Contributing to the on-going discussion of the narrativization of history and nation, four speakers examine the way nationhood is constructed and de-constructed through discourses of affect, body, and performativity in modern Sinophone literature and film. They think through the way authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and racialization constitute nationalism and the way they are contested. By investigating genres of the road movie and xiangtu (native-soil, nativist, localism, or rural), and the subject of fashion, their papers scrutinize historiography and state ideology in their reading of a selection of texts. Closely examining how emotions and body are disciplined and expressed vis-à-vis nationhood, the panel would like to be considered as part of the 2020 presidential theme, “Being Human.”
The speakers will present their papers in the following order. Each presentation is strictly limited to 15 minutes, allowing for 15 minutes of unstructured discussion.
Jessica Tsui-yan Li’s paper, “Affect, Fashion and Cultural Translation in Eileen Chang’s Works” studies the writings of Eileen Chang, a cultural translator and a bilingual writer. Li discusses the relationship among fashion, modernization movements, and the shifting of political powers at the turn of the twentieth century in China, a time where western ideas imported to China slowly took shape, while traditional Chinese practices lingered around, thus leading to modifications of Chinese dresses and blending of both Chinese and Western fashion during this era.
Li employs the Deleuzian notion of affect as “the continuous variation of someone’s force of existing” to comb through Eileen Chang’s depiction of cultural negotiation in modern Chinese women’s fashion in a selection of her works, including her English essay, “Chinese Life and Fashions” (1943), her translation of the essay into Chinese under the title of “Gengyiji” (A Chronicle of Changing Clothes; 1943), her fictions such as, “Love in a Fallen City” (1943), "The Golden Cangue” (1943), and “Red Rose, White Rose” (1944), as well as drawings and her personal eccentric dressing styles recorded in Duizhaoji (Looking at Photos; 1994). Li argues that Chang constructs a passage of intensity in dressing practices through transgressing the semiotic, cultural and national boundaries in her creative works, as part of the legacy in the Chinese sartorial modernity.
Ssu-Fang Liu Jessie’s paper, “Laughter and Tears: Cruel Optimism in Chinese Road Movies,” invokes Lauren Berlant’s idea of “cruel optimism” and analyzes the modality of cruel optimism underpinning post-socialist Chinese dreams. It traces the development of the genre of the road movie from its early left-wing stages to its role in post-revolutionary China by interpreting the tropes of road in Chinese cinema. Jessie considers the genre of the road movie as an “affective medium,” coined by Weihong Bao, which not only expresses antagonism toward moral breakdown, but also intervenes in the re-construction of social emotions and order.
Jessie compares two left-wing movies before and after the establishment of PRC: Dalu (Big Road), a silent film directed by left-wing director Sun Yu in 1934, and Luoye Guegen (Getting Home), a comedy directed by Zhang Yang in 2007. Focusing on how optimism bears out China’s socialist ideology, the paper examines the political mechanism of early socialism by analyzing the “laughter” in Sun’s film and delves into how self-resilience in Zhang’s work negotiates between social tribulation and national expectation, turning a precarious journey into a satire of Chinese dreams.
Tzu-Chin Insky Chen’s paper, “Can Love Break Boundary? –Rethinking Gender, Nation and Ethnicity via Cross-cultural Marriage in Cheng Yu-Chieh’s My Little Honey Moon,” examines how Cheng’s film, Yelianxiang (My Little Honey Moon, 2012) deploys an established genre of xiangtu melodrama in Taiwan as a channel to complicate Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies.” As part of a TV-film series titled Insider/Outsider, My Little Honey Moon depicts a cross-cultural marriage between a Vietnamese woman and Taiwanese man in rural Taiwan.
Reading xiangtu not just as a form of narrative but also as a sense of belonging, Chen analyzes how the film reinterprets the sentiments of xiangtu through the conflict-solving process, and further creates new cultural meanings that extend beyond Taiwan’s national boundary by bringing immigrant women’s hometowns into Taiwanese imagination. Chen’s paper contends that the film creates a possible sentimental transition from disapproval to acceptance for immigrant women and transforms the negative emotion into a positive cultural communication.
Also studying the genre of xiangtu as a form of local antithesis to nationalist ideology, Chialan Sharon Wang’s paper, “Melancholia and the Grotesque: The Utopian Body Politic in Lenin’s Kisses,” investigates the way Yan Lianke’s writing delves into the symbiosis between contemporary China’s neoliberalist capitalism and an emptied and defunct remainder of the communist ideology.
The paper analyzes Yan’s 2004 novel, Shouhuo (Lenin’s Kisses) and discusses the way, in portraying China as a state apparatus that fetishizes and consumes a deceased communism symbolized by Lenin’s corpse, the novel imagines a disabled, grotesque, and spectacularized body politic as a metaphor pointing toward a potential utopian vision that critiques and contests the predatory and exploitative state apparatus. It argues that as Yan’s novel revisits historical trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the aftermath of the nation’s economic reform, the tropes of the malformed and the able-bodied correspond to the dual temporalities of a timeless past and a linear progress in the narrative and recall historical trauma in the form of melancholia.