This essay compares the migrant’s urban strolls in two interwar novels: Chinese author Lao She’s Mr. Ma and Son (二馬 Er Ma, 1931) and Anglophone Caribbean writer Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Analyzing “racialized flaneurs” as those whose mobility in the metropolis is entangled with the metropole’s consumption of exotic racial images, the essay observes the diasporic lives of Chinese antique shop owner Ma Zereng and the white creole tourist Sasha Jansen at the intersection of racialization and economic exchange. By bringing together a novel told from outside imperial whiteness and one told from the ostensible inside, the essay looks at how the empire’s project of cosmopolitan self-fashioning fails in negotiating other transcultural dynamics it capitalizes on. For protagonists who approximate or pass as flaneurs, the essay suggests, the disruption of smooth metropolitan exchange can allow intimacies to resurface through experiences of entrapment, creating new possibilities of coexistence.
Racialized Flânerie, Commodity Fetish, and Empire’s Cosmopolitan Glamour in Lao She and Jean Rhys Available to Purchase
Tianyi Shou is a doctoral candidate in the department of comparative literature at Cornell University. Her research focuses on global modernist literatures and media in Chinese, Caribbean, and British contexts with a focus on racialization, imperialism, spacetime, and transcultural relations. Her dissertation studies how late imperial proximity between the “modern” metropolitan center and its “backward” peripheries has spurred new forms of imagining global connectivity. Her scholarship has been accepted or is forthcoming in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and ACLA State of the Discipline Report, and she is the co-translator, together with Wenjia Song, of Joshua L. Cherniss’s A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought into Chinese (2023).
Tianyi Shou; Racialized Flânerie, Commodity Fetish, and Empire’s Cosmopolitan Glamour in Lao She and Jean Rhys. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2025; 71 (1): 29–58. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-11686154
Download citation file:
Advertisement
