Fanhua, global modernism, and the art of detachment

This chapter analyzes the 2013 Chinese novel Fanhua as a formal hybrid that demonstrates the amorphous quality of the term “global modernism.” Fanhua, authored by Jin Yucheng, blends the external focalization regularly observed in vernacular Chinese novels and anti-psychologizing strains of Western modernism. The opaque psyche of the novel’s characters, especially its male protagonists, accentuates the affective detachment that characterizes relations among urban middle-class individuals in the early 1990s, which reverses while also eerily replicating the cultural atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution. The essay concludes with a discussion of the novel’s penchant for describing urban buildings, trinkets, and clothing items, as gestures toward new modes of affective investment.