Intertextuality of the Nanjing Massacre : the afterlife of missionary writings in transnational literature and cinema

Abstract

After decades of national amnesia in Mainland China, the Nanjing Massacre—mass murders and rapes committed by the invading Japanese Imperialist army in Nanjing, 1937—gradually emerged as a powerful cultural symbol in the China’s nationalist discourse. Since the publication of Chinese American author Iris Chang’s 1997 best-selling The Rape of Nanking, there have been large number of academic monographs on the Nanjing Massacre in the fields of politics and history. However, there has yet to be a full-length academic study of the mushrooming cultural productions that represents the Nanjing Massacre. My dissertation examines transnational cultural productions that have memorialized the Nanjing Massacre over the past two decades. They reflect a vibrant transpacific multicultural arena in which authors and readers have reimagined this event. To establish perspective on these cultural productions, my project starts with an inspiring source document, a diary of the Nanjing massacre by the American missionary woman Minnie Vautrin. Together with other missionary writings, it has inspired in different ways the literary and visual texts by Iris Chang, Yan Geling, Ha Jin, Wing Tek Lum, Lu Chuan, Bill Guttentag and others. The dissertation considers how these writers and filmmakers revisit, respond to, challenge and complement the shifting national discourse of China and contribute to global perspective that remembers World War II as a fundamentally intercultural trauma. By juxtaposing these texts together, I demonstrate a particular methodology of writing and reading a national trauma that emphasizes a transnational critical framework of production and reception. By probing the culturally nationalist portrayals of national trauma from a transnational perspective the dissertation enables traumatic events such as the Nanjing Massacre to facilitate intercultural discussions that resist simplifying history into heroes and victims. Overall, I contend that in the past two decades, especially in the past ten years, the memorialization of the Nanjing Massacre is undergoing huge transformations because of international aesthetic productions on this topic. In turn, the international transformation of the Nanjing Massacre through its representation internationally influences dominant national discourses in China and Japan. This remarkable phenomenon calls for more in-depth scholarly analysis of the practices of writing and reading about national traumas in today’s globalized world.