The Making and Unmaking of Nationalist Literature from the National Margin

Abstract

This article reconsiders the established modern Chinese writer Duanmu Hongliang and his first and most influential work, The Korchin Banner Plains (completed in 1933 and published in 1939), from a borderland perspective. The novel is set in western Manchuria, a multiethnic area of northeastern China that borders Inner Mongolia and was occupied by Japan in the early 1930s. The novel has been read by many as a realistic portrait of the natural and social landscape of the grassland and as an autobiographical account of the author's family history. This article disagrees, and treats the novel as a performative form of “territory-making” that purposefully recreates a Han-centered modern nation from its geographical margin by carefully reorganizing a web of intricate and competing multiethnic and multinational relations in the grassland. In particular, as a self-identified Manchu, Duanmu makes unconventional choices of both themes and literary styles to imply a calculated embrace of a modern nation by an ethnic other. Through a close examination of the spatial-textual negotiations in the novel, the article delineates how a classic work of nationalist literature was produced from the borderland and how this work exposes the precariousness and contradictions inherent in the grand narrative of modern nationhood.