Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-zzw9c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-04-18T20:45:56.184Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“In Search of New Voices from Alien Lands”: Lu Xun, Cultural Exchange, and the Myth of Sino-Japanese Friendship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2014

Get access

Abstract

Lu Xun, a lifelong translator dedicated to introducing foreign thought, “searched for new voices from alien lands” to reinvigorate indigenous culture. Yet, his attitude toward cultural exchange was an ambivalent one. Among the questions that preoccupied him: How are foreign discourses, technologies, and knowledge appropriated and disseminated? Do they enable new frameworks for understanding the self and the world and forward an emancipatory agenda? Or legitimize systems of oppression? While Lu Xun's essays and short stories largely affirm the latter, “Mr. Fujino” imagines a paradigm of relationality that goes beyond the limits of nationalist and colonial discourse. The sentimental account mythologizing his friendship with his Japanese anatomy teacher—one that draws on Confucian notions of benevolence and reciprocity—and, in turn, the positive sentiments and cross-cultural encounters the story has generated, reflects, and in a certain sense, enacts, Lu Xun's more sanguine visions of the transformative possibilities of cultural exchange.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Supplementary material: PDF

Cheng supplementary material

Cheng supplementary material

Download Cheng supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 131.1 KB