| Chapter : | Introduction |
In his close reading of the text, Hamm suggests that “Jin Yong’s work employs traditional Chinese literature to fashion a modern, ‘diasporic’ Chinese identity—to demonstrate the validity of this claim, and also to specify the terms of its applicability.” His analysis illustrates that the two major themes of this collection—modern Chinese literary history and diasporic Chinese identity—are interrelated and that the interesting interplay between the two situates the “Jin Yong phenomenon” within Chinese literary critical discourse and the mapping of global Chineseness.
To address the nature of Hong Kong’s cultural space as it relates to Jin Yong’s writing, we must again raise the question of nationalism, cultural identity, and historical memory in Jin Yong’s fictional world. In his first essay, Weijie Song, the author of From Entertainment Activity to Utopian Impulse: Rereading Jin Yong’ s Martial Arts Fiction (1999), which made a groundbreaking contribution to the study of the martial arts novel, argues that Jin Yong’s writing has gone beyond a single metanarrative of the motif of “nation-state”; Song illustrates how Jin’s diverse representation of hybrid nationalism, the paradox of identity, and historical amnesia have shown a more complex colonial space. However, as Song points out, even if Jin Yong has deconstructed the old binarism of domination/resistance in terms of the oscillation between nation building and personal emotion, he still holds the belief that Chinese culture is much broader and more profound than that of Western and other ethnic groups.
Since culture is a terrain where the unequal divisions of ethnicity, gender, and class are established and contested, a study of these divisions helps us locate Jin Yong’s novels within the broader context of symbolic production and expression and within the larger struggle of power relations. Following Weijie Song’s decoding of Jin Yong’s allegoric meaning of nationalism/ethnicity, Jianmei Liu takes gender politics into consideration. From the perspective of the group image of “bad” and “strange” women and the definitions of femininity and masculinity, Liu’s essay attempts to reveal Jin Yong’s writing position as ambivalent, which enables him to question Western modernity and vacillate between high and low literatures. Furthermore, such an ambivalent position is connected to and conditioned by the postcolonial context, in which Jin Yong’s writing is sharply contrasted with the revolutionary literature of the Mao period.