Warmest congratulations to Qian Zhu, together with DKU AH colleagues Zairong Xiang and Caio Yurgel, on the publication of their co-edited research symposium, “The Modern Question: China and Beyond,” in The Chinese Historical Review.We aim to neither harbor nor to advance a specific definition of modernity—a term that often is read as simply denoting how transformations in technology, administration, and knowledge render one’s direct predecessors obsolete. Our reluctance to define modernity is not only because we reject a metaphysical time sequence that defines the “modern” as the sublation or incorporation of the “premodern.” Rather, our unwillingness is because we—as much as our contributors—aim to acknowledge multifaceted experiences of modernity as a crisis. The crises within modernity that this forum analyses emerge not so much from a common substance or content, but from a way of thinking and being that responds to the modern itself, to the “new,” to disaster, to catastrophe, to watershed moments, and so on.
Each contribution exemplifies our orientation toward the crises of modernity. Qian Zhu’s “Labor Futures: New Village (Xincun) and the Search for Modern China” focuses on the materialization of the “new village” idea in China during the 1910s and 1920s. For Zhu, proposals for new arrangements and institutions, whether in China or Britain or the United States, responded to the felt catastrophe—and the accompanying disquiet—of European modernity or westernization. In line with this special issue’s approach to the crisis of modernity and reinscribing her subjects’ views, Zhu aims to enable future research in intellectual history that cares for everyday space as a dynamic site of knowledge creation. This is particularly relevant in contexts where the discourse surrounding modernity is often presumed to have originated from the West.
Intersecting with Zhu’s Matryoshka-doll-like stylings and in the vein of literary historical scholarship is Zairong Xiang and Caio Yurgel’s “Undercoming Modernity: Eileen Chang Beside Intellectual History”. Xiang and Yurgel focus on Shanghai-born writer Eileen Chang, particularly her stories “Sealed Off” (1943) and Love in a Fallen City (1943), arguing that these texts engage with the crisis of the modern in early twentieth-century China in contradictory ways by cultivating signs and taking advantage of the temporal possibilities that modernity (and modernism) presents and by undermining these quintessential signs and potentials of modernity’s temporalities. It is as if the unease and uncertainty of the crisis of Chang’s modern women is in fact “postmodern,” though in a manner that incessantly interrogates the temporal categories that are constitutive of the “(post)modern.” By exercising literary analysis to reveal how fiction, rather than merely mirroring its social origins, can function as a historical force, Xiang and Yurgel’s article advances intellectual history.
