What is it about?
This chapter examines how the modern Chinese writer Lu Xun employed gendered tropes to question the injustice embedded in the notion of linear history, and, at the same time, to restore a reenchanted history with other temporalities and other worlds.
Featured Image
Photo by Chris Buckwald on Unsplash
Why is it important?
In recent years, scholars have challenged the notion of “modernity” cherished during the May Fourth movement and asked whether the adoption of Western modernity led to the loss of the authenticity and plurality of the Chinese identity. Challenging the empty and homogenous history is simultaneously resisting the monopoly of the capitalist logic of history. One May Fourth writer, Lu Xun, grappled with the modern historical consciousness in almost all of his writings, and had profusely used gendered tropes to carry out his own version of a reenchanted history.
Perspectives
This chapter demonstrates that Lu Xun already sensed the catastrophe of history that Walter Benjamin later discussed. Therefore, he resorted to literature to deploy the “retroactive force” that could awaken the dead and question the victory of modernity.
Ping Zhu
UC San Diego
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reenchanting History, October 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004697904_009.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
