跨域流动中的文学与政治——重绘“东北作家群”的认知地图（1931-1948）

My dissertation reexamines the experiences of two decades of young Manchurian writers through the lens of both the global socialist movement and Chinese political conditions. I argue that the emergence and further development of the “Dongbei Writers group” was a phenomenon that resulted from the entanglement of global leftist movement with the formulation of modern China. The “thick description” of the experiences of “Dongbei Writers group” thus contributes to the study of both leftist and local literatures. On the one hand, it helps us to move past an overly linear narrative of the development of Chinese leftist literature¾from the May Fourth Movement to Yan’an to the People’s Republic¾and recovers the heterogenous, multi-origin, “accidental” ① emergence of Chinese leftist literature in a global context. On the other hand, it is also a perfect example of how, during the 1930s, locally oriented writers around the world moved to the left, joining but also being left behind by the “leftist literary commons”. While current scholarship illustrates this phenomenon through cosmopolitan and multilingual writers, I argue that it is in fact writers who have never left their home nation that reveal the uneven nature of the global spread of leftist literature. Identifying the personal experience of these young writers as "indexes", I hope to decipher how leftist literature in China responded to specific regional problems within the fluctuating political and cultural sphere of the global socialist movement, while “translating” them into the visions of the world revolution. Each chapter of my dissertation reinterprets not only a certain stage in the development of the “Dongbei Writers Group” but also a certain leftist cultural sphere in China. I begin by depicting how these young Manchurian writers, scattered in Shanghai, Harbin, Beijing, and Hunchun, started to write under the influence of different political and cultural institutions such as the Chinese Left-wing Writers’ League in Shanghai, Chinese Left-wing Writers’ League in Peiping, the CCP-M in Harbin, and the East Branch of CCP-M in Hunchun. If left-wing ideas were the water that nurtured this literature, then these organizations were the “water pipes” that connected to form a trans-regional and sometimes international infrastructure for the circulations of left-wing ideas. The second chapter concentrates on the reception these writers received in Shanghai and the larger context of the shift in policy toward the “Popular Front” which followed the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern. In chapters three and four, I examine the different paths these Manchurian writers took in Hong Kong, Chungking, and Yan’an in the Second Sino-Japanese War and place these arcs within the context of the “nationalized” global leftist movement of the Second World War. My final chapter traces their return to Dongbei and evaluates how the fractured system of cultural production was shaped by civil-war party politics.