In Search of Hospitality

Abstract

Revisiting Yingjin Zhang’s writings on spaces, this essay aims to explore the kaleidoscopic imaginary he created to analyze spaces in films and literature. I argue that through his generous interpretation of marginalized spaces and his astute perception of affect in spatial movements and transformations, Zhang offers us a glimpse into how we approach the concept of hospitality. In his writings, Zhang delves into the urban–rural divide, the transformations from socialist to post-socialist spatial configurations, as well as the intricate entanglements between the global and the local on a larger scale. In the face of uncertainties, absurdities, and alienation resulting from spatial issues, Zhang consistently maintains a sympathetic attitude in depicting and interpreting images of strangers, outsiders, the “homeless,” and “guests.” Through his works, he offers us a fresh perspective to reimagine the boundaries between “home” and “elsewhere,” “host” and “guest,” “rural” and “urban,” and “local” and “global,” not only in a spatial context but also within an ethical landscape that stimulates affect and connectivity, ultimately culminating in the constant search of hospitality.

Notes

1 Judith Still, “Derrida: Guest and Host,” Paragraph 28, no. 3 (2005): 85.

2 Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 163.

3 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 231.

4 Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 302–303.

5 Zhang, The City, 166.

6 Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki 5, no. 3 (December 1, 2000): 4.

7 Zhang, The City, 160.

8 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 155.

9 Zhang, The City, 20.

10 Ibid., 19.

11 Yingjin Zhang, “Eulogistic Comedy as Domestic Soft Power: Biopolitical Self-Fashioning in It’s My Day Off (1959),” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 12, no. 2 (2018): 122.

12 Ibid.

13 Yingjin Zhang, “Remapping Beijing: Polylocality, Globalization, Cinema” in Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age, ed. Andreas Huyssen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 239.

14 Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 8.

15 Ibid., 9.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaojiao Wang

Xiaojiao Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from University of California, San Diego, specializing in Chinese and French literature, literary theory, and urban studies. Her ongoing research delves into spatial mobilizations, utopian communities, and legal practices in Shanghai and Paris, spanning from the late nineteenth century to the present. She is also a translator, having translated works such as Julia Kristeva’s La Révolution du langage poétique and Jacques Derrida’s Séminaire: La Bête et le souverain, II into Chinese.