Failure: Nation, race, and literature in China, 1895--1937

“Failure: Nation, Race, and Literature in China, 1895–1937” examines the making of the modern Chinese national identity in the cultural imagination as expressed in literature. My aim is to locate the conceptions of nation and race in a broader social context including socio-political and other forms of cultural discourse. These will include literary, historical, political, scientific, and sociological texts in order to evaluate the development of notions such as “yellow race” and “Chinese national character” during a period of unprecedented political and social turmoil due to both internal unrest and western domination. This project traces the formation of a modern national identity through various contemporary debates on issues such as the “yellow peril,” eugenics and the prospect of racial extinction under the West, masochism and melancholia in relation to masculinity and femininity in literature, and the sublimity of suffering (kumen) as love for the nation. This analysis will demonstrate how these concepts were mobilized by Chinese intellectuals and writers as cultural imperatives crucial to the preservation of race, nation, and society. I argue that China's path towards the definition of a modern national and racial identity was made possible by a fundamental recognition of “failure.” As the conceptual framework behind this study of Chinese literature and culture in the project of nation-building, “failure” proposes a new way of understanding cultural identities and their exercise beyond what existing critical approaches towards literary and cultural studies have to offer. By questioning prevailing assumptions regarding nationalism, multiculturalism, and the formation of subjects' psychic life, “failure” asks that we examine the exercise of cultural survival not according to an idealized vision of autonomy and freedom, but as its persists in the powerful mode of pain, suffering, and abjection.