Abstract
Two decades into its development, the Chinese people witnessed Maoist ideology gradually fade and become replaced by capitalism’s insatiable appetite for accumulation and expansion. Today, China’s emergence as a superpower is certainly catching everyone’s attention. Not only is China gaining a new international status, the society itself is also going through tremendous transformation. The intriguing question here is: How do all these changes affect Chinese people, their value systems, their relation to tradition, and their sense of national and cultural identity? The spirit of iconoclasm is familiar to the Chinese people of modern times, recalling the May Fourth movement that ended several millenniums of feudalism and the Mao-led socialist revolution that completely altered the course of modern China. Both legacies champion a radical break with tradition; but is there indeed a rupture between modernity and tradition? When contemporary Chinese writers contemplate ways to reconfigure identities, the tradition and the integrity of Chinese culture remain essential factors.
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Notes
Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995);
Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Both Jing Wang and Liu Kang extensively discuss Li’s complex philosophical construction of the idea of Enlightenment. Please see Liu Kang’s article “Subjectivity, Marxism, and Cultural Theory,” Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, ed. by Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993),
and Jing Wang, High Culture Fever (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
A recent study on this topic is Rong Cai’s The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). I have written a review on this book, published in China Review International, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 287–91.
Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 25.
For a discussion of “detail” in relation to history, nation, and modernity, please see Rey Chow’s “Modernity and Narration—in Feminine Detail,” Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
This is an indirect quote from Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), 122.
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© 2006 Lingchei Letty Chen
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Chen, L.L. (2006). Negotiating China’s Cultural Authority: Technology of Genealogy and the Self. In: Writing Chinese. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982988_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982988_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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