Juan J. Wu - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Juan J. Wu

Women's Wriitng, 2022

Reading Anne Water Fearn's memoir My Days of Strength (1939) as an empowering narrative regarding... more Reading Anne Water Fearn's memoir My Days of Strength (1939) as an empowering narrative regarding female professionalisation, this article explores the intersection of gender, race, and transcultural encounters in representing epidemic disease. Fearn (1867-1939), a Southern American physician in early twentieth-century China, strategically uses disease, particularly epidemics, as a significant agentic actor in conceiving a medical career that transgresses not just gender norms but also the imperialist ideology prevalent in western discourses regarding China. This article first teases out the historical backdrop in which Western medicine conveniently coupled with imperialism in American discourses on China, mapping epidemic disease onto popular imaginations of China and its people. It moves on to trace the ways in which Fearn turns to depictions of China's epidemic disease and her daughter's death to displace possible criticism of her professional choices. Furthermore, I demonstrate how gendered approaches to epidemics allow for curiosity in and respect for some local medical practices. As such, the memoir reveals a cross-cultural, cosmopolitan sensitivity regarding local medical traditions as much as a cultivated distance from western medicine's perceived superiority and dominance that sustain imperialism.

English Studies, 2022

This essay reads anew Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) as a pedagogical proje... more This essay reads anew Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond
(1899) as a pedagogical project taking the reader through an
ethical, affective journey that upends certain racial, cultural
ideologies regarding China. Invoking concepts such as Victorian
globalism and free-trade cosmopolitanism, it first examines the
ways in which Bird’s interest in the China trade relates to an
ethical vision of cosmopolitan community propelled by the
ameliorative roles of nineteenth-century globalization. It turns
then to explore the use of comparison as a humbling way of
seeing self and other in the liminal space of travelling encounters.
Finally, it shows the affective, liberating potency of
female mobility, contributing to the rise of empowering
emotions that shape productive interactions with
proximate locals. This essay contributes to debates surrounding
the decolonising of Victorian studies and the paradigm shift
brought forth by the mobility turn in travel writing studies.

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2022

This essay examines the texts, images, and collected objects of Emily Georgiana Kemp (1860-1939),... more This essay examines the texts, images, and collected objects of Emily Georgiana Kemp (1860-1939), an artist, traveler, and author, to consider the complex interplay of material culture, memories, and women's mobility. It draws on theories of object and memory, as developed by Walter Benjamin and others, to explore Kemp's professional desire and self-fashioning and account for the complexity, ambivalence, and conflicting moves in Kemp's representations of her travel in China within the fraught context of semicolonialism. As such, I position Kemp's travel texts, watercolor paintings, and the collection of indigenous objects she donated to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum as both material objects and acts of memory. I argue that material objects, which aid travel memories in complex ways, can be understood as involved in a double movement. On the one hand, they enable women travelers to measure, frame, and professionalize the authentic experiences mobility can offer. On the other hand, they facilitate a reflexive re-evaluation of the hierarchical cultural relations upon which British imperialism depended. As an alternative to automatically privileging an Orientalist mode as a means of interpreting women's oriental travel writings, attention to objects and memory offers an opportunity for better understanding, rather than limiting, women travelers' shifting positions across cultures.

Studies in Travel Writing, 2021

Focussing on Florence Ayscough's A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for... more Focussing on Florence Ayscough's A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for vertical travel to have political and ethical implications. Born in China, Florence Asycough (1878-1942) was a Shanghai-based sinologist who garnered an international reputation for translating Chinese literature and culture between the two world wars. Well qualified for this task through her extensive knowledge of local history, language, literature, and culture, Ayscough revises the horizontal axes of travel and writing that were dominant in the 1920s, turning her life in Shanghai and her journey along the Yangtze River into vertical travels involving new modes of microspection, evocation of histories, intertextuality, as well as reflection. It argues that Ayscough's writing demonstrates how vertical travel could be deployed to resist and critique imperial aspirations and their reliance on violence, domination, and existing hierarchies of culture and nature, self and other. It reveals the significance of verticality in her critique of British imperialism and her self-representation as a cosmopolitan with a cultivated distance from Eurocentrism.

Drafts by Juan J. Wu

I begin by demonstrating how Ayscough and Gaunt both configure the human-animal bond, one which i... more I begin by demonstrating how Ayscough and Gaunt both configure the human-animal bond, one which is forged and consequently deepened during foreign travels, to challenge and transgress discursive assumptions about the human/animal divide, inviting new ways to rethink the animal/human relation. I then move on to analyse the ways the two different women writers, Gaunt aligned with modernism’s imperialism and Ayscough with cosmopolitanism, employ different strategies of anthropomorphism to project their contradictory conceptualizations of race. For Gaunt, I argue, instead of displacing animality onto Chinese people, she strategically filters and constructs an animal identity alien to her Chinese dog. In doing so she displaces her racial anxiety as a white woman, a proto-feminist incapable of feeling for the Chinese people and especially her Chinese sisters. For Ayscough, retaining Yo Fei’s Chinese identity is necessary for her to turn away from imperialist discourse, Western racism and speciesism. The constructed canine subjectivity of Yo Fei, one which is deeply rooted in Chinese ways of life and culture, calls into question modernism’s imperialist racial binaries. In exploring the intersection between cross-species relations and interracial dynamics, this chapter sets out to bring a transnational and comparative perspective into ‘beastly modernisms’, enriching studies of the animal in its relation to race, emotion and transnational modernisms.

Women's Wriitng, 2022

Reading Anne Water Fearn's memoir My Days of Strength (1939) as an empowering narrative regarding... more Reading Anne Water Fearn's memoir My Days of Strength (1939) as an empowering narrative regarding female professionalisation, this article explores the intersection of gender, race, and transcultural encounters in representing epidemic disease. Fearn (1867-1939), a Southern American physician in early twentieth-century China, strategically uses disease, particularly epidemics, as a significant agentic actor in conceiving a medical career that transgresses not just gender norms but also the imperialist ideology prevalent in western discourses regarding China. This article first teases out the historical backdrop in which Western medicine conveniently coupled with imperialism in American discourses on China, mapping epidemic disease onto popular imaginations of China and its people. It moves on to trace the ways in which Fearn turns to depictions of China's epidemic disease and her daughter's death to displace possible criticism of her professional choices. Furthermore, I demonstrate how gendered approaches to epidemics allow for curiosity in and respect for some local medical practices. As such, the memoir reveals a cross-cultural, cosmopolitan sensitivity regarding local medical traditions as much as a cultivated distance from western medicine's perceived superiority and dominance that sustain imperialism.

English Studies, 2022

This essay reads anew Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) as a pedagogical proje... more This essay reads anew Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond
(1899) as a pedagogical project taking the reader through an
ethical, affective journey that upends certain racial, cultural
ideologies regarding China. Invoking concepts such as Victorian
globalism and free-trade cosmopolitanism, it first examines the
ways in which Bird’s interest in the China trade relates to an
ethical vision of cosmopolitan community propelled by the
ameliorative roles of nineteenth-century globalization. It turns
then to explore the use of comparison as a humbling way of
seeing self and other in the liminal space of travelling encounters.
Finally, it shows the affective, liberating potency of
female mobility, contributing to the rise of empowering
emotions that shape productive interactions with
proximate locals. This essay contributes to debates surrounding
the decolonising of Victorian studies and the paradigm shift
brought forth by the mobility turn in travel writing studies.

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2022

This essay examines the texts, images, and collected objects of Emily Georgiana Kemp (1860-1939),... more This essay examines the texts, images, and collected objects of Emily Georgiana Kemp (1860-1939), an artist, traveler, and author, to consider the complex interplay of material culture, memories, and women's mobility. It draws on theories of object and memory, as developed by Walter Benjamin and others, to explore Kemp's professional desire and self-fashioning and account for the complexity, ambivalence, and conflicting moves in Kemp's representations of her travel in China within the fraught context of semicolonialism. As such, I position Kemp's travel texts, watercolor paintings, and the collection of indigenous objects she donated to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum as both material objects and acts of memory. I argue that material objects, which aid travel memories in complex ways, can be understood as involved in a double movement. On the one hand, they enable women travelers to measure, frame, and professionalize the authentic experiences mobility can offer. On the other hand, they facilitate a reflexive re-evaluation of the hierarchical cultural relations upon which British imperialism depended. As an alternative to automatically privileging an Orientalist mode as a means of interpreting women's oriental travel writings, attention to objects and memory offers an opportunity for better understanding, rather than limiting, women travelers' shifting positions across cultures.

Studies in Travel Writing, 2021

Focussing on Florence Ayscough's A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for... more Focussing on Florence Ayscough's A Chinese Mirror (1925), this article examines the potential for vertical travel to have political and ethical implications. Born in China, Florence Asycough (1878-1942) was a Shanghai-based sinologist who garnered an international reputation for translating Chinese literature and culture between the two world wars. Well qualified for this task through her extensive knowledge of local history, language, literature, and culture, Ayscough revises the horizontal axes of travel and writing that were dominant in the 1920s, turning her life in Shanghai and her journey along the Yangtze River into vertical travels involving new modes of microspection, evocation of histories, intertextuality, as well as reflection. It argues that Ayscough's writing demonstrates how vertical travel could be deployed to resist and critique imperial aspirations and their reliance on violence, domination, and existing hierarchies of culture and nature, self and other. It reveals the significance of verticality in her critique of British imperialism and her self-representation as a cosmopolitan with a cultivated distance from Eurocentrism.

I begin by demonstrating how Ayscough and Gaunt both configure the human-animal bond, one which i... more I begin by demonstrating how Ayscough and Gaunt both configure the human-animal bond, one which is forged and consequently deepened during foreign travels, to challenge and transgress discursive assumptions about the human/animal divide, inviting new ways to rethink the animal/human relation. I then move on to analyse the ways the two different women writers, Gaunt aligned with modernism’s imperialism and Ayscough with cosmopolitanism, employ different strategies of anthropomorphism to project their contradictory conceptualizations of race. For Gaunt, I argue, instead of displacing animality onto Chinese people, she strategically filters and constructs an animal identity alien to her Chinese dog. In doing so she displaces her racial anxiety as a white woman, a proto-feminist incapable of feeling for the Chinese people and especially her Chinese sisters. For Ayscough, retaining Yo Fei’s Chinese identity is necessary for her to turn away from imperialist discourse, Western racism and speciesism. The constructed canine subjectivity of Yo Fei, one which is deeply rooted in Chinese ways of life and culture, calls into question modernism’s imperialist racial binaries. In exploring the intersection between cross-species relations and interracial dynamics, this chapter sets out to bring a transnational and comparative perspective into ‘beastly modernisms’, enriching studies of the animal in its relation to race, emotion and transnational modernisms.