Organizer: Haiyan Lee, University of Colorado

Chair: Alexander Huang, Pennsylvania State University

Discussant: Lydia H. Liu, University of Michigan

It is said that colonial modernities are translated modernities. This notion seems doubly applicable to modern East Asia, where the very processes of colonization were translated into the form of intra-Asian colonialism. Students of modern East Asian literatures on both sides of the colonial divide have long been accustomed to that condition of cultural hybridity marked by multiple references to Western letters in genre, technique, terminology, motif, and character type. The purpose of this panel is to bring into dialogue recent efforts to examine the status of the foreign within modern East Asia, from the manifold perspectives of China, Japan, Korea, and the Chinese diaspora.

The four papers will examine the following topics: 1) the figure of the Westernesque femme fatale and the practice of interlingual exoticism as a basis for the Japanese genbun-itchi style; 2) the logic of sociality in the Korean poet Manhae’s free verse, especially in relationship to the Indian poet Tagore; 3) the alternative aesthetics of the Chinese diasporic writer Gao Xingjian’s transcultural theater; and 4) the dialectics of self and other, site and emotion in Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park. From these divergent angles, we hope to highlight the inherent hybridity of East Asian modernities as a source of aesthetic creativity, political counter-discourse, nationalist angst, postcolonial critique, as well as new ethical possibilities. As a pioneer in the theorization of translingual exchanges in modern China, discussant Lydia Liu is particularly well-situated to bring these papers into a productive, border-crossing dialogue.

Indra Levy, Stanford University

The modern vernacular style known as genbun-itchi has typically been considered in terms of the intralingual tensions between speech and writing that the new style claimed to reconcile. But the original practice of genbun-itchi in Meiji fiction can best be understood as a form of interlingual exoticism that marked the Japanese vernacular with the opaque traces of foreign letters. This was particularly true for the radical vernacularists of the late 1880s, but their exoticist linguistic practice would also inform the stylistic rebellion of the Japanese Naturalists twenty years later. This paper argues that the siren-like call of modern Western vernacular writing and the culturally hybrid archetype of the Westernesque femme fatale were the privileged objects of an exoticism that underwrote the creation of Japanese literary modernity itself.

Indeed, at two critical junctures in its development, the genbun-itchi novel became home to a female character type who seemed to personify the bewitching call of modern Western letters: what I call the Westernesque femme fatale. By examining the works of Futabatei Shimei, the progenitor of genbun-itchi style, and Tayama Katai, the Naturalist advocate of "raw description," this paper demonstrates that the Westernesque femme fatale comes into being in modern Japanese literature as a siren who inhabits the interlingual gap between reading Western literatures and writing in Japanese. As such, she embodies a form of exoticism that appears to stay at home, yet in fact traverses one of the most confounding of all foreign spaces: the no-man’s land that hangs suspended between languages.

Facing the Other: Sociality in Han Yongun’s Poetry
Ann Y. Choi, Rutgers University

In colonial Korea of the 1920s, sentimental discourse and description reached its height in the ‘discovery’ of romantic love. Against the fetters of tradition, the discursive liberation of affect produced ‘free love’ as a significant modern experience and precipitated the writing of love letters, a practice realized by the inauguration of a modern postal system; in short, it was the period of the invention of modern writing, a process which defined the modern subject as one who could express a wide breadth of emotions in the vernacular writing system in the making. In the language of lyric poetry, such sentimental education led to the proliferation of ‘romantic’ poetry shaped, in part, by selected foreign literatures in translation.

In this paper, I aim to show how Han Yongun’s (Manhae, 1879-1944) Silence of Love published in 1926 was both product and protest against this dominant structure of feeling regulated and maintained by the colonial policy of culture (bunka seiji). By examining Manhae’s poetry vis-à-vis that of Tagore, the Indian poet whose work helped to stimulate the former’s ‘free verse,’ and turning to Emmanual Levinas’ notion of the asymmetric and gratuitous ‘I’-‘You’ relational dynamics, I will show how Manhae’s poetry responds to the polyvalent notion of the foreign (o/Other) with alterity, rather than with mutuality or assimilation. Thus, the paper will trace the specific mode of ‘sociality’ (the term which becomes Levinas’ choice over the abstract notion of ‘humanity’) as a way of addressing the social material process behind the appearance of Korean ‘free verse’; I will argue that lyric poetry’s perceived break from form in early twentieth century Korea attests to something beyond the arousal of affect, that is, to an "irruption of face," or, an ethical awakening.

Alexander Huang, Pennsylvania State University

Gao Xingjjian’s transcultural dramas have been regarded as quintessential representations of voices from the Chinese Diaspora and a major component of the anti-Chinese-official discourses. However, according to Gao, he is primarily interested in using theatre as a medium to search for an alternative aesthetics and artistic voices that have been alienated in the process of modernization. Gao states in interviews and in his critical works that he does not seek to embody an authentic voice of the Chinese Diaspora.

This paper examines the ways in which Gao’s plays, especially Chezhan (The Bus Top), Bayue xue (Snow in August) and Juedui xinhao (Alarm Signal), have come to sustain these disparate claims ranging from aesthetics to politics. In particular, it will examine the relationship between Gao’s style and the two most important forces in modern Chinese theatre: Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt theory and Huang Zuolin’s xieyi (ideographic and intrinsicalistic) theatre.

Haiyan Lee, University of Colorado, Boulder

The Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) was built in the 17th and 18th centuries as a summer palace for Qing emperors. It was a massive complex of gardens, villas, pavilions, lakes, hills, and pleasure grounds that collected architectural and landscape wonders from China and Europe and housed a wealth of priceless treasures. After being looted and burnt down by French-Anglo troops in 1860, it commenced its "afterlife" as a repository of timber and marble, rice paddies, farm villages, factories, bohemian colony, campuses, vacation resorts, public park, and fair ground. Scholars have studied the garden/park from multiple angles, ranging from its pre-destruction architectural and landscaping splendor to its present ambivalent status as a totem of national humiliation and national pride.

In this paper, I focus on the dialectics of self and other, site and emotion in the creation of the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park (Yuanmingyuan yizhi gongyuan). In the context of the controversy surrounding the proposed restoration/development plans, I examine the ideological, architectural, and aesthetic discourses surrounding the nature and fate of the most iconic section of the park: the cluster of broken European-style pillars and pedestals that have graced the covers of most guide books and supplied the background image of countless tourist photos. I consider how the disquiet provoked by this alien element--comprised of the haunting remnants of European civilization and violence--undergirds the spatially and narratively programmed emotional life of the ruins. I also consider Yuanmingyuan's promise for the project of civility in its role as an estranged heterotopia fraught with the tension between a nationalist spatio-emotional regime and a promiscuous site of consumable places.