ABSTRACT
My analysis has centred on the configuration of the local in Jia Pingwa’s works and argues that his Shangzhou stories have been built up as a cultural institution in connection with representing the Chinese national cultural space. There are a number of reasons for privileging the reading of Jia Pingwa’s literary texts as a phenomenon of national narration. First, cultural traditions and national identity have been a preoccupation for the greater part of Jia Pingwa’s literary career, sometimes ostensibly declared and sometimes subsumed. Second, in the study of Chinese literature, nationalism in literary representation has not been adequately explored and so far there have not been many substantial works on China’s literary national imagining, although ‘national salvation’ has been a central and recurrent issue of modern Chinese literature. Third, few critiques have elaborated on China’s nation-narration through regional cultural traditions and local identities. This study of Jia Pingwa’s writing within the framework of ‘nation and narration’ underpins the significance of regionality in negotiating China’s national identities as oppositional to the dominance of the CCP-centred national stories and their usual antagonists. Viewed in this light, the most distinctive feature in Jia Pingwa’s national narration is that the entire project is carried out at the local and the community level and that the close connection between the local and the national characterizes his Shangzhou stories.
