The lure of the global : gender and geopolitics in selected novels by transnational Chinese women writers

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical exposition of the politics of representation in a global capitalist context in six selected global China novels in English by three transnational Chinese women writers: Annie Wang (b. 1972), Xiaolu Guo (b. 1973) and Fan Wu (b. 1973). The selected novels were all published beyond the geopolitical boundary of the Chinese mainland during the post-Cold War and postmillennial decade, 2001-2010. Since China’s integration into the global economic order in the early post-Mao and postsocialist era, the global literary scene has attested to the emergence of women writers of Chinese origin who establish creative writing careers in the West. There has been since an evolving repertoire of global fictions in English which engages with China at the juncture of what cultural critic and historian Arif Dirlik calls global modernity. Circulated and consumed mostly in the West, how do these novels envision the global?

By examining the lure of global modernity and its entanglement with gender politics and geopolitics in selected global China novels, this thesis shows that globalization is generally envisioned as a superior epistemological mode of knowing to that of the nation-state. Remarkably, the global, in its figurations in the selected narratives, is inseparable from the West or the idea of the West. In exploring their global visions, this thesis argues that the novels’ gendered formulations are conditioned upon their geopolitical inclinations towards the West. As the novels are lured by globalization, they are simultaneously lured into constituting gender politics wherein cross-cultural encounters with Euro-American West serve as the conditions of their possibility.

Commencing with a prologue, this dissertation first establishes the historical and theoretical schema for the discussion of the selected global China narratives. It highlights the postsocialist and global contexts which write the women writers and in which the women writers write; and discusses the operation of a politics of recognition in a global multicultural market. Chapter One attends to the lure of global capitalism in Wang’s Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen (2001) and The People’s Republic of Desire (2006). Specifically, it shows how gender and class politics in Wang’s novels operate within global and largely Western capital. Chapter Two revolves around the lure of global modernization in Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (2008) and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). By exploring rural/urban dynamics, it illustrates that Guo’s novels privilege the global city, with its Western cultural flows, as the site of female progress. While all the selected global novels negotiate Chinese identities in a global context, it is in Chapter Three that the lure of global Chineseness as a mode of cultural affiliation is most explicitly discussed. By analysing the constitution of global Chineseness through female-female attachments in Wu’s February Flowers (2007) and Beautiful as Yesterday (2009), it demonstrates that Wu’s novels evince an idealization of the West. In engaging with the lure of global modernity in this emergent literary corpus, this dissertation underscores that as global articulations, the novels are also discursive articulations that register ideological tendencies.