Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, Department of Chinese Studies, and Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Xu Lanjun, Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Lu Xun is perhaps the most studied figure in modern Chinese literature and there has been a great deal of debate about interpreting his work. Given that Lu Xun has been extolled by scholars from different ideological camps, by examining texts about Lu Xun, we often learn as much about the interpreters’ historical contexts as we do about Lu Xun’s work itself. Put more positively, studying the way in which scholars have interpreted Lu Xun offers us a window on how they responded to the political and intellectual contexts of their times. The path-breaking work of Takeuchi Yoshimi is especially thought-provoking in this respect since he wrote about Lu Xun to intervene in the cultural politics of his times. In particular, during transition from wartime to postwar Japan, Takeuchi constantly returns to Lu Xun to develop a vision of Asia as an alternative to a modern world dominated by abstraction and alienation. Takeuchi’s reading of Lu Xun becomes the foundation from which he posits novel visions of literature, politics and resistance. Scholars have for the most part read Takeuchi either as a public intellectual, who must be contextualized in relation to Maruyama Masao and others or in relation to abstract philosophical concerns, such as the problem of feeling and subjectivity. I would like to bring these two methodologies together by grounding the philosophical in relation to global imperatives of capitalist modernity. From this perspective, we will see both the historical and the contemporary relevance of Takeuchi Yoshimi’s attempt to turn Lu Xun into a fulcrum of resistance against modernity and Eurocentrism. Towards the end of my presentation, I will touch on how themes of Takeuchi’s work live on in the work of the Japanese sinologist Mizoguchi Yūzō and the Chinese critical intellectual Wang Hui.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and researches Chinese and Japanese intellectual history. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness, (Brill, 2011) and co-editor with Axel Schneider of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia, (Brill, 2013), and co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique and is currently working on a project tentatively entitled: Pan-Asianism and the Conundrums of Post-colonial Modernity.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.