English idiom and Republican China: repatriated subject in Wong–Quincey’s Chinese Hunter

Abstract

Since Fanon’s critique of the national bourgeoisie in The Wretched of the Earth, the subjectivity of repatriated natives under colonial circumstances tends to be associated with the ‘nationalist pitfall’. Conditioned by the cultural or material capital of the west, these members of the native middle class are said to be committed to a vision of nationalism fundamentally limited by their class interest. In this essay, I present a reading of Chinese Hunter, a set of notes about big game hunting in northern China written by John Wong–Quincey, a Chinese academic who taught Shakespeare and western drama at Beijing’s Tsinghua College for many years. My approach to reinstate the relevancy of colonial repatriation as an issue of postcolonial world history is centered on the processes of subject formation within the Althusserian context of interpellation. Following Judith Butler’s recent allegorical interpretation of Althusser, I relate Wong–Quincey’s physical and linguistic emulation of the English hunter to the trope of bien parler which for Althusser serves as the ultimate model of ideological compliance in the reproduction of social reality and relations.