[ Introduction and Description | Schedule and Readings | Assessment and Policies | Related Resources ]
Please read the following texts:
Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City. Trans. Karen S. Kingsbury. New York: New York Review of Books, 2007.
Chang's short stories have a historical context that is as vital as Pramoedya's. As the introduction to your text will tell you, Chang's stories were written out of a complex experience of semi-coloniality and invasion. Chang grew up in a Shanghai dominated by foreign colonial powers, and spent two years in the British colony of Hong Kong. Yet she wrote her stories at a time of great turbulence: Hong Kong fell to Japanese troops, and Chang, having returned to Shanghai, published and gained popularity in a city occupied by the Japanese.
Last week looked at the manner in which Deniz Kandiyotti explores women's problematic place in nationalism, and Pramoedya's emplacement of women within a realist historical narrative. It may be interesting to explore Chang's work in this light. Her work was criticized in China from the 1950s to the 1980s as lacking nationalist sentiment, and indeed for being reactionary. You may remember the story "Lust, Caution," which was made into a film by Li Ang recently, in which a young woman seduces a collaborator as part of a plot by a group of young idealistic students attempting to assassinate him, but eventually betrays her comrades by warning her lover of the danger he is in. Chang's narratives seem shorn of the progressive politics of pramoedya, and indeed often end uncertainly. Are they apolitical, or do they represent a different kind of politics? And how is their form related to the experience of living in the modern world?
Last updated: 18 June, 2008