Ke Ren’s paper on the poet-activist Wang Lixi begins the session by describing how Wang ran afoul of the dominant Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s. It considers Wang’s poetry--and the English translations--as an instance of transcultural lyricism and poetic internationalism that continued late imperial trends of adapting classical verse to modern themes, while extending Chinese poetry to a transnational community of readers. The result is a powerful lyrical record written in the face of the powerlessness of the forced expatriation Wang suffered, poems that delve into the classical tradition and captured the attention of the English modernist poets Sylvia Townsend Warner and John Hewitt who translated some and distributed them in the British media and among literary circles in London. Wang’s collection juxtaposes the frustrated laments of an exiled patriot with animated accounts of international solidarity.
Jiwei Xiao’s paper illustrates through a comparative reading how exile as a gendered historical-existential experience has stimulated both a new aesthetic form and new political expression. It reveals that “the woman on the road” has become a quintessential figure and subject of modernity, as she flees from patriarchy (often accompanied by an estrangement from the mother), seeks independence that eventually both empowers and burdens her, wrestles with loneliness and isolation, equivocates between different political-ideological demands, and achieves a broadened yet also intimate view of the world. Xiao shows how the grinding experience of the “female vagabond” in the iconic author Xiao Hong’s series of personal essays written in the 1930s humanize the dehumanization that accompanies peregrination. Xiao’s paper serves as a bridge to the contemporary by then turning to contemporary filmmaker Ann Hui’s screen depiction of Xiao Hong’s peripatetic life and Hui’s rendering of her own life abroad in a kind of gendered exile.
No Chinese writer is better known for his exilic status than the Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, the subject of Cecily Cai’s presentation. Drawing on Said’s interest in music, Cai’s discussion of the polyphonic voices of wandering in Gao’s Soul Mountain unveils his interweaving of Chinese voices in the text with Western traditions in a contrapuntal pattern. She argues that these experiments with language and form recall similar approaches of Michel Butor and Italo Calvino and others, yet they achieve new narrative effects given the characteristics unique to the Chinese language. In Soul Mountain, Gao seeks not only a new landscape but also a new soundscape by emphasizing the orality of the narrative, resonating with theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The unique interpretation of Gao Xingjian in musical terms provides an innovative understanding of this author who has disavowed his Chinese citizenship and national identity.
Margaret Hillenbrand brings us to the present by focusing on a horrific blaze that broke out in the urban village of Xinjian in 2017, 25 miles from the center of Beijing, killing 19. In the aftermath, locals had no chance to mourn before the settlement was condemned and razed by city authorities. Xinjian emblematized inequality and exclusion well before the fire, and its residents long counted among contemporary China’s most disenfranchised people. What does it mean to be officially banished from a place of already de facto exile? The evictions provoke questions about the limits of inequality, exclusion, and insecure work as meaningful descriptors of social conditions in our times. These limits have prompted Saskia Sassen to argue that we are now witnessing “the emergence of new logics of expulsion,” forces which make the language we use too tepid. Hillenbrand explores the logic of expulsion, noting how people living under precarity in China use culture as a space to vent feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain that are taboo under the diktats of so-called harmonious society.