Interview with Dr Nan Zhang
By Bingshu Zhao, Sarah Khan and Dario Castiglione
On 3rd April 2023, the Centre for Political Thought at the University of Exeter hosted Dr. Nan Zhang for a remotely conducted interview. Dr. Zhang is an Associate Professor of English at Fudan University, and an Honorary Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. The interview followed, and interwove, various threads in Dr. Zhang’s work on global modernism, including, but not limited to, themes such as ethics and virtue in twentieth-century British literature; an anti-colonial way of being in the thought of Rabindranath Tagore; the possibility of a conversation between Western epistemology and perspectives of the world we can locate in Eastern or Chinese philosophies.
Bingshu Zhao: First, we would like to start with your intellectual background and academic formation. How did you get interested in literary studies, and more specifically, in English literature and the Victorian Era?
Nan Zhang: I had indeed taken a detour before I could focus on literary studies. I have always been passionate about literature. Thanks to a generally open-minded attitude towards the outside world and a proliferation of good-quality translations of foreign literature in China in my formative years, I felt very much at home in the worlds of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Rousseau, and so forth. For various reasons I majored in international finance in college and for a long time felt marooned in a strange world of facts and figures.
In hindsight, however, I think my training in economics and finance has both intensified my wish to concentrate on literature and enabled me to adopt interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies. When formulated as a branch of knowledge that deals with how to satisfy unlimited wants and needs with limited resources, economics has great attractions for me. For the attention to human motives and inclinations seems to me to align with literature’s investment in unfolding the complexities of human psyche and mentality and the richness of the inner world. I found it natural, for instance, that Adam Smith inquired into issues of wealth and moral sentiments at the same time. Similarly, John Maynard Keynes’ concern with full employment in his macroeconomic theory seems consistent with his emphasis on literature and art in his vision of good life.
Keynes did draw my attention to the Bloomsbury group after I switched to literary studies in graduate school. And my fascination with the work by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and T. S. Eliot quickly extended my interest to modernist literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to the field of modernist studies. While modernism, as a literary and artistic movement, has often been considered to signify a break from the past, or the immediate past of the Victorian Era, I find it essential, and nourishing, to tap into Victorian literature and culture in order to achieve more profound understanding of modernism.
Bingshu Zhao: In your article on Edmund Burke, Virginia Woolf and the Negotiation of virtue, as well as your recently published book on Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, you shed light on modernist writers’ engagement with various forms of civic virtue in a global context. Could you elaborate a bit more about Woolf’s insights into Virtue and public spirit also in the context of her engagement with the more global and transcultural context of her own time, including the experience of imperialism and colonialism. More generally, do you think there is in your research on Western literature a distinctive Chinese perspective?
Nan Zhang: The violence and rapacity of imperialism and colonialism has been all too familiar now. Meanwhile, we also know that an ideology of so-called civilizing mission underlies the new imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. This is an idea that “civilized” nations should promote civilization among “primitive” peoples and uplift them economically, morally, and politically, and it drew heavily on notions of civic virtue and public spirit in mobilizing support from the metropole. These notions were already prevalent in the public school ethos in Late Victorian England. Stefan Collini, for one, has provided very insightful analysis of the subject.
Virginia Woolf’s depiction of virtue and public spirit, in my reading, is situated within such a historical context. It embodies endeavors that challenged imperialist policies and practices by confronting their moral apologetics with demands for civilized values and sympathies delinked from racial and national biases. In other words, Woolf didn’t just criticize the intertwined forces of patriarchy and imperialism, as many scholars have pointed out; she opposed an official discourse of virtue with a countervailing spirit of solidarity across national boundaries.
If there is a distinctly Chinese perspective in my research, it’s not always conscious, definitely not in the beginning. I had always wanted to achieve some distance from my own mindset shaped by my environment. I had thought intellectual immersion in a different literature and tradition would help toward that. Then I became increasingly aware of how one’s perspective is inevitably inflected by the cultural tradition in which one was brought up. My interest in civic humanist discourses and questions concerning virtue and public spirit, it has dawned on me, has to do with influences of Confucian culture, which doesn’t mean officialized accounts of Confucianism of course. Now I find it productive to adopt, rather than disavow, comparative perspectives and approaches, and the globalized turn in almost every field of research has certainly allowed for more substantive and valuable comparisons and critical self-reflections.
Sarah Khan: In your discussion of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel The Home and the World you show the main protagonist, Nikhil’s, as being at the cross-roads of a rootedness in a Buddhist spiritual tradition that we can perhaps take as a metaphor for the home, and his impulse towards a universal shared humanity, that we can understand as a metaphor for the world. Could you shed some light on how modernist thought reconciles these two ideals, and therefore, the home and the world?
Nan Zhang: The spatial tropes of the home and the world operate on various levels in Tagore’s novel, and in modernist literature at large. In one sense, the home draws our attention to ideas of nation and nationhood as an opposition to the oppressive power of imperialism and colonialism. That is an important part of the political context of many modernist novels in the early twentieth century. While Tagore’s novel highlights the conflicts between colonial power and nationalist advocacies, it also addresses the moral and affective ramifications of such conflicts. That’s why moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum have drawn upon this novel to articulate their arguments concerning the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism.
Within cosmopolitan studies, there is recognition that universal sympathies need to be reconciled with at least some forms of local attachment, otherwise cosmopolitanism will become rootless, if not a hollow or colorless ideal. Tagore’s privileged protagonist Nikhil is in many ways a cosmopolitan thinker, or a kind of Kantian philosopher, as Nussbaum has cogently argued, but his affinity for a Buddhist worldview enriches understanding of cosmopolitan thinking, which can draw energy and inspiration from diverse sources and traditions.
Modernism is well-known for its complicated relationship with tradition in an accelerated world of globalization. If the idea of home in the early twentieth century involved wrestling with one’s own culture and tradition, then keen awareness of a shared world impelled one to move beyond their constraints, perceptually, conceptually, and attitudinally. I don’t think modernist literature often reconciles the tension between the home and the world successfully. The tragic ending of Tagore’s novel reminds us of the difficulty of reconciliation. But we do see strenuous efforts directed towards bringing the home and the world together in modernist literature, and those efforts remain part of the attraction of modernism.
Sarah Khan: Your reading of Tagore’s novel brings into relief another dualism, in parallel with that of the home and the world. This is more concerned with two different ways of trying to shake off colonial subjection. One through a violent nationalism the other through a spiritual opening towards the ‘universal’. The first can be said partly to appropriate the ‘language’ of the colonizer confronting violence with violence; the other seems to neglect that colonial subjugation supposes a separation of the human (the colonizer who assumes moral authority) from the sub-human/sub-altern (the colonized who is regarded morally inferior). Can these two impulses be combined a reconciliated, in a way that the spiritual non-violent opening makes room for the agency of resistance that puts the colonized on equal footing with her colonizer?
Nan Zhang: As forms of resistance against colonial subjugation, the two approaches are certainly related, but there are also significant differences between them. Tagore’s novel depicts two vivid characters that occupy the two positions you have laid out. In contrast to Nikhil, who argues against belligerent nationalism, Sandip embraces the logic of confronting violence with violence. But Tagore presents us with a complex account of the corrupting force of violence. Sandip believes that the lofty end of saving his country justifies the use of violence. But this inclines him towards a Machiavellian attitude towards others and life, which turns out to be dangerous and destructive.
On the other hand, Nikhil’s valuation of moral reasoning and universal sympathy seems rather feeble in the face of brutal violence practiced by both cruel colonizers and impassioned nationalists. Although Tagore’s novel emphatically endorses the moral principle and spiritual belief espoused by its privileged character, the novel also portrays a realistic picture of the limitations of moral and spiritual engagement when violence runs wild.
Indeed, many liberal-minded modernist writers were faced with a similar predicament in the late 1930s when the violence of totalitarian regimes provoked militant reactions and left less and less room for gradual spiritual opening. But at least Tagore’s novel encourages us to think beyond the limited horizons of colonial power and to reconsider the importance of nurturing the agents of resistance.
Dario Castiglione: In the two articles of yours that we have just discussed you seem to highlight another distinction, the one between spiritual and material life. And in between the lines it would seems to me that there is the suggestion, particularly in the essay on Tagore, that what has guaranteed the success of Western civilization has not been its force on the spiritual and ideal side, but on the material side. And this prevalence of the material over the spiritual is what many people from other civilizations have often criticized or resisted. Is there something in this?
Nan Zhang: The tension between spiritual and material dimensions of life is indeed essential to my reading of modernist literature. Both Woolf and Tagore have exposed and criticized the domination of possessive desires and their intimate relationship with the imperial enterprise, in spite of differences in their cultural orientations and artistic projects.
Woolf recognizes the importance of material basis, like a room of one’s own, for higher ends of life that are more spiritual. For instance, in an aesthetic manifesto of hers that also reflects her outlook on life, Woolf divides modern writers into two groups: the materialists who try to create some external reality; and those who are more spiritual and committed to revealing the flickerings of the inner flame. “The spirit of life,” to use Woolf’s phrase, is what modern novelists should try to capture and what readers, by extension, are encouraged to explore.
Actually, Woolf’s emphasis on inner life aligns with a tradition of cultural criticism in the Victorian era featuring Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, among others. Matthew Arnold, for example, famously denounced “faith in machinery” as a besetting danger for the whole civilization of a modern world growing increasingly “mechanical and external.” In my Tagore essay, I also show affinities between the ideas of English-educated Nikhil and Arnold. It is true that Tagore was sensitive to the detrimental power of Western industrial and imperial forces over other civilizations and traditions, but he was certainly aware of the significant presence of critical reflections within Western civilization that was crucial to its development.