Animacy at the End of History in Changrae Lee's On Such a Full Sea
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3039271 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher T Fan (0000-0002-0823-8289, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 69 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 675-696 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/aq.2017.0056 |
| OpenAlex | W2756874553 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 13 |
This essay examines how dystopian depictions of US-China interdependency speculate on the material and aesthetic consequences of China’s rise, which, of late, have been articulated-though rarely explicitly-as “capitalist realism”: a belief in the impossibility of imagining alternatives to capitalism at the end of history. I focus on Changrae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea, arguing that it stages a pragmatic acceptance of China’s rise through its depictions of the end of history, environmental apocalypse, and perpetual economic stagnation; and through its reimagining of the novel form itself. I then show how Lee’s novel explores the limits of capitalist realism by exchanging a sine qua non of the novel genre-a liberal, bourgeois protagonist-for a minor character: specifically, an “animacy,” to use Mel Y. Chen’s term. As a refraction of American stereotypes of Chinese workers, this character/animacy mediates the novel’s consideration of how US-China interdependency portends the end of history and, via environmental crisis, the end of the world. I show how AlexandreKojève’s orientalist end of history theory-the progenitor of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history theory, which is the main provocation for “capitalist realist” criticism-might in fact offer some surprising possibilities for imagining beyond the end of history via “post-historical” aesthetics
Aesthetics · Art · Bourgeoisie · Capitalism · Criticism · End of history · Impossibility · Literature · Political science · Politics · Realism · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2022 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |