Disoriented Nationalist Discourse of the Wenxuan Group amidst Manchukuo’s Anti-Modern Chorus

Abstract

In his article "Disoriented Nationalist Discourse of the Wenxuan Group amidst Manchukuo's Anti-Modern Chorus" Chao Liu analyzes the proposal of "native-land literature" made by left-wing Chinese writers in occupied northeast China. As it turns out, inheriting the nationalist discourse of the May Fourth Movement and further radicalizing it via a "new romanticism," those writers over-emphasized the socio-political function of literary production and took native-land literature as the most effective tool for nationalist mobilization. Accordingly, they repelled modern civilization as it was associated with the colonists, relying instead on natural wilderness and primitive force and thus adopting subject matters as well as stylistic features that paradoxically celebrated the Japanese imperial ideology of "overcoming modernity." In this sense, the Wenxuan group involuntarily lapsed into an anti-modern chorus with the colonial regime.