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Like many realist works written during the 1920s and 1930s, Lu Xun's True Story of Ah Q has been read as a satire of Chinese national characteristics. The problem with interpreting the work as a social satire is that it tends to perpetuate the set of essentialist cultural myths that many Chinese authors used for self-representation. Upon close examination, Lu Xun's story, an attempt to indict Chinese traditions, is really mediated through such discourses as popular social Darwinism and Eurocentrism. By identifying and registering these pseudo-scientific views of history and racist notions of culture as they have functioned in Chinese literature, the paper resists the conventional reading of Ah Q as an average Chinaman and interprets the hero as the colonial subject invented and seen through the lens of European cultural imperialism.
European thought since the Renaissance would be as unthinkable without the impact of colonialism as the history of the world since the Renaissance would be inconceivable without the effects of Europeanization.
-Robert Young, White Mythologies
The inference I would like to draw from this remark by Robert Young is that modern Chinese history, with literature subsumed in it, needs to be understood in the context of the globalization of world society. Young's view resonates with Fredric Jameson's understanding of modern Chinese literature: "All third world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical; [because] the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society. . . locked in a life-and-death struggle with first world cultural imperialism."1 Such an emphasis on colonialism and globalization of culture expands the scope of the historical and political contexts in which to read many literary works written in China during the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, it calls for a critical reexamination of the way we understand realism in a national literature; most of these texts have been read as truthful reflections of Chinese social realities. After all, how a nation defines the Real and represents it in its literature is neither an isolated national event, nor necessarily an isolated literary event. Developments in the globalization of culture often affect our understanding of realism as a literary mode and warrant new reading and interpretation.
Take, for...