Nation, Religion, and Su Xuelin’s Transmedia “World-Building” Projects

Abstract

This paper studies Su Xuelin’s imaginative and scholarly writing from the 1940s to the 1980s as a series of projects aimed at building a utopian world to reconcile the conflicting claims of Chinese nationalism and her Christian faith. In her short stories celebrating the Ming loyalists, Confucian and Catholic, who defended the Manchus unto death, she highlighted the image of the mountain as the center of their moral- political universe. She continued to work on the mountain in her scholarly articles and, under the influence of the European school of Pan- Babylonianism, traced the origin of Mount Kunlun, the Biblical Eden, and other sacred mountains to ancient Mesopotamia. On this basis, she postulated that Qu Yuan produced his rhapsodies by drawing from the repository of world mythologies brought to him by ancient migrations, the forgotten foundation of the Chinese civilization. Although Su’s work is limited to the medium of print culture, her seemingly disconnected projects coalesce to enact a fantastical world mediating diverse times and places. A representative of the Chinese Catholics, a knowledge community actively participating in what Henry Jenkins calls trans-media world-building, Su reimagined China and Christianity as both located in a global network of migrations and mutations.

Keywords

nationalism / Catholicism / Pan-Babylonianism / comparative mythology / trans-media world-building / Huang Daozhou / Qu Shisi / Qu Yuan / Su Xuelin

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2019 Higher Education Press and Brill