Title

Beyond the Cultural Dominant: For a Textual Politics in Modern China 

Author

Ching-kiu Stephen Chan 

Genre

Article  

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Abstract

    Drawing references to the recent debates in the crisis of modernity in the West (including the debate on postmodernism), this paper attempts to analyze the project of cultural modernity in China since the May-Fourth Movement. By tracing the development in textual strategy, cultural formation and institutionalization through three significant stages in the history of modern China (marked respectively by the year 1919, 1949, and 1979), the author discusses the changing relationship between Culture and Revolution. With an emphasis on the cultural text’s “representation” of 

Revolution, the paper intends to outline the possible crisis and revolution in the formation of subjectivity and investigate the historical subject’s realization of the dominant hegemony through cultural/textual discourse. For this purpose the paper is divided into four parts. The first section deals with the relationship between traditional and modernity and argues for the significance in recognizing the form of historical consciousness in cultural/literary modernity, the emergence of which depended, distinctively, upon the active and sometimes radical rejection of its past. The significant of a radical break or rupture (versus the mitigatory effect of the reliance on continuity as emphasized by tradition) is analyzed, and the historical context under which modernity in China emerged as such a project of ruthless forgetting” is also discussed. 

    Drawing references to the recent debates in the crisis of modernity in the West (including the debate on postmodernism), this paper attempts to analyze the project of cultural modernity in China since the May-Fourth Movement. By tracing the development in textual strategy, cultural formation and institutionalization through three significant stages in the history of modern China (marked respectively by the year 1919, 1949, and 1979), the author discusses the changing relationship between Culture and Revolution. With an emphasis on the cultural text’s “representation” of Revolution, the paper intends to outline the possible crisis and revolution in the formation of subjectivity and investigate the historical subject’s realization of the 

dominant hegemony through cultural/textual discourse. For this purpose the paper is divided into four parts. The first section deals with the relationship between traditional and modernity and argues for the significance in recognizing the form of historical consciousness in cultural/literary modernity, the emergence of which depended, distinctively, upon the active and sometimes radical rejection of its past. The significant of a radical break or rupture (versus the mitigatory effect of the reliance on continuity as emphasized by tradition) is analyzed, and the historical context under which modernity in China emerged as such a project of ruthless forgetting” is also discussed. 

    Finally, the paper ends with a note on the possibilities opened by debate on postmodernism in the West for an alternative tactic in the Chinese project to strive for a modern subjectivity under current cultural-political situations. The author proposes that to move forward in our quest for modernity, it is perhaps useful that we begin to (i) rewrite the cultural text of modernity, (ii) re-situate the modern subject, and (iii) speak (up) for the position of such an active and conscious historical subject by participating in the production and reproduction of culture as discourse.