The Untimely Avant-Garde: Literature, Politics, and Transculturation in the Sinosphere (1909-2020)

Abstract

This dissertation unprecedentedly unearths a genealogy of the avant-garde in China as well as in global Chinese diasporas from the early twentieth century to the present. Primarily concerned with literary productions, it highlights a selection of writers, works, and cultural movements as pivotal cases to the rediscovery of this genealogy. Originally a French term for the most advanced corps of an army, the avant-garde came to acquire another meaning in the late nineteenth century: cultural figures of pioneering ideologies and practices who challenge the existing aesthetic and social conventions of the arts. The study of its birth and development has largely remained exclusive to the context of American and European cultural history. Meanwhile, within the field of Chinese cultural and literary studies, the avant-garde or xianfeng has almost only referred to the group of artists and writers in the 1980s and 1990s who experimented with aesthetic conventions in groundbreaking ways that were prohibited under Mao Zedong’s regime. It is my conviction that the avant-garde, which I see as a self-authorizing position taken by literary writers, has barely begun to live out its expansive discursive potential in the Chinese and Sinophone context. It can shed new light on moments of disruption that remain resistant to the extant narrative of Chinese cultural and political histories but in fact constitute crucial developments in the unfinished search for Chinese modernity. I am aware that no single genealogy can be established to encompass the diverse and involved phenomena of the literary avant-garde in the modern and contemporary Sinosphere. So my objective here is to identify revealing traits of resemblance that allow us to begin recovering the landscape and the mindscape of the Sinosphere’s literary avant-garde. In turn, I want to open or reopen up the avant-garde as a meaningful discursive zone for comparative literature, world literature, as well as other global literary studies. Positioned before everyone else, the avant-garde is bound to be untimely. In the context of the Sinosphere, this untimeliness entails a perpetual confrontation with the time of the modern, which began ticking its clock when China encountered a major political failure in relation to the West during the First Opium War (1839-1842). The sense of political crisis and the nature of cultural hybridity became defining characters of the Sinosphere’s literary avant-garde. On that account, this project focuses on four historical junctures when the Sinosphere wrestles with sociopolitical upheavals vis-à-vis foreign powers: the 1910s and 1920s when Chinese national revolutions and Civil War arose amid the World Wars; the 1930s and 1940s when Taiwan was nearing its end of Japanese colonization; the 1960s and 1970s when overseas Chinese students launched their own activism in America during the Cold War; the 1980s to the present as the post-Mao China has continued to reestablish its internal and external sociopolitical orders. I examine how selective writers take advantage of radical aesthetic tools to anticipate these moments of crisis, to contest historical time, and to overcome it.