Redefining Chinese-ness in the era of globalization: A comparative approach.

摘要

During the 1990s, globalization gave rise to a comprehensive societal and cultural transformation in contemporary China, which made the modernist conceptualization of a singular, unitary, and homogenous Chinese-ness problematic. Instead, Chinese-ness can now be redefined through an analysis of peripheral, underground, and alternative aspects of literature and culture in 1990s China. This study demonstrates that Chinese marginality, a powerful space and site of “minor” literatures and subcultures, has played a major role in constructing a pluralistic and dynamic Chinese-ness in the era of globalization. The objects for investigation are seminal literary/musical/visual texts by a group of marginalized writers and artists: underground rock musicians, women, gays, and ethnic minorities.; concentrates upon concrete, specific aspects of Chinese-ness. As a category of socio-cultural identity, the redefinition of Chinese-ness in the era of globalization is based upon ongoing global/local conflicts, compromises, and negotiations, mainly those between Maoist revolutionary legacies and the commercialized consumer culture brought into China by global capitalism. Rock musician Cui Jian's image of “eggs under the red flag” aptly suggests that the new socio-cultural identity is grounded both in an inheritance from and a rebirth out of Chinese tradition. As a category of gender identity, the redefinition of Chinese-ness aims to challenge the dual repression inculcated by both the indigenous patriarchal tradition and white-male-centered Western hegemony. The reassertion of female jouissance in “body writing” (such as Wei Hui's Shanghai Jewel) and the emergence of plural masculinities in the domain of popular culture and in gay literature (such as Wang Xiaobo's novella “East Palace, West Palace”) point to the absurdity and invalidity of all forms of indigenous and global cultural homogenization. As a category of ethnic identity, the redefinition of Chinese-ness in the “boundary writing” by a group of ethnic minority writers (such as Tibetan writer Zhaxi Dawa's Turbulent Shambala ) denotes ethnic multipositionality and cultural hybridity, which run counter to indigenous hegemonic discourses such as latent Han-centrism and to Western ethnocentrism as well.; Comparative case studies that juxtapose Cui Jian and Bob Dylan, Wei Hui and Alice Walker, and Zhaxi Dawa and Salman Rushdie attest to the viewpoint that Chinese-ness as redefined in the cultural space of Chinese marginality has become an integral part of global postmodern culture, or the “third culture.” In the era of globalization, the assertion of a pluralistic, dynamic Chinese-ness is intended to cast doubt upon any form of cultural homogenization; to promote ethnic heterogeneity and cultural diversity under the aegis of a Gramscian “systematic transformation” of Chinese society and culture; and ultimately, along with other endeavors of the “third culture,” to contribute to the construction of a more democratic, equitable, and heterogeneous world-system.