UTOPIA/WUTUOBANG AS A TRAVELLING MARKER OF TIME

This article argues for the understanding of ‘utopia’ as a cultural marker whose appearance in history is functional to the a posteriori chronologization (or typification) of historical time. I develop this argument via a comparative analysis of utopia between China and Europe. Utopia is a marker of modernity: the coinage of the word wutuobang (‘utopia’) in Chinese around 1895 is analogous and complementary to More's invention of Utopia in 1516, in that both represent attempts at the conceptualizations of displaced imaginaries, encounters with radical forms of otherness – the European ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ during the Renaissance on the one hand, and early modern China's own ‘Westphalian’ refashioning on the other. In fact, a steady stream of utopian conjecturing seems to mark the latter: from the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom borne out of the Opium wars, via the utopian tendencies of late Qing fiction in the works of literati such as Li Ruzhen, Biheguan Zhuren, Lu Shi'e, Wu Jianren, Xiaoran Yusheng, and Xu Zhiyan, to the reformer Kang Youwei's monumental treatise Datong shu. Altogether, these sketches of utopia provide an imaginary counterpoint to the co-produced regimes of historicity whose genealogies are being traced in this issue.

Opium and Sexuality in late Qing Fiction

This article examines opium smoking in two gendered contexts of the late Qing, as an activity among socializing men and in situations between men and women. The method is to use fiction to ask how male and female smokers differed and in general to show how opium came to symbolize an uncanny and ominous disruption of the social fabric. In terms of gender, the obscene enjoyment of the female smoker was exponentially more threatening in the prohibitionist's eyes than that of the male. As the sign of an unprecedented type of pleasure, opium addiction threatened to denaturalize the boundaries of cultural as well as gender identity.