A flaw like this, no doubt, should not eclipse the general high quality of the book. Her contextualization of literary texts, as a result, slackens in rigor at certain points.

However, even as Kong theorizes her terms carefully for the most part, she does sometimes resort to unexplained political clichés such as totalitarianism and authoritarianism in her comments on contemporary China. Kong illuminates the conflicting features of the literary diaspora that Tiananmen gave rise to: self-exoticization and melancholic repetition-compulsion on one side and a simultaneous critique of Chinese authoritarianism and global neoliberal capitalism on the other. Tiananmen takes on a number of guises in Kong’s critical language, both a site of the literary imagination and that of existential, political struggles on national and global levels. The last chapter discusses a text dealing mostly directly with the history of Tiananmen, namely Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma (translated from Routu, its Chinese title). Chapter 3 discusses Annie Wang, who, like Gao, receives an ambiguous appraisal from the author. Chapter 2, possibly the best chapter of the book, turns to Ha Jin, an American counterpart to Gao in the sense that he writes in the language of his adopted country in the post-Tiananmen era and his literary accomplishments have been broadly recognized in the adopted nation. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ĭhapter 1 offers a reading of Gao Xingjian’s play Taowang (Escape), commissioned by the American Theatre Group.

Phillip lopate to show and to tell