Alternative Diplomacies: Writing in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai, Istanbul, and Beyond The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Xiang, Alice. 2017. Alternative Diplomacies: Writing in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai, Istanbul, and Beyond. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41140229 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Alternative Diplomacies: Writing in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai, Istanbul, and Beyond A dissertation presented by Alice Xiang to The Department of Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Comparative Literature Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2017 © 2017 Alice Xiang All rights reserved. Dissertation advisers: David Damrosch, David Wang Alice Xiang Alternative Diplomacies: Writing in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai, Istanbul, and Beyond Abstract This dissertation presents rich grounds for comparison between Chinese and Turkish literary contexts in the early twentieth century, an academic dialogue which has hitherto been nearly non-existent. Writers in these two contexts were faced with comparable challenges and stimuli: the turbulent end of a once-glorious empire, accompanied by a profound cultural crisis along with radical modernisation and nation-building efforts. Meanwhile, these processes of change unfolded in particularly fraught ways in the cosmopolitan crucibles of Shanghai and Istanbul, cities which respectively embodied the complex contradictions of Chinese and Turkish modernity. By examining the work of literary figures who were shaped by their experiences of Shanghai/Istanbul —such as Kang Youwei, Nazım Hikmet, Shao Xunmei, Halide Edib, and Lin Yutang— this dissertation presents such figures as groundbreaking synthesisers of a stunningly cosmopolitan range of intellectual and cultural resources across ‘East’ and ‘West’. In addition, this project positions these writers as ‘alternative diplomats’: from explicit critiques of western-centric power politics and diplomatic norms, to fictional narratives offering boldly re-imagined transnational networks and solidarities, I explore the ways in which these figures were deeply engaged in the creation of alternative discourses to official inter-state diplomacy. Through the supple and charismatic medium of literature, they endeavoured to influence broad reading publics, and to fashion new horizons of possibility for iii cross-cultural reflection and dialogue. By forming literary and ‘diplomatic’ linkages across Shanghai and Istanbul —and thus, in a larger sense, China and Turkey— this dissertation seeks to re-frame the landscape of early twentieth-century literary cosmopolitanism as well as international affairs. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………………………… vii Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………….... 1 I. Kang Youwei and Virginia Woolf: Comparatists in Constantinople ! Istanbul through foreign eyes: a diplomatic intervention ……………………………… 17 !"Comparatists in Constantinople ………………………………..……………………………. 26 ! Imagining the world …………………………………………………………………………… 53 II. The Mona Lisa in Shanghai: Nazım Hikmet’s imaginative diplomacy ! Imaginative diplomacy ……………………………………………………………...……….. 69 """""! Charismatic narratives ……………………………………………………………………… 75 """""! Re-worlding the Mona Lisa ………………………………………………………………… 76 ! Foreign forms ……………………………………………………………………………….... 83 ! Mobility in exile ……………………………………………………………………………… 96 III. Shao Xunmei and Emily Hahn: Salon diplomacy in semi-colonial Shanghai ! Diplomacy, hospitality, and semi-colonial Chinese modernity …………………….. 103 ! Salon diplomacy ……………………..…………………………………………………........ 115 ! Salon hospitality ………………………………………………………………………......... 136 ! Magazine diplomacy: From Candid Comment to the New Yorker …………………. 147 ! Going native, turning foreign ……………………………………………………………… 158 IV. Between Orient and Occident: The civilisational diplomacy of Halide Edib and Lin Yutang ! Being civilised . ………………………………………………………………………………. 163 ! Civilising the West: inventing Turkey and China ……………………………………... 172 ! From Wilsonians to ‘Europe’s gadflies’ …………………………………………………… 189 """"!"Beyond the ‘East-West problematic’: pan-Islamic solidarity from India to Japan … 207 !"World literature for a world civilisation .. ……………………………………………….. 221 ! ‘Who is who and what is what?’: Concluding thoughts ……………………………….. 236 V. Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………….. 241 v For my parents who didn’t ask me to study Economics instead vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It goes without saying that I owe a great debt of gratitude to my committee, David Damrosch, David Der-wei Wang, and Cemal Kafadar. To benefit from such a brilliant and generous audience is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I will always be inspired by their kindness and erudition. I am deeply grateful, too, to Karen Thornber, in whom I have had an exemplary mentor to turn to for support as a graduate student and teaching fellow. Dissertation-writing can be a lonely business, but I have had the fortune of having great company along the way. Thank you to my dissertation group —Julianne VanWagenen, John Welsh, and Lusia Zaitseva— whose feedback and encouragement proved a very pleasant means of keeping on track. I couldn’t imagine my graduate school years without my delightful cohort —Guangchen Chen, Raphael Köenig, Miya Qiong Xie, and Lusia— and the other friends who have added so much warmth and whimsy to my time in Cambridge: Mithila Rajagopal, Maria Gloria Robalino, George Yin, Wei Chen, Ren Wei, Sungho Kimlee, and others. I am also grateful to my students, who pushed me to be a better, fuller scholar, and through whom I had the luxury of re-discovering the wonder of literature. Meanwhile, without the pedagogical patience and wizardry of Himmet Taşkömür, Eda Özel, and Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu, who introduced me to the ins and outs of the Turkish language, I would not have had the linguistic courage to tackle this project at all. I am also grateful to Ban Wang and Burcu Karahan for making me feel welcome during my exchange year at Stanford as I completed this work. And I owe Isaure Mignotte many thanks for all her kind administrative assistance throughout my time as a student. Finally, this dissertation would have been both far less likely and far less meaningful without my family. My sister Katty’s kindness and support have been unwavering, and I am constantly reminded of how lucky I am to have her in my life. To my dear parents I owe more than I can say. With each passing year, I have only become increasingly struck by their love, generosity and open-mindedness. I hope to dedicate something worthier to them one day. And with my husband Doğuş —aşkım— by my side, all obstacles have seemed trivial, all joys magnified. I have him to thank for curious conversations, dumpling adventures, and happiness. vii INTRODUCTION In 1929, after seven years in Moscow steeped in Marxism-Leninism and avant-garde artistic movements, the Turkish modernist Nazım Hikmet (1902-1963) had newly returned to Istanbul, the city of his childhood and youth. It was then that he produced the remarkable Gioconda and Si-Ya-U (Jokond ile Si-Ya-U), a long poem which features the Mona Lisa —referred to as ‘Gioconda’— and her infatuation with a Chinese revolutionary. When her beloved is deported from France for participating in anti-imperialist protests at the Chinese embassy, Gioconda escapes from the Louvre and heads off in cross-continental pursuit of him via monoplane and steamship; upon reaching Shanghai, she mocks the authority of the extraterritorial French military court, which ultimately sentences her to death by burning. Full of exuberant poetic antics, from typographic playfulness to polyphonic registers to a brief appearance of the poet himself (as the monoplane-pilot who helps the Gioconda escape from the Louvre!), what remains most striking about the poem is the audacity of its cosmopolitan imagination. By formulating —in an innovative Turkish poetic idiom inspired by Soviet modernism— passionate attraction as well as political alliance between an icon of Western artistic heritage and a Chinese anti-imperialist activist, Nazım’s poem pushes the boundaries of transnational solidarity and aesthetic identification. It was Gioconda and Si-Ya-U, so vibrant and capacious, yet simultaneously so critical and political, which first made me wonder if there was more meaningful common ground to be found between Turkey and China during this time period than the (essentially non-existent) academic conversation thus far implied. It also made me eager to look for ‘more’ — to situate this poem as one glittering node in a cosmopolitan network of texts by writers boldly re-imagining the early twentieth-century world, working to 1 expand the possibilities of transnational critique and alliance through the flexible and charismatic medium of literature, their perspectives shaped by the weight of non-Western and Western histories and identities alike. The meeting of these two lines of inquiry forms the focus of this dissertation. Becoming ‘China’ and becoming ‘Turkey’ in the early twentieth century