Organizer: Robin Visser, Columbia University
Chair: David Der-wei Wang, Columbia University
Discussant: Xiaobing Tang, University of Chicago
What does it mean to be an urban subject in 1990s China? To be "Chinese" in post-martial law Taiwan? To be an émigré from postcolonial Hong Kong? Identity is generally recognized to be a process based on positive identifications with ethnicity, gender, class, nation, and language. However, a consideration of nostalgia, melancholy, and loss in the constitution of personal and cultural identity leads to issues of lack as central to the construction of subjectivity, the formation of ego, and the delineation of social boundaries. Discussing works from Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, this panel will focus on nostalgia, melancholy, and loss as constitutive processes that form the limits of Chinese urban identity in the 1990s.
We begin by looking at Chen Ran’s 1996 novel Private Life. In a rapidly modernizing Beijing, Chen’s female protagonist narrates her personal identity in terms of the melancholy she experiences in relation to urban alienation. We continue with an examination of Zhu Tianxin’s rewriting of Taiwanese history in her 1997 collection, Ancient Capital. Nostalgia functions in this text as a means of reclaiming the past in order to displace undesirable aspects of the urban present. It ultimately breaks down when the cohesion between history, memory, and place can no longer be maintained. We conclude with a reading of Clara Law’s 1996 film The Floating Life. Law’s story of the Chan family’s emigration from Hong Kong to Australia traces a migratory map of the Chinese diaspora that is predicated on gendered distinction and loss. Law’s film investigates the way in which gender at once problematizes the rebuilding of ethnic and national identity, while giving discursive legibility to postcolonial identity as loss. Through our choice of mixed media, our cross-disciplinary interests, and our geographically comparative approach, we hope to promote critical discussion on the question of uneven Chinese identity formation in a global context.
The Melancholic Urban Subject: Chen Ran’s Private Life
Robin Visser, Columbia University
Georg Simmel opens his well-known essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" by stating that "the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life." Chen Ran’s 1996 novel Private Life is written as an interior monologue in autobiographical format, reflecting on the coming of age of a female protagonist in Beijing from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, where the subject is preoccupied, above all, with maintaining the "autonomy and individuality of (her) existence" in the perpetually modernizing metropolis. The title of the novel also attests to the tendency of many urban writers in 1990s China to write from highly idiosyncratic perspectives heedless of master narratives of history, ideology, or belief.
In this paper, I examine how the subject is produced in her urban space in relation to psychic theories of the ego and material conceptions of the production of space, which determine her sense of self and concomitant dislocation as a public citizen. Further, I will locate Chen’s work in the context of the mid-1990s intellectual debates over the loss of "humanitarian spirit" in contemporary China, as the tendency to write the individual, shorn of transcendental value, in part gave rise to the debates. Thus I will re-examine theories on melancholy both in relation to its gendered manifestation in Jue-jue’s search for personal identity in an alienating urban metropolis and as it applies to the intellectual angst over China’s cultural climate in the newly emerging market economy of the 1990s.
Nostalgia and Urban Displacement: Questions of Cultural Identity in Zhu Tianxin’s Ancient Capital
Lingchei Letty Chen, Columbia University
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the notion of "cultural identity" in the context of post-martial law Taiwan, particularly, its articulation in Zhu Tianxin’s Ancient Capital. Cultural identity is often equated with national identity, relying on concepts such as ethnicity, class, language, or a cultural "other." In Zhu Tianxin’s fiction, the experience of very rapid geographical and architectural change produces a dislocation of identity and problems of identity fragmentation, which prompts the author to investigate the dynamic relationship between history and cultural identity.
To lay claim to a cultural identity, one must believe this identity will give one a sense of uniqueness, that it is inherently original and authentic. In Ancient Capital, Zhu Tianxin digs deeply into the very core of what cultural identity means and what reconciliation one must make before the construction of this identity can even begin. In her simulation of history, in order to articulate a coherent and independent cultural identity, Zhu Tianxin allows nostalgia to become such a powerful force, that her investigation takes unexpected turns.
Nostalgia is the desire to connect and relate to the past, and where there is desire, there is a lack, a need. Nostalgia is also a privileging of the past over the present—a longing to go back because it was in some way better than the present. The question is, can one construct cultural identity based on the past alone? How is urban displacement reflected through such sentiment? Ultimately, what will be at stake when the cohesion between history, memory and place can no longer be maintained? I will explore the answer to these questions raised in Zhu Tianxin’s narrative.
Loss in The Floating Life
David L. Eng, Columbia University
Critics praise Clara Law’s The Floating Life (Southern Star Films, 1996), Australia’s nomination for the best foreign language film for the 69th Academy Awards, as both a comedy of assimilation and a melodramatic meditation on the nature of displacement and loss in the Chinese diaspora. This presentation explores the relationship of gender to assimilation and loss. In particular, it investigates the ways in which gender gives discursive legibility to Law’s version of Hong Kong postcolonial identity.
While numerous reviewers of The Floating Life focus their critical attentions on the vicissitudes of immigration, few have noted that the problematics of the rebuilding of ethnic and national identity in Law’s film is driven by a prior and unacknowledged gendered loss. That is, the emigration of the Chan family from Hong Kong to Australia that marks the opening of the film covers over the prior dispersion of the Chan daughters, Yen and Bing, to Germany and Australia that the diegesis cannot immediately, perhaps ever, show. In the world of the Chinese diaspora, Yen and Bing constitute the palimpsest of migration that their transnational family comes to trace (marking, among other things, the gendered distinction between transnational labor and capital). Rethinking Freud’s theories on mourning and grief as well as Judith Butler’s work on gender, I will explore postcolonial identity and assimilation as melancholic racial and gender loss.