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Papers by Harlan Chambers
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 31, no.2, pp. 249-292, 2019
From Chinese thinkers’ earliest engagements with “reportage literature,” their endeavors have alw... more From Chinese thinkers’ earliest engagements with “reportage literature,” their endeavors have always been grounded in explicitly leftist political commitments; but what has become of the practices sustaining this genre amidst today’s “depoliticized politics”? To interrogate this problematic, this article examines the “Liang Village Series” by author Liang Hong, who has not only distanced herself from a defined political agenda, but from the very genre of reportage literature itself. I will argue that a postsocialist tension unfolds between Liang the literary critic’s withdrawal from a defined political project, on the one hand, and Liang the investigator’s exposure of the social logic driving China’s reform-era rural transformations on the other.
The first part of this article examines Liang’s contributions to non-fiction writing as a contemporary literary genre emerging amidst a broader “farewell” to reportage literature. The distance Liang poses between her own non-fiction writing and the political engagement of reportage literature is consonant with a broader discourse in China’s contemporary literary field, holding that historic practices of literary reportage have little to offer the present. The second section turns from Liang the critic to Liang the investigator, examining how her approach conceptualizes the “rural” as embedded in disjunctures of urban time and space. To clarify the stakes of Liang’s intervention, I will contrast her approach with Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao’s China Peasant Investigation (2004), an influential work of contemporary literary reportage. The third section then turns to a close reading of Liang’s texts to interrogate how Liang the investigator engages with “feeling” as a field of experience bound to the social logic of the market economy. The fourth and final section will interrogate the limits of Liang the investigator’s discoveries to indicate new possibilities for thinking the rural within contemporary, postsocialist politics of political disavowal.
Book Reviews by Harlan Chambers
in The Journal of Asian Studies. Volume 75 - Issue 4 - November 2016
Translations by Harlan Chambers
PRC History Review, 2020
Zhang Jishun's "Response" to Wang Chuchu's review of A City Displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s 远去的都... more Zhang Jishun's "Response" to Wang Chuchu's review of A City Displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s 远去的都市：1950年代的上海 (北京：社会科学文献出版社，2015) in the PRC History Book Review Series
Modern China, 2019
This article situates the birth of the twentieth century within the conditions of a spatial revol... more This article situates the birth of the twentieth century within the conditions of a spatial revolution. Proceeding from the dimension of horizontal temporality, it analyses anew the problem of "origins" as well as the era's "politics of displacement" and "politics of self-negation." A salient phenomenon of cultural politics in the twentieth century was the horizontal movement of concepts, a formulation of how historical content from different temporal axes was transformed, within a synchronic framework, into that which can be expressed in a single discourse. Yet the political content of such discourse and concepts cannot be defined from its European origins, including ideas such as nation, sovereignty, people, class, citizen, and so on. Whenever these alien concepts are used under historical conditions totally distinct from the conditions that originally produced them, this not only leads to the birth of new consciousness, values, and movements, but it also produces a new political logic. For this reason, it would be difficult to explain the meaning of China's twentieth century if we leave behind the perspectives internal to its revolution. This article therefore takes up the cases of Lu Xun’s “literature of resistance to despair” and Mao Zedong’s “philosophy of victory,” in which one “moves from victory to victory,” in order to once again examine twentieth-century China’s despairs and hopes, its failures and successes.
Modern China, 2019
This two-part article explores the question of how to constitute China in the twentieth century a... more This two-part article explores the question of how to constitute China in the twentieth century as an object of thought. This means, first of all, releasing the twentieth century from the position of being a mere object, such that one no longer regards this era as an annotation or appendage to contemporary value systems and ideologies, but instead approaches it as a process in which, passing through the liberation of the object, we may reconstruct a relation of dialogue between ourselves and twentieth-century China. Part 1 proceeds from a temporal analysis of the twentieth century, and Part 2 analyzes this era from a spatial perspective. Part 1 encompasses three sections: first, the long twentieth century, the European fin de siècle, and the century as a trend of the times; second, the conditions of the short century, imperialism, and the rise of the Pacific century; third, the Chinese Revolution and the rise of the short century: unevenness and "the weakest link." Having pursued an analysis of the global conditions of the imperialist epoch, I assert that any discussion of the birth of the "short twentieth century” must begin with an analysis of “the weakest link.” In seeking the roots of the revolutionary moment, one must look not at the geopolitical contestations in Eurasia, but instead the revolutionary conditions produced by the new situation in Asia (especially the rise of Japan and Japan’s victory over Russia). That is, it was not imperialist wars pure and simple, but instead the “awakening of Asia” called into being by these wars that constituted the multifaceted point of departure for the “short twentieth century.” Thus, from the perspective of temporality, the “short twentieth century” did not, as is often believed, begin in 1914, but rather in the period 1905–1911; from the perspective of spatiality, it did not begin at a single point of beginning, but from a whole series of points of beginning; from the perspective of the moment, it did not begin through destructive wars, but instead was born in a series of attempts to break free of the imperialist system and the archaic regime.
The Guggenheim Foundation, December 2017, https://www.guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Interview-with-Wang-Hui-Guggenheim-Museum.pdf . Accessed 18 December, 2017., 2017
This interview was the keynote address of an exhibition curatorial workshop, "Theater of the Worl... more This interview was the keynote address of an exhibition curatorial workshop, "Theater of the World: Art and China", co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing. It was held at the CAFA Museum on March 14, 2017. Translated from Chinese by Harlan Chambers and Benjamin Kindler.
The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2017
What does it mean to take revolution seriously in a postrevolutionary era? What relevance do twen... more What does it mean to take revolution seriously in a postrevolutionary era? What relevance do twentieth-century revolutionary movements have for contemporary projects of liberation? This essay seeks to answer these questions by tracing the complex legacies and contributions of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions, considered as the two decisive revolutionary moments of the twentieth century. The author calls for us to reposition the Russian Revolution outside of a Eurocentric frame by examining the ways that Lenin and other revolutionaries thought about Russia through the lens of radical upsurges in China, as well as the possibilities the Russian Revolution opened for revolutionary nationalists in China and other colonized societies. Breaking from a Western Marxist discourse of failure, therefore, this essay takes the relationship between the Russian Revolution and global projects of self-determination and anticolonialism as a historical trajectory of emancipation, one that has been marginalized within existing accounts. In this sense, the Russian Revolution opened up a series of decolonizing possibilities whose repercussions echoed through the century. Drawing from the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution opened the possibility of a reconceptualization of the revolutionary subject itself, one in which the category of “the people” (renmin) performed the role of a revolutionary subject always in transformation, critically grounded in the peasantry as the appropriate base of revolutionary mobilization in non-European settings. It did so through the real political practice of “People’s War” (renmin zhanzheng), which, as a form of sustained rural insurgency, embodied a temporality and strategy of revolution very different from the urban insurrectionary model of the Russian Revolution. This essay allows us to situate these and other revolutionary processes at the center of the twentieth century and to study them anew as sources of emancipatory thought and practice, against attempts to banish revolution as such from the stage of history and political possibility. In doing so, this article enjoins us to dream that the world might once again be turned upside down.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 31, no.2, pp. 249-292, 2019
From Chinese thinkers’ earliest engagements with “reportage literature,” their endeavors have alw... more From Chinese thinkers’ earliest engagements with “reportage literature,” their endeavors have always been grounded in explicitly leftist political commitments; but what has become of the practices sustaining this genre amidst today’s “depoliticized politics”? To interrogate this problematic, this article examines the “Liang Village Series” by author Liang Hong, who has not only distanced herself from a defined political agenda, but from the very genre of reportage literature itself. I will argue that a postsocialist tension unfolds between Liang the literary critic’s withdrawal from a defined political project, on the one hand, and Liang the investigator’s exposure of the social logic driving China’s reform-era rural transformations on the other.
The first part of this article examines Liang’s contributions to non-fiction writing as a contemporary literary genre emerging amidst a broader “farewell” to reportage literature. The distance Liang poses between her own non-fiction writing and the political engagement of reportage literature is consonant with a broader discourse in China’s contemporary literary field, holding that historic practices of literary reportage have little to offer the present. The second section turns from Liang the critic to Liang the investigator, examining how her approach conceptualizes the “rural” as embedded in disjunctures of urban time and space. To clarify the stakes of Liang’s intervention, I will contrast her approach with Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao’s China Peasant Investigation (2004), an influential work of contemporary literary reportage. The third section then turns to a close reading of Liang’s texts to interrogate how Liang the investigator engages with “feeling” as a field of experience bound to the social logic of the market economy. The fourth and final section will interrogate the limits of Liang the investigator’s discoveries to indicate new possibilities for thinking the rural within contemporary, postsocialist politics of political disavowal.
in The Journal of Asian Studies. Volume 75 - Issue 4 - November 2016
PRC History Review, 2020
Zhang Jishun's "Response" to Wang Chuchu's review of A City Displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s 远去的都... more Zhang Jishun's "Response" to Wang Chuchu's review of A City Displaced: Shanghai in the 1950s 远去的都市：1950年代的上海 (北京：社会科学文献出版社，2015) in the PRC History Book Review Series
Modern China, 2019
This article situates the birth of the twentieth century within the conditions of a spatial revol... more This article situates the birth of the twentieth century within the conditions of a spatial revolution. Proceeding from the dimension of horizontal temporality, it analyses anew the problem of "origins" as well as the era's "politics of displacement" and "politics of self-negation." A salient phenomenon of cultural politics in the twentieth century was the horizontal movement of concepts, a formulation of how historical content from different temporal axes was transformed, within a synchronic framework, into that which can be expressed in a single discourse. Yet the political content of such discourse and concepts cannot be defined from its European origins, including ideas such as nation, sovereignty, people, class, citizen, and so on. Whenever these alien concepts are used under historical conditions totally distinct from the conditions that originally produced them, this not only leads to the birth of new consciousness, values, and movements, but it also produces a new political logic. For this reason, it would be difficult to explain the meaning of China's twentieth century if we leave behind the perspectives internal to its revolution. This article therefore takes up the cases of Lu Xun’s “literature of resistance to despair” and Mao Zedong’s “philosophy of victory,” in which one “moves from victory to victory,” in order to once again examine twentieth-century China’s despairs and hopes, its failures and successes.
Modern China, 2019
This two-part article explores the question of how to constitute China in the twentieth century a... more This two-part article explores the question of how to constitute China in the twentieth century as an object of thought. This means, first of all, releasing the twentieth century from the position of being a mere object, such that one no longer regards this era as an annotation or appendage to contemporary value systems and ideologies, but instead approaches it as a process in which, passing through the liberation of the object, we may reconstruct a relation of dialogue between ourselves and twentieth-century China. Part 1 proceeds from a temporal analysis of the twentieth century, and Part 2 analyzes this era from a spatial perspective. Part 1 encompasses three sections: first, the long twentieth century, the European fin de siècle, and the century as a trend of the times; second, the conditions of the short century, imperialism, and the rise of the Pacific century; third, the Chinese Revolution and the rise of the short century: unevenness and "the weakest link." Having pursued an analysis of the global conditions of the imperialist epoch, I assert that any discussion of the birth of the "short twentieth century” must begin with an analysis of “the weakest link.” In seeking the roots of the revolutionary moment, one must look not at the geopolitical contestations in Eurasia, but instead the revolutionary conditions produced by the new situation in Asia (especially the rise of Japan and Japan’s victory over Russia). That is, it was not imperialist wars pure and simple, but instead the “awakening of Asia” called into being by these wars that constituted the multifaceted point of departure for the “short twentieth century.” Thus, from the perspective of temporality, the “short twentieth century” did not, as is often believed, begin in 1914, but rather in the period 1905–1911; from the perspective of spatiality, it did not begin at a single point of beginning, but from a whole series of points of beginning; from the perspective of the moment, it did not begin through destructive wars, but instead was born in a series of attempts to break free of the imperialist system and the archaic regime.
The Guggenheim Foundation, December 2017, https://www.guggenheim.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Interview-with-Wang-Hui-Guggenheim-Museum.pdf . Accessed 18 December, 2017., 2017
This interview was the keynote address of an exhibition curatorial workshop, "Theater of the Worl... more This interview was the keynote address of an exhibition curatorial workshop, "Theater of the World: Art and China", co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing. It was held at the CAFA Museum on March 14, 2017. Translated from Chinese by Harlan Chambers and Benjamin Kindler.
The South Atlantic Quarterly, 2017
What does it mean to take revolution seriously in a postrevolutionary era? What relevance do twen... more What does it mean to take revolution seriously in a postrevolutionary era? What relevance do twentieth-century revolutionary movements have for contemporary projects of liberation? This essay seeks to answer these questions by tracing the complex legacies and contributions of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions, considered as the two decisive revolutionary moments of the twentieth century. The author calls for us to reposition the Russian Revolution outside of a Eurocentric frame by examining the ways that Lenin and other revolutionaries thought about Russia through the lens of radical upsurges in China, as well as the possibilities the Russian Revolution opened for revolutionary nationalists in China and other colonized societies. Breaking from a Western Marxist discourse of failure, therefore, this essay takes the relationship between the Russian Revolution and global projects of self-determination and anticolonialism as a historical trajectory of emancipation, one that has been marginalized within existing accounts. In this sense, the Russian Revolution opened up a series of decolonizing possibilities whose repercussions echoed through the century. Drawing from the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution opened the possibility of a reconceptualization of the revolutionary subject itself, one in which the category of “the people” (renmin) performed the role of a revolutionary subject always in transformation, critically grounded in the peasantry as the appropriate base of revolutionary mobilization in non-European settings. It did so through the real political practice of “People’s War” (renmin zhanzheng), which, as a form of sustained rural insurgency, embodied a temporality and strategy of revolution very different from the urban insurrectionary model of the Russian Revolution. This essay allows us to situate these and other revolutionary processes at the center of the twentieth century and to study them anew as sources of emancipatory thought and practice, against attempts to banish revolution as such from the stage of history and political possibility. In doing so, this article enjoins us to dream that the world might once again be turned upside down.