Colonial Visuality in Modern Chinese Travel Literature

The East Asian Languages and Cultures Department presents: Seeing in South Seas Color: Colonial Visuality in Modern Chinese Travel Literature.

This presentation addresses techniques of “colonial visuality” in modern Chinese literature by authors who traveled to Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century and made the colony a setting for imaginative composition. The literary device of “South Seas Color” (Nanyang secai) deployed in these works reveals a transcolonial consciousness that appears more complex and disorienting than that viewed solely through the monochrome lens of travel to Japan and the west. As a gazing subject who cannot easily locate his reflection within the multiethnic, multilingual, and tropical landscape of the colony, the South Seas traveler’s desire to project a national Chinese consciousness within a simplistic colonizer/colonized framework is repeatedly thwarted.

Presentation will be given by Brian C. Bernards.