A marginal return?—The problematic in Zhang Chengzhi's reinvention of ethnic identity

Abstract

Amidst frantic economic and social changes in China today, Zhang Chengzhi, like most other humanists, must redefine the humanist role and reconfigure his individual identity accordingly. What he does is to rediscover his ethnic identity as a Muslim Chinese, which rehearses a problematic shared by other humanists: self‐reinvention must be contested and negotiated via social contingency and acculturation; one cannot renew a cultural entity without recourse to ‘the other‘—an allegorical subject, a suppressed ethnicity or a transcendental self. Zhang overcomes the void of a disoriented self by first recounting the muted history of Jahriyya Muslims (in his book History of the Soul) from the narrative stance of ‘a defamiliarized self and then engaging the primordial with the circumstantial in his effort to evoke the obscured awareness of his ethnic root. In his next book The Heroes’ Paths in Wilderness, Zhang recaptures key moments of his recuperation from the disoriented self through his psychoanalytic diagnosis of Lu Xun, his mirror image. The dialogic probing at the other in fact locates himself in the paradox between the historicity of the ethnic identity and the spirituality of a transcendent self. But his ambiguity toward a self/other reversal leaves us in question about his readiness to continue this fluid, open‐ended interaction and his ability to avert possible pitfalls of ethnocentrism.