Postmodernism and Postmodernity in China: An Agenda for Inquiry

The nine strong essays on which I am commenting arise from a conference, held in August, 1995, at Dalian Foreign Language University, People's Republic of China, on the topic "Cultural Studies: China and the West." I attended that conference and was sufficiently engaged by the issues raised that I agreed to attempt a response, even though I am not expert in Chinese culture or history and do not know any form of the language. In this attempt I am encouraged by the quite complementary emphases of Wang Ning and Jerry Aline Flieger. Flieger interprets Lacan to argue that one's subject position only emerges by "gazing at oneself through the speculation of the Other," while Wang warns against the damage to international exchange that might follow from an emergent Chinese practice of "Occidentalism" (a simple ideological inversion of "Orientalism," in which the West is constituted and opposed as an "Other"). Both agree on the necessity for self-understanding to be achieved in relation to others and both value the possibilities of dialogue. So for my own good and that of others, here I go. I was very struck at the conference by what remains evident in the essays assembled here, that the Chinese participants, whether based on the mainland or abroad, defined their pieces in relation to the topics of the Postmodern and the Postcolonial, far more than in relation to what most English or American academics would consider "Cultural Studies." In an intriguing index of comparative international renown, Fredric Jameson and Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, as theorists of the postmodern, and Edward Said, as inaugurating postcolonial inquiry, seem far more familiar to these essayists than do Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall as fundamental resources for cultural studies.