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Abstract:
This paper explores the processes of serial narration in view of the serial enactment of Fu Manchu. Its contention is that seriality is a principle rather than a technique and that this principle cannot be deduced to one author, author collective, or instigator. It gains a 'machinic' momentum of its own in the course of its unfolding. It is no mere circumstance that the most successful serial narratives-like the Fu Manchu narratives-were initiated in the 'long' 19th century with its expansionist ambitions regarding the spread of global capitalism and the modern nation state, and then were propelled by the engines of 20th-century media modernity. The Fu Manchu narratives lend themselves to an investigation of the principle of seriality because they vent the serial logic of expansion, excrescence, and spread both on a thematical and a formal level and tightly interweave structural and ideological functions. In consequence, the narratives have to be seen as serial performances or enactments, rather than representations, of the yellow peril theme. They do not so much express politico-social fears and cultural anxieties from the vantage point of an author or individual text, but work as engines in the serial machinery which generates and spreads ideological certainties.
My attention fixed itself on the spinning roulette wheel and the little white ball whirling inside it. I experienced the sensation that I was the whizzing roulette ball, that the numbers I passed in my spin where the faces of all those I had known at Land's End, and before: that I was myself and Petrie, that Smith and Fu Manchu were the same imago, and that the spin would never stop, the ball that was me would never come to rest on red or white, on 7 or 24, but rotate for eternity on that clicketing wheel. (Indiana 204)
This is how the narrator of Gary Indiana's The Shanghai Gesture (2009), which is arguably the most recent literary take on the subject matter of Fu Manchu, envisions himself at the end of the novel. By then, the fact that Fu Manchu is a cultural construct has been thoroughly driven home in the text. Fu Manchu is of interest to Indiana precisely because he has been of interest to so many other people...