Mcconaghy Dissertation
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Writing Villages: Language, Objects, and Spirituality in the Discovery of Rural China, 1911-1949 by Mark Frederick McConaghy A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto ©Copyright by Mark McConaghy 2017 Writing Villages: Language, Objects, and Spirituality in the Discovery of Rural China, 1911-1949 Mark McConaghy Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2017 Abstract This dissertation examines the explosion of writings about rural life that emerged during the Republican period (1911-1949) in China, found in the essays, short stories, long-form novels, folklore journals, and ethnographic surveys that dotted the mediascape of the time period. Situating its arguments at the cross-section of Republican era village studies, intellectual history, and literary criticism, this dissertation argues that such writings did not merely reflect an already existing social reality beyond the text, but were themselves productive of the very concepts by which such a reality was to be imagined and acted upon. As such, they produced an imaginative binary that had not, hitherto, been dominant in Chinese social and cultural life: the urban vs. the rural. While such writings evidenced a persistent fascination with the spoken languages, material objects, and spiritual ideas that defined village cultures, they were not produced from within the geographic boundaries of village life. They were created by cosmopolitan intellectuals imbedded in translingual print networks of global reach. Such writings must thus be situated within the properly global context in which they were produced- a world roiled by the unevenness of capitalism in its imperialist form. The world system produced by capitalism sought to array peoples into monolingual national units that could be arranged hierarchically across historical time. When seen from this developmental lens, the rural emerged in 20th century China as a site of “backwardness,” in need of material, linguistic, and social “reconstruction.” ii I track how folklorists, fiction writers, essayists, and language reformers responded to, but also complicated, this ethnographic drive to study, classify, and transform village life. Challenging a long standing axiom in the field of modern Chinese history that Republican era intellectuals “invented” the cultural figure of the peasant as a depressed allegory of the national condition, doing so without a sustained engagement with the popular cultures that defined village spaces, I argue that the songs, objects, and votive practices of village life remained key points of inquiry for intellectuals throughout the era. In doing so, I tell a more nuanced story regarding the urban/rural binary as it emerged during this time period, one that emphasizes that the incorporation of the village into the cultural life of the new republic was not a uni-directional or conceptually closed process, with the new national project blotting out all signs of the pre-national matrix. My first chapter examines how, in the early 1920s, a group of folklorists based at Beijing University set out to collect, annotate, and publish the songs and storytelling practices to be found across China’s diverse regions. My second chapter examines the “hometown” narratives in the vernacular literature of the day, in which intellectuals of the time sought to grapple with the non- secular cultures of the rural townships they had grown up in. The differences between old and new lifeworlds imprinted themselves on not just the content but also the form of these literary works, which were organized around moments of epistemic breakdown between intellectual narrators and rural others whose practices they struggled to understand. My third chapter examines how social scientific discourse and vernacular fiction co-produced one another in the 1930s, producing a vision of rural life defined by concepts such as class and mode of production. In chapter four I examine the emergence in the 1940s of long form novels dedicated to probing the cyclical rhythms of the village everyday, a site of interest for writers as they grappled with the twin discourses of pan-Asian fascism and wartime nationalism. Finally, in an appendix to the dissertation, I develop further a number of the questions regarding dialects and regional writing touched upon in the various chapters. iii The work of the intellectuals examined here all shared an interest in the way rural people spoke, sang, prayed, and celebrated, practices which often upended clear boundaries between the human and the ecological, the sentient and the non-sentient, the living and the dead. Village writings thus explored the inherited practices that defined rural life-worlds, while also probing the contradictions within the new national project that made villages into an object of such intense ethnographic interest. All told, what emerges here is not the “invention” of a fallen civilizational other (the peasant) by modernizing reformers, but rather a negotiating with heterogeneous networks of place, practice, and language. iv Acknowledgements This study, whatever value it may have to the field of modern Chinese cultural and literary history, could not have been produced without the support of a tremendous network of people, one that has illuminated my life over the last decade. I must first thank my dissertation committee: professors Meng Yue, Janet Poole, and Tong Lam. Meng Laoshi was unstinting in her resolve to see this project make an original contribution to our understanding of Republican China, pushing me to move beyond accepted scholarship regarding xiangtu writing, rural reform, and intellectual history. She taught me to not only go beyond my own theoretical comfort zone, but to listen deeply to my sources, developing concepts from within their discursive folds and textures. Professor Poole was a generous close reader of each of my chapters. In our meetings throughout the years she pushed me to articulate why literature was a different kind of discourse than political speeches, social scientific reports, and economic statistics. Her insistence on reading literature in an intersectional, formally engaged, and historically grounded manner inspires me to this day. In our meetings across downtown Toronto’s many cultural enclaves, Tong Lam combined an historian’s rigor regarding the history of ideas with an artist’s empathy for the embodied, the sung, and the everyday. A dissertation meeting with Tong was an intellectual event that spanned questions regarding capital, epistemology, visual culture, our own built environment here in Toronto, and how we think historically about empire and nation. Without these three professors there would be no project for readers to engage with in the following pages. I would also like to thank my external readers for their incisive and generous feedback: professors Zhong Yurou, Atsuko Sakaki, and Paola Iovene. My interest in thinking critically about China’s historical experience was cultivated during my time as an undergraduate in NYU’s East Asian Studies Department. Professor Rebecca Karl first taught me how to think systematically about the world around us, and it was in her seminars that I discovered scholarship as a form of praxis that opens up our historical imagination to futures as yet unwritten and untamed. Her personal generosity and encouragement were critical to my decision to v pursue China studies as a career, and I can only hope that some of the scholarly rigor she impressed upon me as her student shines through in this document. Professor Joanna Waley-Cohen gave me a sense of how complicated thinking the pre-20th century world can be, but also how thrilling. Her classes on Qing history amply illustrated that one cannot grapple with China’s 20th century without understanding the complex political, social, and linguistic alignments that defined the empire that preceded it. This dissertation has benefitted from a number of research stints abroad, and I must thank professor Peng Hsiao-yen at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, professor Wang Chun-yen at National Chung Hsing University in Taizhong, and professors Zhao Xifang and Sun Ge at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing for their generosity and advice. Portions of this project were presented at workshops across various institutions and I would like to thank the following scholars for their helpful feedback: Alexander F Day, Zhong Xueping, Zhang Li, Zheng Enhua, Joyce C.H. Liu, David Ownby, Tina Mai Chen, Timothy Cheek, and Jacob Eyferth. I would also like to thank the many scholars that have served over the years as members of the Critical China Studies Reading Group at the University of Toronto, which has been an invaluable forum for me to not only develop my own ideas, but gain inspiration from groundbreaking work in the field. Such scholars include Joan Judge, Yiching Wu, Anup Grewal, Linda Feng, Josh Fogel, Li Chen, Chen Xi, Yanfei Li, and Wang Yu. My graduate student colleagues in Toronto provided me with an endless variety of passionate and engaged conversation over the years. Special thanks must be directed to the 14th Floor Collective- Sean Callaghan, Brys Stafford, and James Poborsa- who boldly joined me in collapsing the division between intellectual work and public engagement, producing a creative endeavor that continues to this day. I would also like to thank the administrative and support staff at the University of Toronto’s East Asian Studies Department, the Cheng Yu Tung East Asia Library, and the Richard-Charles Lee Hong Kong-Canada Library: Natasja Vanderberg, Norma Escobar, Jack Leong, Lucy Gan, and Stephen Qiao. vi My deepest gratitude most go to my friends and family, who have supported me in a career path that has been anything but conventional, and who have filled my life with abounding love. I was blessed to have the friendship of Ilene Solomon, Brys Stafford, James Martens, Clarissa Binkley, Adam Smith, Zhekang Peng, Peng Zhixun, Hsu Ching-Fang, Dave Cape, John Fraser, Michael Valpy, Kang Xiao, Jiang Xiaobing, and Ainslee Beer throughout my graduate student years.