Productive distortions: On the translated imaginaries and misplaced identities of the late Qing utopian novel

Abstract

In recent times the coordinates of modern Chinese literature have undergone a substantial rewriting which lead to the reevaluation of the late Qing period as a prolific gestational stage for the development of the Chinese literary modernity. Among the different narrative forms and genres that were conceived, theorized and experimented between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the utopian novel (or wutuobang xiaoshuo) emerges as one of the most interesting ones. Promoted by Liang Qichao as the epitome of a new literary aesthetic, this genre is a product of those cultural practices of “productive distortion” which, according to Lydia Liu, characterise fin-de-siècle China’s colonial modernity. A Genettian “archi-genre” whose narrative scope (ideally) encompasses all other forms of narration, the utopian novel of the late Qing period offers both an ideal synthesis of the Chinese reformist thought of the time, as well as a ratification of its failure. By focusing on the reception of this genre from the part of the Chinese literati of the time, and by proposing a comparative analysis of Liu Shi’e’s Xin Zhongguo, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Arthur D. Vinton’s Looking Further Backward which takes into account the modalities of representation of the Other through which these texts (and the utopian novel in general) are built, the aim of the present contribution is to understand the late Qing utopian novel as a chief product of the ideological subconscious of China’s colonial modernity, whose traits and development confirm us once again that a fragmented reality could only correspond to a fragmented representation of reality.