded our literary production and other cultural forms? My hypothesis is that our present mnemonic preoccupation is more than a sign of the fin de siecle nostalgia or syndrome, but rather reflects in a profound and uncanny way a crisis of historicity—the crisis of official history and historical discourse—in Chinese contemporary cultural and intellectual situation.
In the study of use of memory in this paper I will examine closely Qiao Liang’s "The Mourning-flag," a story that can be seen to represent the recent attempt to rewrite revolutionary history. I will focus on the function of memory locus in mnemonic representation of past. Here memory locus not only serves to preserve the past buried by the official history, but also functions as a site of discourse, a specific semantic field formed to make a different story. The importance of memory place in the art of memory is to help memorize and organize knowledge, while in the fictional history in question, is to enact an alternative position of perception and signification. As a result we not only have different versions of history but also different experiences of history: History is also about "what fails to happen."
Yomi Braester, University of California, Berkeley
National calamities such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58 or the Cultural Revolution are often believed to be retained through collective memory, yet testimonies from these events underscore the individual dimension of experience. This tension is illustrated in Zhang Xianliang’s My Bodhi Tree (1994). The author sees it as his mission to testify to his experience in a labor reform camp in 1960 and counter the collective amnesia of his generation. At the same time he sets high personal stakes, describing the text as a means for staying alive and for affirming his survival as novelist. To negotiate between past experience and present memories, the novel brings together two separate texts—Zhang’s diary written in the camp and his annotations composed more than thirty years later. By speaking through two disparate moments in time, Zhang comments on the challenges of bearing witness, challenges that rise out of his present distance from the events and of the cataclysmic nature of the past experience.
Zhang sees his self-censorship as the result not only of direct surveillance but also of the traumatization of writing. Zhang’s viewpoint informs our understanding of the crisis of writing on history in post-Tiananmen China. Many of the realistic descriptions of "scar literature" and the abstract parables of "avant-garde" fiction have failed to speak in the name of past experience and present memory at the same time. Zhang exemplifies how bearing historical witness succeeds only when it addresses both the highly-personal instant and "history" as understood by collective consciousness.
Jianhua Chen, Harvard University
As scholars have noted, Eileen Chang’s aesthetic of the desolate (cangliang) arises from her vision of history, not as a progression and development, but as a field of destruction and potential catastrophe—history in the image of a fallen city. In her essay "My Own Writings" she says that modern individuals must grasp "ancient memory" to justify their existence and that her poetics of cangliang aims to "portray human memory alive through the ages." This paper explores the myth of memory in Chang’s early writings: By self-reflexively writing about/from memory with a cangliang poetics she struggles between forgetfulness and History and resists the "obsession with reality."
Her notion of "human memory" is connected with tradition, everyday desire, and a faith in writing, epitomized by her vision of a woman, a lonely, passionate survivor in a desolate and timeless landscape. This vision is matched with an implied image from her personal memories of childhood, family, and war: a kind of Benjamimian "angel of history" witnessing and reflecting on the fracture between tradition and modernity. "A beautiful and desolate gesture" can be a metaphor for her act of writing about/from memory, creating a "force field" where past and present interact each other.
"Love in a Fallen City" is an allegory of the "ancient memory" of beauty and war. She uses conventional chuanqi narrative to tell a "desolate story" about love, history and revolution rather than a modern banal romance. Chang represents the ambiguities between distance and intimacy, the author and her mask, the private and collective memories.