Wednesday, April 20, 2005
the orphan of asia
According to its preface and some of the researches, the Orphan of Asia was first written in Japanese between 1943 and 1945 during the Pacific war and first published in 1946. Its Chinese translation was first published ten years later in the year of 1956. Only after the Chinese translation had been published, the novel could be widely read and recognized on the island, the hometown of the protagonist Hu Taiming. The writing and translation of the Orphan of Asia itself became a journey of wandering, exiling and expatriating, even though the protagonist was never forced to leave his hometown. And the process of translation became traumatized in the society of Taiwan after the Second World War. People are not able to understand and retrospect their past without the agency of translation. If the works are not translated into Chinese, they would be inaccessible to most of the people on the island. While the people have to retrospect their past experience through the selective perspectives of translation agency, the identity they formed through the works would be dubious.
The Polemics of Romance Part 2
The Polemics of Romance part 2: Romancing Nation, Romancing Empire, Romancing Self
Revolution is far from the only forum in which romance and nation, self definition and politics become interwined. This week’s readings take us from the desire of diaspora for home and history, to the place of the orphaned in a politics of identity through an examination of the politics of postcolonial theory itself, and its links to imperialism. We see figured here the romantic at every turn, whether in the form of a fanciful cosmopolitanism located precisely in lack (Abbas), the creation of an identity and history for subject and nation through a catalogue of over estimated cultural signs (Abbas, Wu Zhuoliu), or the self critique that forms part of the process of identity negotiation at a national level in current discourse (as pointed out by Leo Ching and as in the case of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Japan, as well as to all nations to a lesser or greater extent). Leo Ching further points out the complex relationship between the self critique that is formative of a nation state and the discursive formations of postcolonial theory that derive from a eurocentric theoretical endeavor of a similar kind bordering, and in some places moving boldly into an all pervasive solipsism that fails, in the end, to break down the very signifiers it seeks to interrogate. This is a point worth bearing in mind if we are to practice reflexively. The relationships between nation, modernity, colonialism, and hegemony are all explored here, but it is in the texts of The Orphan of Asia and A Lazi Woman that these subjects are fleshed out.
In a week colored by renewed flames of tensions between Japan and China, and at a time when the “Taiwan Question” still rages, the politics of belonging, and Nation with regard to diaspora identity could not seem more pertinent. Defining the nation, or a people beyond national boundaries comes to be precisely a matter of recreating or creating a history for the orphaned self, a history that will be invested with a politics of disgust/desire and whether constituted as a return or a reinvention, the diasporic desire for the lost home is one based on romance, faith and, as Leo Ching argues, particular historical factors. Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia pits the protagonist in a maelstrom of historical change and cultural approximation: nothing ever seems to quite fit, and in the end, lying between in a liminal state between recognized cultures tense with change and conflict, the self of the Hu Taiming drops into insanity. It may be useful to think of the alternate ending offered us, his success as a revolutionary on the mainland as an example of the way out provided by sublimating this confusion of identity into a grander cause, locating a series of delineations that can be approximated as fitting, and slipping in, in order that a romance of the self, its identification as an object as well as a subject, be completed. I think that perhaps this is the project by which national, and indeed gender identities in general are performed however, and not a situation unique to the diasporic consciousness. By contrast, insanity finds in itself the way out of this particularly historically charged identity crisis.
The narrator of A Lazi Woman speaks from a privileged position (we may think of the model of Eurocentric critique advanced in Ching, p.41) on the behalf of his “Lazi Aunt” silencing her even as the text seems to beg her to speak. The plot is of the literal romance, or perhaps libidinal concentration including disgust, of the other, and contains themes of the effects on the diasporic image of the self, of racism and intermixing groups, the perceived dangers of hybridity whether within arrived at through interrogation of any “original” group or through the latent dangers of the other, to the homogenizing impulse of the particular dyasporic self described in this story. The Lazi woman remains unnamed and victimized, her reproductive capacity both providing the means by which she enters the community of Chinese, and the locus of that community’s fears: in an essentializing and patriarchal view of nationality and character the womb becomes a dangerous place of potential contamination, where “half-breeds” and “monstrous children” may be produced even as the status of woman as parent is effaced by patrilineal thinking. Taiwan too, as a “Distorted Island” is conceived of, as pointed out by Leo Ching in his examination of The Orphan of Asia, like “Doggy” and “Shrimpy” the children of the Lazi Woman as somehow critically flawed, fatally hybrid.
Both Abbas and Ching offer up complex and nuanced examinations of the particular field of (national) identity formations, its pitfalls and discontents. A combination of the theoretical brushstrokes of Abbas and the historically particular as advanced by Leo Ching seems to be the project at hand, tempered by an awareness of the status and origin of theoretical models and a sensitivity to the degree to which analysis and process is dynamic and in a state of tension. After all, the focus of examnation of Taiwan's nationhood and identity, or Hong Kong's search for a soul has necessarily fallen in part to extensive understanding of the hisotries and identities of other national agents in the field, directly or indirectly exerting power (Britain, China, Japan) but not simply because of their impact UPON those places of liminality, but because of the impact of the colony, the liminal, and the state or place that emerges from these spaces UPON THEM.
Revolution is far from the only forum in which romance and nation, self definition and politics become interwined. This week’s readings take us from the desire of diaspora for home and history, to the place of the orphaned in a politics of identity through an examination of the politics of postcolonial theory itself, and its links to imperialism. We see figured here the romantic at every turn, whether in the form of a fanciful cosmopolitanism located precisely in lack (Abbas), the creation of an identity and history for subject and nation through a catalogue of over estimated cultural signs (Abbas, Wu Zhuoliu), or the self critique that forms part of the process of identity negotiation at a national level in current discourse (as pointed out by Leo Ching and as in the case of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Japan, as well as to all nations to a lesser or greater extent). Leo Ching further points out the complex relationship between the self critique that is formative of a nation state and the discursive formations of postcolonial theory that derive from a eurocentric theoretical endeavor of a similar kind bordering, and in some places moving boldly into an all pervasive solipsism that fails, in the end, to break down the very signifiers it seeks to interrogate. This is a point worth bearing in mind if we are to practice reflexively. The relationships between nation, modernity, colonialism, and hegemony are all explored here, but it is in the texts of The Orphan of Asia and A Lazi Woman that these subjects are fleshed out.
In a week colored by renewed flames of tensions between Japan and China, and at a time when the “Taiwan Question” still rages, the politics of belonging, and Nation with regard to diaspora identity could not seem more pertinent. Defining the nation, or a people beyond national boundaries comes to be precisely a matter of recreating or creating a history for the orphaned self, a history that will be invested with a politics of disgust/desire and whether constituted as a return or a reinvention, the diasporic desire for the lost home is one based on romance, faith and, as Leo Ching argues, particular historical factors. Wu Zhuoliu’s Orphan of Asia pits the protagonist in a maelstrom of historical change and cultural approximation: nothing ever seems to quite fit, and in the end, lying between in a liminal state between recognized cultures tense with change and conflict, the self of the Hu Taiming drops into insanity. It may be useful to think of the alternate ending offered us, his success as a revolutionary on the mainland as an example of the way out provided by sublimating this confusion of identity into a grander cause, locating a series of delineations that can be approximated as fitting, and slipping in, in order that a romance of the self, its identification as an object as well as a subject, be completed. I think that perhaps this is the project by which national, and indeed gender identities in general are performed however, and not a situation unique to the diasporic consciousness. By contrast, insanity finds in itself the way out of this particularly historically charged identity crisis.
The narrator of A Lazi Woman speaks from a privileged position (we may think of the model of Eurocentric critique advanced in Ching, p.41) on the behalf of his “Lazi Aunt” silencing her even as the text seems to beg her to speak. The plot is of the literal romance, or perhaps libidinal concentration including disgust, of the other, and contains themes of the effects on the diasporic image of the self, of racism and intermixing groups, the perceived dangers of hybridity whether within arrived at through interrogation of any “original” group or through the latent dangers of the other, to the homogenizing impulse of the particular dyasporic self described in this story. The Lazi woman remains unnamed and victimized, her reproductive capacity both providing the means by which she enters the community of Chinese, and the locus of that community’s fears: in an essentializing and patriarchal view of nationality and character the womb becomes a dangerous place of potential contamination, where “half-breeds” and “monstrous children” may be produced even as the status of woman as parent is effaced by patrilineal thinking. Taiwan too, as a “Distorted Island” is conceived of, as pointed out by Leo Ching in his examination of The Orphan of Asia, like “Doggy” and “Shrimpy” the children of the Lazi Woman as somehow critically flawed, fatally hybrid.
Both Abbas and Ching offer up complex and nuanced examinations of the particular field of (national) identity formations, its pitfalls and discontents. A combination of the theoretical brushstrokes of Abbas and the historically particular as advanced by Leo Ching seems to be the project at hand, tempered by an awareness of the status and origin of theoretical models and a sensitivity to the degree to which analysis and process is dynamic and in a state of tension. After all, the focus of examnation of Taiwan's nationhood and identity, or Hong Kong's search for a soul has necessarily fallen in part to extensive understanding of the hisotries and identities of other national agents in the field, directly or indirectly exerting power (Britain, China, Japan) but not simply because of their impact UPON those places of liminality, but because of the impact of the colony, the liminal, and the state or place that emerges from these spaces UPON THEM.
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