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" Stateless subjects: Chinese martial arts fiction and the morphology of labor "
Petrus Y. Liu
J. P. L. Butler, Lydia H.
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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52430
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| Doc. No
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TL22384
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| Call number
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3190839
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| Main Entry
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Petrus Y. Liu
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| Title & Author
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Stateless subjects: Chinese martial arts fiction and the morphology of labor\ Petrus Y. Liu
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| College
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University of California, Berkeley
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| Date
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2005
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2005
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| Page No
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236
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| Abstract
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This dissertation examines the evolution of Chinese martial arts fiction in the twentieth century, focusing on the interplay between its narrative form and historical ground. In my analysis, the industrialization of China is shown to have produced new forms of social interdependence which, I argue, became constitutive of this literary imagination. Martial arts fiction constructs a stateless, primordial social world where conflicts are settled neither by the state nor by the material development of a state, but by a kind of "martial arts" called wugong that is said to derive from an ancient, spiritual text. As such, martial arts fiction imagines a form of labor that exists in a state of statelessness, but it does so precisely to explain the history and effects of colonialism and the formation of postcolonial states. Attending to the rhetorical structure and historicity of such paradoxes, "Stateless Subjects" offers a re-interpretation a body of texts commonly associated with "traditional Chinese culture" as a modernist aesthetic project that both resists and reifies the social norms of modern capitalist life. The first chapter is an introduction that explains the economic theories used in the project as well as the discursive constructions of the labor process in martial arts fiction. Marxian economics provides an important clue as to why the recurring motifs in Chinese martial arts fiction---the "secret scroll," women, war, and border-crossing---all refer to categories of products that are exterior to the circuit of industrial capital---works of art, domestic work, destructive goods, and international competition. The four main chapters that follow are accordingly organized around these four themes. Chapter Two argues that Chinese martial arts fiction has been misconstrued as a fantasy about the body while it is actually a form of wordplay. Chapter Three demonstrates that the legacy of May Fourth feminism furnished a specific vocabulary of "martial arts" for Wang Dulu, one that took gender to be expressive of anatomy and required a foreclosed homosexuality. Chapter Four focuses on the historical incorporation of China into a "permanent arms economy" and its consequences for the fictional representations of war in the postwar period. Chapter Five chapter considers the spies, immigrants, and transgendered people in Jin Yong's novels and the ways in which these figures are deployed in the author's construction of "Islam."
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Social sciences; Language, literature and linguistics; Chinese; Labor; Martial arts fiction; Marxism; Asian literature; Comparative literature; Economic theory; Martial arts; Historical fiction; Industrial development; Economic conditions; Studies; 0511:Economic theory; 0305:Asian literature; 0295:Comparative literature
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J. P. L. Butler, Lydia H.
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University of California, Berkeley
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