| "A sheet of loose sand"---this was the bleak, yet powerful metaphor through which such leading Chinese cultural figures as Liang Qichao and Lu Xun depicted the Chinese people at the turn of the twentieth century. How to transform an entity fragmented like sand into a cohesive social body has since been a crucial concern of Chinese intellectuals. At the center of their discussions is the trope of the crowd. If Chinese people were "a sheet of loose sand," a metaphor which itself yearns for a moment of consolidation, is the crowd the "rock" formed out of the loose sand, the building block of a cohesive national body? Is the physical massing of bodies a manifestation of self-awakening and self-determination or just a showcase of mass madness?;In modern Chinese literary and cultural studies, the emergence of modernity has been generally characterized as the interaction between romantic individualism and revolutionary nationalism. However, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the figure of the crowd maintained a precarious relationship with both the individual and the nation. Rather than a random assemblage of individuals, the crowd began to be understood as a particular mode of being in which individuals thought and behaved differently from when they were alone. The tumultuous crowd was not readily identified as the embodiment of the common will of the nation either. This study demonstrates that between the discourses of individual liberation and national salvation, the figure of the crowd occupied a volatile place where notions of self, community, class, and the "people" were articulated and contested. I analyze the formation of the crowd as a pervasive literary and social subject within the problematic of Chinese modernity and document how new terms, meanings, and modes of representation of the crowd arose and circulated in modern China. The story my study tells is the process whereby the crowd was represented and contested in response to both local socio-political concerns and the transnational flow of theoretical discourses and aesthetic forms. By investigating a wide range of literary, theoretical, and visual texts by leading intellectuals as well as less known crowd theorists, psychologists, philosophers, activist writers, and artists, my study situates various accounts of crowds not only within their immediate intellectual and political context, but also within a global network of theories and representations, ranging from Gustave Le Bon's study The Crowd to Frans Masereel's "woodcut novel" A Man's Path of Sorrow. |
