ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Walter Benjamin’s performative quotation and use of Chinese cultural traditions. Benjamin’s texts discussed in this chapter were haunted by the spectre of Chinese traditions invoked by his performative quotations of, and allusions to, Chinese texts and cultural images, as shown in his views on Brecht’s idea of epic theatre and on Franz Kafka and in his own writings, particularly his essay on his meeting with the American actress Anna May Wong. This chapter looks at Benjamin’s approach to Chinese traditions, which shares Brecht’s. It investigates Benjamin’s intertextual and intercultural quotations of Chinese literary texts and cultural images. It argues that Benjamin’s quotationist approach to Chinese traditions represents a reification of an Orientalized Chinese tradition; and it demonstrates that even Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s most original critical minds, was haunted, in his intercultural quotations of Chinese traditions, by the spectre of the nineteenth-century Eurocentric Orientalism.
