Image Credit: Jiang Shuo

by Ma Haitian 马海天

Read the Faculty Introduction.

As we navigate this diverse and changing world, our interactions with one other always include cultural encounters of values and perspectives. Determining how to live with differences in these values and perspectives then becomes a task that we constantly perform, the urgency of which significantly increases in the modern era, where cultures interact in more direct and confrontational manners. In the attempt to construct a healthy, non-hierarchical manner of interaction, cosmopolitanism has risen as a promising vision. We may literally interpret cosmopolitanism as a culture of the cosmos, or the world. Beyond the literal designation, however, the essential conceptualization of this cosmopolitan vision remains under debate. In “The Case for Contamination,” author Kwame Anthony Appiah critiques and differentiates cosmopolitanism from three candidate ways of interaction: cultural preservationism, anti-colonialism, and neo-fundamentalism. In juxtaposition, Appiah proposes his version of cosmopolitanism based on what he calls the “contamination model,” where individuals get accustomed to new cultural phenomena and gradually merge them into the existing cultural norms. Cultures contaminate each other through progressive mergence starting from the individual level. Now the question arises: has Appiah truly grasped cosmopolitanism in its entirety through this model?

Just as Appiah critiques the three alternative ways of interaction, I argue that Appiah’s project contains its own flaw as well. The primary problem with his contamination model rests in its underlying presumption of universal individual autonomy when it comes to cultural adaptation. In reality, collective entities always interfere with and restrain individual autonomy by bringing in social hierarchies. Argumentative negligence of such collective influence can lead to alienating individuals from the concrete cultural contexts they inhabit, turning them into homogeneous abstractions. In view of this universalist pitfall, I suggest the alternative approach of contemporary author Ross Douthat’s idea of “disappearance,” where we strive to understand other individuals’ perspectives precisely by associating them with their surrounding cultures and comprehending the way these particular cultural conditions shape individual identity. With this empathetic approach in mind, we can better transform that understanding into a wholehearted embrace of diverse individual experiences.

Before we analyze Appiah’s project, let us first look more carefully into his view of cosmopolitanism. Appiah describes the core of cosmopolitanism as “contamination—that endless process of imitation and revision.” Achieving this contamination requires everyone to “take an interest in their [other] civilizations,” which, according to Appiah, will enable us to “get used to one another.” Upon closer analysis, this process contains two steps: first to acknowledge and tolerate a different culture, and second to integrate the originally peculiar differences into the ordinariness of one’s cultural community.

Within this mechanism lies an important premise—that the fundamental agents of contamination are individuals as autonomous members within any given culture. Although situated within a particular cultural context, individuals in Appiah’s model reserve the autonomy to make choices—to acknowledge and accept rather than reject and alienate other cultures. For Appiah, it is the accumulation of “perspectival shift[s]” on the individual level that initiates cultural contamination in a broader sense, and, in affirming the individual origination of such “perspectival shift[s],” he undeniably presumes the individual autonomy of deciding for oneself what attitude to adopt towards any cultural representation.

However, this cosmopolitan vision based on individual adaptation overlooks the non-linear struggles throughout the actual process of cultural hybridization, where various collective institutions take form to influence individual agency. Appiah’s explication of the eradication of footbinding in China, for instance, manifests such negligence by generalizing the revolutionary details, assuming the rapid change in customs as rationally unexplainable: “What had been beautiful became ugly; ornamentation became disfigurement. The appeal to reason can explain neither the custom nor its abolition.” Correspondingly, the only plausible explanation lands on “the consequence of our getting used to new ways of doing things” (Appiah). Yet this explanation is a relatively rough one. Appiah solely stresses the result of people getting used to footbinding, while leaving out many painstaking details in the struggling process. In his essay “From Cultural Capital to National Stigma: The Anti-Footbinding Movements in China and Taiwan,” scholar Yen-Wei Miao thoroughly represents the violent political endeavors during the revolutionary period. According to Miao, despite the groundbreaking establishment of anti-footbinding institutions, the first-documented Nanhai Jie Chanzu Hui (Foot Emancipation Society) in 1883 was soon dismissed due to “huge pressure from the community” (Miao 220). In 1898, government conservatives forcefully suppressed early anti-footbinding movements following the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform (Miao 232). Even Appiah himself mentions numerous “older women with bound feet” who suffered greatly from “the agonies of unbinding.” Taking these factors and occurrences into consideration, what triggers the “perspectival shift” here cannot simply be an individual choice of getting used to natural feet. Social institutions and cultural communities impacted individual reactions at all times.

To some extent, Appiah does acknowledge the collective influences within struggle and their contradictory moral implications. He mentions this contradiction in discussing women’s equality in Islamic cultural communities, where “liberty,” displayed mostly in Western human rights treaties, and “diversity,” referring to the respect for Islamic cultural traditions, may “well be at odds” (Appiah). But Appiah does not provide a resolution to the dilemma. Collective influence seems something easily ignored once individuals become the “proper object of moral concern.” This confidence—that individual autonomy outweighs collective influences—is most conspicuously displayed in Appiah’s reference to Zulu viewers of American soap dramas. Appiah contends that these viewers in the periphery do not necessarily suffer from cultural imperialism as cultural preservationists often claim, for they are not powerless “blank slates” susceptible to intrusive cultural influences. Put differently, individuals do not passively submit to higher forms of institutional impacts, but instead hold a considerable degree of autonomy in their choice-making. Nevertheless, if the rhetoric of cultural imperialism fails to recognize individual autonomy in cultural interaction, Appiah’s unmitigated affirmation of individual agency does not ultimately explain the cultural reaction of Zulu viewers either. The two seemingly oppositional perceptions—submission to imperial imposition and agency in cultural self-determination—are in fact compatible and, moreover, often co-exist and work together. As individuals are “[deciding] for themselves what they do and do not approve of,” their conscious responses can also reflect and indicate the changing dynamics of the imperialistic cultural framework. Given the historical trajectory of colonialism and its present influence on South African societies, these individual audiences may well have participated in constructing and reproducing the cultural othering of themselves without without their own realization. Therefore, we must bear in mind the possibility that they inhabit the accompanying cultural discourses as they approve messages in the soap drama, just as we should equally attune ourselves to the inherent political statement of anti-colonialism in their disapproval as such. That imperialist ideologies largely embed themselves in personal values is what puts individual autonomy onto the precipice.

Manifested in this television-drama example is the omnipresence of collective influences. While individuals do possess agency in their choices to embrace or reject cultural values, collective influences still tend to predominate over individual autonomy. This is because individuals do not interact with cultures the way workers operate machines; individuals are themselves part of the culture—they are inside the community of a particular culture, or a collection of mutual-influencing cultures. Furthermore, as contemporary American writer and The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat points out in his article “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism,” it is human nature to “seek community.” This intrinsic desire to belong predetermines the confinement of individual agency to collective wills and standards.

Even if individual autonomy manages to overcome collective influences, the subsequent question comes to whether every individual can access that degree of autonomy. The answer is apparently negative, for both real (realistically existing) and imagined (organized upon shared social identities) communities hierarchize their members on the spectrum of social mobility. Take class as an example. An individual’s degree of autonomy depends extensively upon their possession of economic and social capital; people with different socio-economic conditions thus constitute different communities of classes. This variation limits the right of making autonomous choices mostly to upper-class individuals, turning this right into a sign of privilege instead of freedom. The prestigious background of pioneering figures in the anti-footbinding movement evidences this point. As American scholar Brent Whitefield introduces in his essay “The Tian Zu Hui (Natural Foot Society): Christian Women in China and the Fight against Footbinding,” founder of Natural Foot Society, Alicia Little, was the “wife of a prominent British merchant and writer”; Kang Youwei, who founded the Anti-footbinding Society in Canton, enjoyed high reputation in the political domain in addition to status as a “famous literus and writer” (206). With many others, these progressive elites shared commonality in possessing superior family backgrounds and higher social status to back them in their activist work. People lower down on the social ladder, by contrast, are often “too poor to live the life they want to lead” at all, for they do not possess the basic financial means to attain political leverage such that their demands can receive legitimization and satisfaction (Appiah). Moreover, lack of economic and social capital brings about subsequent poverty in cultural capital, making the poor not only unable to afford autonomy, but also unaware of the notion at all given their limited access to education.  

We can formulate similar analyses upon other realms of social identities such as race, gender, religion and upon historical trajectories to uncover their hierarchizing impact on individual autonomy. The reality can display further complications since these identities often interlock and burden one another. We will not discuss intersectionality in detail, but the main point here is that hierarchical divisions in collective communities make it almost impossible for equal individual autonomy in choice-making. Together with humans’ instinctive urge for community belonging, these two factors demonstrate Appiah’s confidence in individual autonomy as idealistic and lacking contextual considerations. Returning to the specific process of the anti-footbinding campaign, we see that whether they were government officials, progressive pioneers, or the general masses, all sought transformative power as members of collective entities rather than separate individuals; aggressive power struggles continued throughout the movement until reformers attained sustainable power dominance over other collective forces and, consequently, eradicated footbinding. Apparently, these collective struggles went beyond the individual level, or at least tied individual choices to underlying social impositions.

Moving to the contemporary global context, one may argue that Appiah’s project centering on the individual actually attains more promise given social development through time and a cultural environment that is correspondingly more open. Yet we must also note that such openness simultaneously entails more direct confrontation of diverging beliefs and values among different cultural groups as well. In the face of these confrontations, individuals are more inclined to attach themselves to collective influences in search of security and legitimacy. In this sense, the power of the collective may matter more than we think and, given the trend of globalization, can operate on more subtle ideological levels. Cosmopolitan elitism serves as a paradigmatic example here. The more that privileged individuals seemingly detach themselves from their local communities, the more they tend to aggregate into a new community that Douthat calls the elite tribe. “Global citizens,” as they often refer to themselves, these elitists still have their own “distinctive worldview” and “shared values” that alienate other communities and individual experiences (Douthat). What engenders further stake, moreover, is individuals’ unawareness of such collective enclosure: the sharpening collective influences have accumulated more power by becoming invisible. Douthat himself is deeply concerned with this unnoticed congregation: “[I]t’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe.” Following Douthat’s line of argument, we may find this exact elitist pitfall in Appiah’s cosmopolitan project of contamination. His underlying affirmation of “individual freedom” in the contaminating process is substantially an aristocratic by-product available to “insider” elites alone: only they are entitled to exercise the contamination model of cosmopolitanism because of their privilege in choice-making. When Appiah humbly claims that “cosmopolitans don’t insist that everyone become cosmopolitan,” he already ignores and marginalizes the majority of individuals who have no agency to choose that vision.

Does this mean that we should not take individuals “as the proper object of moral concern” in comprehending cosmopolitanism (Appiah)? Of course not. Appiah’s highlighting of individuals is still significant and illuminating in its humanistic value. It is important for us to note that this statement comes primarily as a critical response to three other claims: cultural preservationalism, cultural imperialism, and neo-fundamentalism. While cultural preservationism rigidifies cultural representations into fixations and blocks their development, the fight against cultural imperialism often enters the pitfall of prioritizing socio-political agendas over cultural analysis. Neo-fundamentalism, on the other hand, imposes exclusive values in the name of universal truth upon communities and individuals. All three claims tend to overlook or distort the individual will for their own ideological ends. With its acknowledgment of cultural interactions and its allowance for plurality of values, contamination therefore carves a respectful space for individual voices.

However, the pitfall that Appiah enters in endorsing individual agency is that he confuses moral concern anchored in the individual with complete personal autonomy in addressing cultural differences; correspondingly, the cosmopolitan ideal of contamination relies entirely upon individuals of different cultural backgrounds “get[ting] used to one another” (Appiah). Having acknowledged the individual will, this claim still fails to take into account the multiplicity of contexts in which the individual is situated and whose influences they often internalize. In fact, the decisions that individuals make towards new and old cultures do carry cultural imprints in the past and inform ongoing cultural dynamics, and therefore must not be treated as random, personal choices alone. Positioning individuals “as the proper object of moral concern” does not mean that we completely dismiss the roles of “nations, tribes or ‘peoples’”; instead, communities and groups as such are essential clues for us to comprehend and evaluate the choices that individuals make, to unpack the broader socio-cultural transformations in place, as well as the challenges they bring to individual lives. Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism wipes off this contextual analysis in place of a plurality of autonomous choice-making actions on the individual level.

Beneath this interpretation lies a universalist approach that I want to place on alert. Note that Appiah himself does distinguish cosmopolitanism from the “intolerant universalism” of neo-fundamentalism, whose members share a faith containing particular values that exclude others. In refinement, he affirms a faith in “universal truth,” yet also claims to be “less certain that we already have all of it” (Appiah). The universalism that I intend to pinpoint, however, alludes less to the principles and values that Appiah conceives of tentatively, but more to the conceptualization of individual participants who live with these values, which is that individuals in the cosmopolitan vision of contamination exist as abstractions, homogeneously possessing the attributes of autonomy and independence. We have seen Appiah’s refutation of the “blank slate” presumption, where individuals are seen as susceptible to the graffiti of global capitalism and neo-colonialism; yet ironically, by undermining the complexity of social impacts, Appiah envisions a form of cultural interaction that potentially formulates “blank slates” of another kind—an imagined, depersonalized individual as a pure social member, perpetually cut off from specific cultural contexts, and forever unmarked by any historical imprints.

To clarify, this abstraction does not mean that Appiah fails to take individual experiences into account; in fact, the entire investigation is predominantly anchored in individual perspectives, from his personal observation of the modern-traditional juxtaposition in the old Kumasi Royal Palace to the exemplification of ordinary television audience in Kumasi. What I want to call into question is his theorization of personal responses to cultural phenomena. Rather than preserve them as individual representations of diverse socio-cultural dynamics, Appiah attributes these responses to a generic and homogeneous attribute of individual will, the authenticity of which, as we have discussed above, remains at stake. This totalizing theorization, as Douthat expresses, can oftentimes make the “experience of genuine cultural difference [become] far more superficial.” Put differently, unifying cultural responses into an imagined political mechanism of individual freedom risks erasing cultural complexities and their rich expressions.

Concerned with this potential cultural erasure, Douthat challenges us to “disappear into someone else’s culture”—to look more closely into individual responses and uncover the embedded socio-cultural signals in broader social contexts. To exemplify, Douthat particularly includes his own peaking cosmopolitan experiences at age eleven, “attending tongues-speaking Pentecostalist worship services” and “playing Little League in a working-class neighborhood.” Different from Appiah, however, Douthat does not make any theorizing move in these experiences; he leaves these experiences to speak for themselves. Behind this strategic disposition, I would argue, lies Douthat’s alternative conceptualization of cosmopolitanism in a broader sense. Instead of systemizing varied cultural experiences and encounters into a universal explication, Douthat prompts us to analyze culture with the approach of “disappearance,” where the explorer is “ready to be transformed by what it [the cosmopolitan attitude] finds.” In one way, this statement finds common ground Appiah’s affirmation of pluralism. Yet, by “disappear,” Douthat highlights an irreducible intertwinement between individual representations and the cultural contexts in which they are immersed. Disappearing into one’s culture, accordingly, accentuates the cultural conditions as much as the individual lens. This irreducible intertwinement is what Appiah’s project lacks. When Appiah’s contamination model detaches individuals from their cultural contexts to better enact cultural accustoming, Douthat parts company to argue that individuals are never apart from cultures. Symbolically speaking, individuals are their cultures: they carry, represent, and receive deeply-imprinted impacts from their cultural surroundings. Hence, a cosmopolitan vision that values humanity, that claims “every human being has obligations to every other,” must not reside in the human individual level alone, but dig deeper into the specific socio-cultural forces that both empower and restrain the individual (Appiah).

As we have discussed, Appiah’s contamination model of cosmopolitanism fails to capture the inseparable correlation between individuals and the collective entities that they embed themselves in. Douthat’s cosmopolitan critique, from this perspective, revises our understanding of cosmopolitanism by positioning individuals and cultural contexts as an organic whole. This revision attains significance in that it manages to acknowledge and manifest the struggles facing every individual in complex cultural conditions; at the same time, the vision does not sacrifice this individual locus, but ultimately lands upon a unique  perspective by bringing cultural dimensions to one’s individual identity.
This vision has yet to achieve perfection. Conflicts such as the one that Appiah raises about “liberty and diversity” remain unclear: having acknowledged the other culture and understood individuals within that culture, we may still face fundamental moral conflicts embedded in cultural differences. Do we decide, then, to respect or to abandon that cultural representation? Is there a third alternative to cope with the conflicts? Can cosmopolitanism offer a linear answer or solution? These questions may pertain to the study of cosmopolitanism with broader indications about human empathy in the globalized-yet-fragmented contemporary era.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The Case for Contamination.” The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Company, 1 Jan. 2006.

Douthat, Ross. “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 2 Jul. 2016.

Miao, Yen-Wei. From Cultural Capital to National Stigma: The Anti-Footbinding Movements in China and Taiwan. Sep. 2004. New York University, PhD dissertation.

Whitefield, Brent. “The Tian Zu Hui (Natural Foot Society): Christian Women in China and the Fight against Footbinding.” Southeast Review of Asian Studies, vol. 30, 2008, pp. 203-212. EBSCOhost, eds.a.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=96d8885b-3a13-4a5f-838d-0f9643b3af2a%40sessionmgr4009.

Image Credit: Katherine Pellegrino

by Cindy Wang 王新语

Read the Faculty Introduction.

Every night, nearly a hundred music lovers huddle together and shake to the rhythm of the bands. In a secluded and tiny live house in downtown Shanghai, these independent young artists wear Hanfu, the national costume of Han people, and use traditional props such as folding fans, which contrast sharply with the highly modernized night view of the cosmopolis. The lyrics of the songs have very strong regional characteristics; they reflect local history and incorporate words and phrases from local dialects such as momozi 沫沫子,“procrastinator” in Lanzhou dialect. These heartfelt attachments to the native culture are, in fact, expressions of indignation and criticism of the cultural globalization. In response to this irresistible trend of globalization, rather than passively adapting to foreign cultures, live house artists and their followers have formed a unique culture in which a new dimension of Chinese national identity is coming into being.

After almost four decades of China’s reform and opening up, Chinese culture has gradually moved away from blindly absorbing foreign cultures to reconstructing its own cultural space as a part of global culture; it is becoming increasingly influential in shaping global trends. Although it seems that Chinese culture, in order to expand its territory, is undergoing a process of reinventing itself to be more international, open, and inclusive, the reality is not a one-sided adaptation but rather a negotiation between global and native culture. This negotiation is best reflected by the emerging live house culture in China, which utilizes global marketing strategies to let the world rediscover the vitality of China’s age-old culture. Behind the adoration of Chinese civilization is, however, a sense of insecurity about losing the nation’s roots in its culture. To cope with such an identity crisis, pioneers of the live house culture in China are experiencing a process of concretizing Chinese national identity in which they intensify and reassert the notion of being Chinese.

To defend and strengthen Chinese national identity, live house culture constructs a new conception of being Chinese that is free from the restriction of nationality and ethnicity. Chinese national identity can be read in different dimensions. One is as the identity of the People’s Republic of China, the political foundation on which Chinese nationalism and the “Chinese dream” has been built (He 55-57). This interpretation is closely associated with China’s “century of humiliation” and its rise to great power status in today’s international arena. According to scholar Honghua Men, another approach to defining Chinese national identity is based on ethno-cultural identity, as national identity is essentially a consensus on a specific system of values that is deeply rooted in a nation’s history and culture (190).

Extending beyond these two visions of Chinese national identity, the new live house culture conceptualizes and simplifies Chinese national identity in symbolic cultural, historical, and religious elements. One example is the lyrics from a folk song called “兰州 兰州” (“Lanzhou Lanzhou”) performed by 低苦艾 (Low Wormwood), a band from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province: “兰州～淌不完的黄河水向东流／兰州～东的尽头是海的入口。”(“Lanzhou, the endless Yellow River runs to the east/ Lanzhou, the end of the east is the entrance into the sea”) (line 11-12). These lyrics express connection to the city Lanzhou and resonance with Chinese national identity because the Yellow River is China’s mother river and the cradle of Chinese civilization. This song turns Lanzhou and the Yellow River into symbolic images of one’s love for this nation, which is powerful in terms of recalling people’s national identity. Another example is Sun Wukong (also known as the Monkey King), one of the main characters in a 16th century Chinese classical novel The Journey to the West. Over time, Sun Wukong developed into an icon of loyalty, love, courage, and resistance. The figure of the Monkey King is loved by many music lovers who are fond of live house culture because they think this character can best represent their attitudes toward music as well as life. The positive qualities of this mythological figure are a part of Chinese identity. In this way, both Chinese and foreigners who are fascinated by this culture can express their Chinese national identities by simply wearing a T-shirt with the figure of Wukong on it. Similarly, one without much knowledge of Chinese culture can display one’s self-identification as Chinese or craze for Chinese culture by wearing Hanfu or tattooing Chinese characters on one’s body. These practices of concretizing and simplifying Chinese national identity make it easy and straightforward for people, despite their nationalities and ethnicities, to express their affinity for “Chineseness.”

Such illustration and expression of the Chinese national identity is not a product of an isolated development of the notion per se but a result of the global and local conflict in the course of globalization. Anna Katrina Gutierrez, a researcher on the concept of glocalization, argues that there exists a “glocal heterotopia” in which “the threat of global homogenization and the fear of local isolation seek resolution through the establishment of a middle ground” (20). This claim suggests that globalization is a two-way communication in which global and local spheres agree, disagree, and compromise with one another. Although Gutierrez provides insights into this phenomenon of “glocal” by arguing that glocal areas raise the possibility of possessing “multiple identities” or “multiple dimensions to national identity,” she does not address how those new dimensions of national identity have intensified the original national identity (23). In this case, the seemingly rebellious practices of the live house artists keeping to tradition and resisting cultural assimilation are, in fact, an outcome of mixed emotions composed of feeling tired of cultural homogenization and numbness in cultural interchange. For instance, 布衣乐队 (Buyi Band), a band that has been active for more than twenty years in the live house community, produced the song “羊肉面” (“Lamb Noodles”), which praises the Chinese concept of home and maternal love through telling a story about lamb noodles, one of the most popular snacks in China:

幸福究竟是什么                                          (What on earth is happiness

妈妈最幸福的就是看你吃                          For me, the happiest thing is to watch the

的样子                                                              way you eat, my son                                         

你回家吧 困难的时候                                 Go home when you are in trouble

回家妈妈给你做最喜欢                              When you come home, Mom will cook you

的呀                                                                    your favorite

你回家吧 困难的时候                                 Go home when you are in trouble

回家妈妈给你做你最喜欢                          When you come home, Mom will cook you

的呀                                                                            your favorite

羊肉面。(9-15)                                            Lamb noodles.) (9-15)

This song demonstrates what it means to be happy for an ordinary family in China, which reasserts Chinese traditional ideology and, at the same time, implies a disapproval of the outside world where there are chain stores of American fast food but no authentic lamb noodles.

This pride in local flavor implies an anxiety over and distaste for cultural homogenization perpetuated by standardization in the progress of globalization. As Douglas Blum, a professor and expert specializing in globalization, reveals, “[B]eing modern per se is also a palpable wish, one which in part reflects the internalization of a new, materialistic standard of ‘civilization’” (78). By applying Blum’s claim to today’s cultural development, it becomes clear that cultural homogenization is one prominent form of standardization, but people’s appetites for global culture also reflect psychological internationalizations of a standardized culture. In fact, some would argue that since live houses originated in Japan, this new live house culture in China precisely confirms the charge that Chinese national identity has been homogenized by the global culture. Although this claim seems plausible because there are indeed many foreign bands who have performed or will perform in these live houses, I would argue that this is just one example of how the emerging live house culture in China utilizes the opportunities and benefits of globalization to reinforce and promote Chinese national identity. Instead of getting lost in multiple dimensions of national identity, the live house culture in China returns to the bedrock of Chinese cultural elements, searches for salvation in tradition, and further sets a new trend of chinoiserie. By using lyrics with strong regional characteristics such as Lanzhou, the Yellow River, and lamb noodles, these live house artists convert Western musical genres into Chinese style.

This process of reconstructing Chinese national identity is not about simply denying all the newly-added dimensions of national identity and standing against the trend of globalization; it is a process of returning to the authentic by negotiating the global and local and then making globalization work for national interest. Introducing foreign bands is a form of marketing to attract foreign and Chinese music lovers in the first place. These live houses have special official websites in English only, as well as Facebook websites. By seizing the opportunities provided by globalization and with the help of marketing, foreigners have become a large proportion of the regular live house customers and are exposed to and influenced by the local culture. The increasing number of followers enables Chinese culture to play a larger role in the progress of globalization.

A new dimension of Chinese national identity is developing through the live house culture in China. Such practices of conceptualizing and simplifying markers of Chinese national identity not only reassert identity among Chinese people but also make it easier to blend with global culture. Moreover, Chinese national identity has been enriched by the “glocal heterotopia,” which has caused great impact on the local culture by adding new dimensions of national identity. Even more importantly, glocalization has highlighted and intensified the original dimensions of Chinese national identity. Instead of seeing globalization as a threat to the native culture, this emerging live house culture employs it as a marketing approach to promote Chinese national identity. By reconstructing Chinese national identity on one hand and utilizing the global market on the other, Chinese culture is able to better cope with the trend of globalization and leaves its own mark on the world course.

Works Cited

Blum, Douglas W. “The Discourse of Globalization and Youth Culture.” National Identity and Globalization: Youth, State, and Society in Post-Soviet Eurasia. Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 74-104.

Buyi Band 布衣乐队. “Lamb Noodles” 羊肉面. Translated by Cindy Wang. So Long, Pocket Records, 2007.

Gutierrez, Anna Katrina. “Metamorphosis: The Emergence of Glocal Subjectivities in the Blend of Global, Local, East and West.” Subjectivity in Asian Children’s Literature and Film: Global Theories and Implications. Ed. John Stephens. Routledge, 2012, pp. 19-42.

He, Lichao. “Ready to Become a Great Power? The Recent Nationalist Movement and China’s Evolving National Identity.” Journal of International and Area Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 53-70.

Low Wormwood 低苦艾. “Lanzhou, Lanzhou” 兰州 兰州. Translated by Cindy Wang. Lanzhou, Lanzhou, Maybe Mars Records, 2011.

Men, Honghua. “China’s National Identity in Transition: Domestic and International Perspectives (1982-2012).” Social Sciences in China, vol. 35, no. 2, 2014, pp. 189-207.

Image Credit: Maria Paula Calderon

by Bai Xiao 白皛

Read the Faculty Introduction.

As an influential figure in the history of Western literature, Ezra Pound marked the epochal transformation of English poetry at the beginning of the 20th century. Besides his pioneering theory of imagism, Pound is also known for his bold translation of ancient Chinese poetry and Confucian classics, through which he presented a highly positive and even glorious image of “China” to the Western world. Although many of Pound’s contemporaries belittled China only as “a vast potential market for American goods, American culture, and American democracy,” Pound’s unusual enthusiasm for the Orient helped usher in the second taste for China in the West after the Enlightenment (Divine 25). However, instead of presenting China in its true sense, Pound’s “China” is rather a myth created by the author himself. Pound’s works translating Chinese literature to English, notably the Confucian classics and Cathay, are more than a collection of involuntary inaccuracies mixed with intentional manipulations; more intriguingly, considerable assimilation and metamorphism of the Chinese ideology, submerged under the surface of his Chinese-related texts, distinguish his works from any conventional translations. To be more exact, Pound’s creative image of China in his “translations” shapes an effective myth of China, which he proposed as a medication to save the Western world from serious crises and degradation in the 20th century and to lead the West to a brighter future.

Studying China persistently for more than forty years, Ezra Pound spares no efforts in eulogizing China’s culture and ideology, fundamentally Confucianism, in his most exemplary works such as The Cantos. His interest in China was largely kindled by orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, who, in his “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” expressed hearty admiration of China:

Their type of cultivation has been high. Their harvest of recorded experience doubles our own. The Chinese have been idealists and experimenters in the making of great principles; their history opens a world of lofty aim and achievement, parallel to that of the ancient Mediterranean peoples. (42)

It is noteworthy that at the root of this effulgent civilization, Confucianism became the cardinal representative of Chinese philosophy and ideology in Pound’s mind, with all the meritorious essence of Chinese wisdom aggregated in the Confucian canon. Confucianism constituted one of the major pillars in Pound’s prolonged development of The Cantos—from Canto XIII written as early as around 1920, which combines several important flashes of Confucian thought into one piece, to Canto LIII, the finale of his China cantos, which vigorously concludes the first 2000 years of recorded Chinese history with an allusion to Confucius’s honorable lineage.

Pound’s attachment to Confucius was not only intellectual but also personal. During those most gloomy days when he was confined at St. Elizabeths, he had James Legge’s translation of Confucian odes with him. Angela Palandri quotes Pound as saying, “This little book has been my bible for years, the only thing I could hang onto during those hellish days at Pisa…. Had it not been for this book, from which I drew my strength, I would really have gone insane” (qtd. in Flack 124n44). Here, we see the first glimmerings of Confucianism as a kind of medication, first for Pound himself, and, as he would later propose, one which could radiate healing throughout the West.

Although Pound appreciated China and made profound contributions in introducing China to the West throughout his life, his presentation of China largely remained a deficient myth due to his peculiar ideogrammic interpretation of the Chinese language. One of the biggest problems with Pound’s “China” was his lack of knowledge of Chinese, which caused him to deviate from the true meaning of original texts from time to time. An interesting moment in Pound’s journey of studying Chinese sheds light on his maverick view: when reading James Legge’s bilingual edition of the Four Confucian Books without a glossary in 1937, he professed, “When I disagreed with the crib or was puzzled by it I had only the look of the characters and the radicals to go on from” (Sun 111). Without knowing sufficiently the meaning of Chinese characters as organic entireties, he often focused on their graphic components.What became the paradigm of his ideogrammic approach was the juxtaposition of unrelated particulars to arrive at an imagined abstract meaning. However, subjective assertions about the Chinese language actually overemphasized the apparent forms of Chinese characters while neglecting the inseparability of all integrals in a character to convey abstract concepts. Pound’s approach incurred the illusion that someone without any knowledge of Chinese would be able to access the meanings of characters instantly by simply looking at these “semi-pictorials” (Fenollosa 43).

Such a subjective approach explains why Pound made mistakes in his translation of Da xue, commonly translated as The Great Learning but what Pound called The Great Digest. For instance, from his selected terminology before the text, he dismantles shen 慎 into its radical on the left, xin 心, meaning “heart,” and a fragment of its right segment, mu 目, meaning “eye,” which results in the interpretation of the whole character as “the eye (at the right) looking straight into the heart” (Pound, Great Digest 21). However, not only does he fail to recognize that the so-called “eye” is only a fraction of the right part zhen 真 (“truth”), but he also distorts the meaning of the whole character, which should denote “cautiousness.” In contrast to Pound’s ideogrammic analysis of Chinese, “Chinese characters, at least the vast majority of them” are “morphosyllabic—a heavy (if rather clunky and esoteric) term intended to convey the dual semantic-phonetic nature of the majority of the Chinese characters” (Williams 158-159). That is to say, most Chinese characters should not be taken as purely “ideograms,” but Pound might not have identified the phonetic segment of a character and imposed the meaning conjectured from the partial form to the overall understanding instead. Even if Pound did not bungle every Chinese character in his works, many of his cognitions about China are actually problematic, as a result of his unfamiliarity with unique characteristics of the Chinese language.

In fact, Pound’s ideogrammic myth of the Chinese language gives rise to his idealization of the Confucian ideology, which became a luminous component of his mythmaking. Let us take Pound’s interpretation of one key character in Confucian writing under scrutiny:  de 德, which is usually paraphrased as all kinds of virtue a human could possess in line with Confucian morals, including benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, sincerity, and so on. According to Pound, de refers to “the action resultant from this straight gaze into the heart” ideographically, and thus revealed specifically “the ‘know thyself’ carried into action” rather than general virtue (Great Digest 21). Strikingly enough, here Pound emphasizes the significance of self-knowledge, namely “know thyself,” over all the other qualities embedded in de, while there is no evidence at all that self-knowledge was given such a priority in the original meaning of the character. Though it might appear unintelligible at first sight, this uncommon illustration uncovers how Pound’s ideogrammic interpretation was subtly colored by the Confucian ideals. On the one hand, aligned with Pound’s translation of The Great Learning, Pound deemed Confucianism as a morally and ethically virtuous system that vitalized human nature through self-reflection and self-cultivation; on the other hand, Pound identified in The Great Learning that the ultimate catalyst of self-knowledge was rooted in gewu 格物, “sorting things into organic categories” in his own words, which resonated with knowledge of the laws of nature (Great Digest 31). Inspired by the Confucian classics he was working on, his ideogrammic method with a biased focus on specific components of characters helped further consolidate his Confucianism as a “totalizing philosophy” where Heaven (“nature”) went hand in hand with humanity (Zhu, “One-Principle Text” 397). His complimentary presentation of the harmony of Confucianism—both pointing inwardly towards the bottom of the heart and stretching outwardly toward  prodigious nature—significantly burnished his mythmaking of China.

For Chinese readers, Pound’s flawed image of China might seem quite bizarre; however, as Pound’s works on China were intended for his Western audience, this oriental myth functioned surprisingly well. Eric Hayot points out in his book Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel that there have been long-term effects of Pound’s works on the Western view of China in so far as that “everything after him has to look like his work to seem ‘Chinese’” (21). Even though Pound was vulnerable to potential criticism on his deficient knowledge of China, the Western audience at his time was even more ignorant of China than he was. That is to say, “Pound [could] imitate and persuade with utmost economy not because he or his reader [knew] so much but because both [concurred] in knowing so little” (Steiner qtd. in Hayot 21). Considering the existing knowledge gap between the West and China, Pound ingeniously sorted out the most conspicuous elements closely related to the image of China—those luminous details “whose strangeness needed no explanation” for Western people (Hayot 23). His colossal handwritten Chinese characters standing out abruptly in his Cantos were among the best examples to render such percussive oddness. It is exactly the “cultural shorthand” “easily recognizable as ‘Chinese’” in Pound’s works that eventually “established the authenticity of the Eastern setting,” resulting in an enduringly appealing impression of China in the Western view (Hayot 21). By taking advantage of such a stylized conception of China from the Western perspective, Pound laid the foundation for effectively utilizing the myth to make his prescription later for what he perceived to be a  degraded modern Western society.

Entangled in the turbulence of the 20th century, Ezra Pound’s advocacy for China was  deeply rooted in the social environment of the Western world at that time, which galvanized his pungent depression and anxiety. It is quite noteworthy that among the tens of thousands of surviving ancient Chinese poems on various topics, the fourteen translations in Pound’s Cathay seem to be purposefully selected, concentrating on only a few themes such as war, exile, lovesickness, unwilling farewell, and nostalgia. The pervasive inner bitterness and loneliness shared by these motifs underscore Pound’s Chinese poetry with subtle pathos and mirror the poet’s torment during a desperate quest to salvage Western society.

From Pound’s point of view, the cardinal cause of Western society’s sickness was economic breakdown. With the cruelty of World War I still carved in mind, “Pound came to the conclusion that poverty and war result from the inequitable distribution of consumer purchasing power in a capitalist economy” through the control of credit from international private banking and usury (Farahbakhsh 1450). In other words, “the evils of unchecked capitalism,” featured in vicious rivalries of international capitalists, accompanied by recessive monetary policy and heavy taxes, was the culprit to blame for the severe disorder in the western society (Farahbakhsh 1450). In Pound’s Canto XLV, the repetition of sentences beginning “with usura” demonstrates Pound’s sharp denunciation of usury, a “sin against nature” and “CONTRA NATURAM” (229-231). Although he  seems to hold his discussion in the context of fifteenth century Italy and northern Europe, it was exactly usury, this determinant for the failure of the authoritative Medici bank, that was eroding modern Western society again. Such a pessimistic outlook on the economy also found its way to the Chinese cantos. When Pound describes the Spring and Autumn period in Chinese history in Canto LIII, he highlights, “Usurpations, jealousies, taxes / Greed, murder, jealousies, taxes and douanes,” which might be regarded as a vividly realistic portrait of the 20th century here—a startling metaphor of troubled times (274). This premonition of chaos made Pound perceive an urgent need for peace, welfare, and order, through which he aspired to “prevent a second international war” (Farahbakhsh 1451). However, this aspiration was difficult to achieve without the presence of strong leaders.

Pound re-discovered “China” from ancient legacies and found that its honored Confucian philosophy “offered the best hope for an enduring and just social order,” which turned out to meet exactly his needs (Farahbakhsh 1451). The idea of order and good national governance took up a key position in Pound’s image of China according to Confucian values. In Canto LIII, the tyrants who ruled by misdoings, like King Wang who intended to vary the currency “against council’s opinion, / and to gain by this wangling,” are all punished by anomalies from the wrath of heaven, for example, “never were so many eclipses” (273). In  sharp contrast, those virtuous emperors who followed Confucian teachings and governed with wisdom all achieve great success in their administrations, and are held in awe and commemoration by the people. For example, Pound sings his praises to one of the benevolent emperors explicitly:

                       Honour to Chao-Kong the surveyor.

                                      Let his name last 3000 years

                       Gave each man land for his labour

                                               not by plough-land alone

                       But for keeping of silk-worms

                                     Reforested the mulberry groves

                                     Set periodical markets

                       Exchange brought abundance, the prisons were empty. (LIII/268)

From this hymn, we can clearly assess that Pound witnesses, or rather “realizes” his propositions of a well-governed and prosperous economy in his representation of China. The gracious images of those wise emperors in ancient times also embody his other ideals of the right form of governor, by “keep[ing] down taxes” (LIII/267), “fitting words to their music” and ritualistic odes (LIII/262), giving people freedom to “make verses” and “play comedies” (LIII/270), and reigning by righteous law “of the just middle, the pivot” (LIII/269). More importantly, he makes his powerful appeal for the stability of the state and the well-being of the people through Tching-ouang’s weighty testament: “[T]his is my will and my last will / Keep peace / Keep the peace, care for the people” (LIII/267). Having suffered heartbreaking devastation after war, Pound believed he could turn to Confucius for remedies, in a similar way that he looked to the Odyssey in Canto I “in order to heal the wounds opened by the Great War” (Flack 105).

Order, calibrated to the Confucian teachings and beginning at the level of the individual, appealed to Pound. Confucius’s recurring reference to “order” underlines its significance:

                                      If a man have not order within him

                       He can not spread order about him;

                       And if a man have not order within him

                       His family will not act with due order;

                                      And if the prince have not order within him

                       He can not put order in his dominions. (XIII/59)

The uniqueness of “order” here consists in “the Confucian emphasis on the individual as the origin and expression of a society’s values,” with the on-going spiral of cultivation toward perfection originating from the individual and then extending to the sphere of family and society (Flack 106). This emphasis on individualism is further expounded in The Great Digest: “[F]rom the Emperor, Son of Heaven, down to the common man, singly and all together, this self-discipline is the root” (Pound, Great Digest 33). Everyone, whatever identity and social status he or she enjoys, must carry out a responsible surveillance of himself or herself first and foremost.Confucius’s call to establish order through good rulers first from internal strengths of individuals turns out  to be the best and the most innovative solution to external disorders and conflicts in the Western world, as Pound longed for effective “ideas which are intended to go into action” (Guide to Kulchur 34).

Apart from war and social disorder, the Western world was experiencing a profound spiritual degeneration at the turn of the 20th century as well. Under the intensive impact of industrial civilization and the age of machines, there was an increasing concern that human beings would gradually be alienated from nature by their materialistic desires and the fast-paced lifestyle of modern society. Pound was determined to summon human “nature” back with the help of Confucian China. According to Alireza Farahbakhsh, Pound strongly resisted the “debasement of human life within the contemporary conditions of bourgeois economics,” which “distorted the nature and purpose of work, time, and wealth” (1452). To tackle the predicament, “Confucius offers a way of life, an Anschauung or disposition toward nature and man and a system for dealing with both” (Pound qtd. in Zhu, “Pound’s Confucianism” 58). From the Confucian Chinese culture and values rooted in agricultural civilization, Pound attained a clean cut from what he thought of as the rotten industrial society and warmly embraced the beauty of simplicity and the charm of primitivism. In Canto XIII, when commenting on his pupils’ answers on how to become known, Confucius makes a perfect response: “‘They have all answered correctly, /‘That is to say, each in his nature” (58). Here Pound actually adapts Confucius’s sayings to express his enthusiasm for the natural, unstained state of soul. Similar to what Tian gracefully describes in Canto XIII—going swimming, flopping off planks, and playing mandolins in the underbrush— Pound’s ideal headed for a nobler mode of harmony, where edification was as gentle “wind over grass” (LIII/266). Sharply different from “the ‘stupidity’ of extreme asceticism born of hatred of the body” in Christianity, Confucian teachings on nature and spiritual life made good sense to Pound, giving him the useful treatment for curing the inward disease of the Western world (Romer).

Of course, it is no coincidence that Pound looked to China, particularly ancient China, for his prescription for the Western world. Ultimately, this choice of “medicine” reflects the thinking behind his famous command to “make it new.” In Canto LIII, among all the Chinese characters Pound appended to his text, he places Confucius’s name, Zhongni 仲尼, between two zhou 周, meaning “Zhou Dynasty.” It is true that there were exactly two Zhou Dynasties, the Western and the Eastern Zhou; Confucius lived in the restless Eastern Zhou. In his paper “Pound’s Quest for Confucian Ideals: The Chinese History Cantos,” Hong Sun raises the thought-provoking observation that “although the master himself lived in the Eastern Zhou dynasty, his heart went back to the good old days of King Wen’s Western Zhou and often lamented the demoralization of his contemporaries” (115). Pound’s romantic, nostalgic application of Confucianism to his time and place mirrors Confucius’s own nostalgia for a better, wiser society. Just like Confucius, Pound was anxious to give appropriate treatments for almost all social problems at his time, but “what he was seeking was not so much a revolution as ‘a renewal, a revivification of an old tradition’” (Firchow qtd. in Sun 116). Pound’s declaration of his looking to “an American renaissance” in “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” further proves his standpoint—“renaissance” instead of radical and thorough transformation. Interestingly enough, if we recognize that Greek and Roman antiquity served as the paradigm for reviving Western culture during the Renaissance in the 14th through 16th centuries, we can see the essence of Pound’s “renaissance” actually remained the same, except with “China” as the tool this time.

Through the lens of Pound’s works on China, it can be clearly seen that his presentation of China derives from his way of viewing “others” and the “self.” The mythicized image of China provided Pound a valuable opportunity to conscientiously reflect on the severe crises in the Western world during the 20th century. Some people may attack Pound’s distortion of China in his translations of Chinese classics, criticizing him as a bad translator; however, Pound never wanted to be treated as a literal “translator.” It is true that he may not have been a good or even qualified translator because of his lack of knowledge of the Chinese language, but he was definitely an excellent preacher of China and a voluntary ambassador of ancient Chinese legacies to the modern West; he made great efforts to bring “China” closer to Western people, though his image of China is still confined to an effective myth. Pound longed to “make it new”—a vigorous “remaking of the old” to catalyze the process of renewal of the West, and he was successful (Firchow qtd. in Sun 116). He would not feel satisfied to become only “a passive reflector of light from another culture”; instead, he took the mission of Prometheus, “an active agent not simply carrying forward the light of Chinese philosophy, but rejuvenating Western poetry with its ideals” (Sun 96). History is sometimes strikingly similar: from Voltaire during the Enlightenment period to Pound in the 20th century, the West always stumbled on its way to getting to know China, starting from myths and misunderstandings, but Pound clearly tries to initiate a leap. His mythmaking is an ambitious construction of his own world of China—a luminous one to make the Western world new with the flame of hope.

Works Cited

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Flack, Leah Culligan. “‘The News in the Odyssey is still News’ Ezra Pound, W.H.D. Rouse, and a Modern Odyssey.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 22, no. 1, 2015, pp. 105-124. Proquest, search-proquest com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/central/docview/1664944777/ fulltextPDF/2DDD390E3B434FB9PQ/1accountid=12768. Accessed 6 Nov. 2016.

Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. University of Michigan Press, 2009. NYU Ebrary.

Pound, Ezra. Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1969.

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Romer, Stephen. “The great imitator: Ezra Pound may have been declared insane by an American court but, says Stephen Romer, the notion of ‘Mediterranean sanity’ that illuminates his best work still has lessons for his homeland.” The Guardian, 3 July 2004, www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jul/03/featuresreviews.guardian review12. Accessed 6 Nov. 2016.

Sun, Hong. “Pound’s Quest for Confucian Ideals: The Chinese History Cantos.” Ezra Pound and China, edited by Zhaoming Qian, University of Michigan Press, 2010, pp. 96-119. ProQuest ebrary.

Williams, R. John. “Modernist Scandals: Ezra Pound’s Translation of ‘The’ Chinese Poem.” Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics, edited by Sabine Sielke and Christian Kloeckner, Lang, 2009, pp. 145-165.

Zhu, Chungeng. “Ezra Pound’s Confucianism.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 29, no. 1, 2005, pp. 57-72. ProQuest Central, https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/central/docview/220552581/fulltextPDF/5AA17F4AEDA430APQ/1?accountid=12768. Accessed 6 Nov. 2016.

—. “Ezra Pound: The One-Principle Text,” Literature & Theology, vol. 20, no. 4, 2006, pp. 394–410. JSTOR, doi:10.1093/litthe/fri037. Accessed 16 Jan. 2018.