Integrating an Intercultural Aesthetic World: Hong Liu’s The Magpie Bridge and The Touch

Abstract

ABSTRACT Representing China’s history is a narrative tradition of Anglophone Chinese literature, and it is usually considered an effective way for authors to participate in multicultural marketing. This study, however, expounds that Hong Liu’s two novels on Chinese history, The Magpie Bridge and The Touch, featured with cultural translation, represent cosmopolitan literary practice beyond the frame of nation-state and ethnicity. Both address the Chinese in diaspora: their present lives are frequently linked with the past via specific Chinese symbols – the ‘mirror’ and the ‘touch’, which are endowed with English connotations through translation and reveal the intercultural aesthetic world Liu crafts. Analysis of intercultural symbolism, where different aesthetic traditions are treated equally, distinguishes her writing from the marketing of exoticism that subordinates the ‘foreign’, demonstrating her contribution to the discursive diversity of English-language literature by minority writers. In this sense, Liu’s narrative performance of Chinese history engages in the negotiated process of transformation of Anglophone Chinese literary discourse and practices post-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism towards boundary-crossing world literature.