Solidarity with the Faraway
Travel Writing and Utopian Geopolitics in China’s Revolutionary Century
Travel means a movement between the familiar and the unknown, a human condition of mobility, and a social-spatial experience of otherness. Travel writing, as an exploration of the foreign and the faraway, has been indispensable to literary modernity since the advent of global transportation, capitalist domination, and world revolution. I am applying for the Mandel Research Grant to tread new paths in my second book project. This study, the first of its kind, explores revolutionary travel writing in twentieth-century China. With the initial work I have done in the USA and France, I have also found an ever-expanding horizon of transnational comparison. I hope that, with the support of this fellowship, I can conduct more cross-disciplinary research in China.
Existing scholarship on travel writing has focused on either Western travel literature or non-Western writings on trips to the “advanced” West, and as a result, preoccupied itself with the (post)colonial power structures. Embracing this emerging field and emphasizing the under-represented relationship between travel writing and revolution in a non-Western context, my study seeks to demonstrate another possibility of spatial-political mobility: the possibility of self-liberation, of embracing otherness, of searching for the utopian, of developing a solidarity within the new communities defined not by tradition or capital, but by equality. Investigating the literary, cultural and political conditions and manifestations of revolutionary travel, my project shows how the utopian geopolitics of the faraway (that is, the experience of “utopia” in its literal meanings: the unknown place, no-place, and better place) is produced and contested in Chinese revolutionary culture.
This project thus pursues a broad definition of travel writing. As practice, discourse and textual experience, travel literature that I aim to rediscover from revolutionary China includes: modern travelogues (such as Zhou Zuoren’s accounts of his trips to Japanese anarchist-socialist communes and Mao Dun’s report of his sojourn in the USSR); journalism and political commentaries (such as reports on Yan’an, the Chinese communist mecca); travel poetry in both commemorative and lyrical forms (including the wartime modernists’ rediscovery of Asian hinterland, Guo Moruo's poems devoted to the trip to Vietnam, and Ai Qing’s Cold-War poetry in solidarity with Latin America); personal memoirs (the former Red Guards’ remembrances of their wanderings); and the inter-generic combination of the personal, the literary, and the intellectual (such as Zhang Chengzhi’s post-Maoist geographical scholarship and Hai Zi’s odes to China’s inner Asia).
Correspondingly, this project sees the Chinese Revolution as a revolutionary century, a singular historical process composed of plural revolutions: from the May Fourth New Culture Movement (1917-1925), to the National Revolution and the following revolutionary civil war, to the War of Resistance against the Japanese Invasion, to yet other civil war, to the socialist transformation and failed economic leap-forward, and finally to the Maoist Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Dealing with this revolutionary century of radical mobilization, my inquiry starts with the May Fourth voyages to Europe, Japan, and Soviet Russia in the aftermath of the First World War, and ends with the post-Maoist 1980s, during which the offspring of Red China reinvented a spiritual geography against the dusk of socialism.
Furthermore, conducting this research in different countries, I have come to a realization that Chinese writers’ revolutionary travel writings were in deep conversations with geopolitical mobility in world literature. Just as travel means border-crossing, so travel literature entails a comparative perspective. My project will investigate Chinese texts on par with the rise of travel writing in the age of utopian internationalism, encompassing the works of such writers as Rabindranath Tagore, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Romaine Rolland, Louis Aragon, Simone de Beauvoir, and W.E.B Du Bois.
All in all, this new kind of travel writing in China and beyond embodies the utopian geopolitics of a revolutionary century. Its essential characteristic is the experience and expression of solidarity with other people, other social transformations, and other possibilities of equality and progress. As the first comprehensive study of Chinese travel writings of the revolutionary era, this project represents a spatial turn in Chinese cultural studies and intends to stimulate more debates in comparative humanities.