The Full Programme – 4/10/13 – Fu Manchu in London: Lao She, Limehouse and Yellow Peril in the Heart of Empire

Fu Manchu in London: Lao She, Limehouse and Yellow Peril in the Heart of Empire

Friday 4^th October 2013, 115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies is pleased to be hosting this one-day conference on the occasion of three auspiciously inter-related events this autumn: the publication by Penguin Modern Classics of Lao She’s forgotten masterpiece of 1920s Chinese London, Mr Ma and Son, the launch at the Ovalhouse Theatre of Daniel York’s satiric play, The Fu Manchu Complex (dir. Justin Audibert), and to mark the centenary of the first appearance of “the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man”, Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer, a collection of essays edited by Phil Baker and Antony Clayton (Strange Attractor Press, 2013).

The day’s speakers will examine the contexts and enduring fascination of one of the world’s most notorious fictional villains, from the fin-de-siecle racial anxieties and obsessions that spawned Rohmer’s oeuvre to the skewed perceptions that have arisen around his pervasive influence. Of all the overseas Chinese who came to England during the inter-war years, Lao She was the only one to confront the popular Sinophobia endemic in British society directly. Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929) portrays the pernicious effects of the media on the lives of Chinese people in London. Based on his own experiences in London and written principally for a Chinese readership, the novel gives us a rare, if not unique, picture of the social and commercial affairs of the shop-keepers, café proprietors, and seafarers, that made up the major part of London’s small Chinese community, then based in Limehouse in the East End. Daniel York’s play, The Fu Manchu Complex challenges the resonances of ‘Yellow Peril’ stereotypes for the 21^st century in a satirical pastiche of classic British cinema. Five East Asian actors ‘white up’ in the style of slapstick and Victorian music-hall comedy to play the traditional colonials in a murder mystery set in the East End.

 

Admission is free but please register by emailing Dr Anne Witchard here:
anne@translatingchina.info

 

 

PROGRAMME

9.30AM Coffee/Introduction from Anne Witchard

 

Dr Anne Witchard

Anne Witchard is lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. Her publications include Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate, 2007), Lao She in London (Royal Asiatic Series Shanghai HKUP, 2012) and London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (edited with Lawrence Phillips) (Continuum, 2010). She is currently working on an edited collection Modernism and British Chinoiserie (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War (Penguin, 2014).

She was principal investigator of the AHRC funded network project, China in Britain: Myths and Realities (2012-2013)  www.translatingchina.info

 

 

10.00AM – “Some Kind of Admiration or Respect”: Dr Fu Manchu as Hero

Phil Baker

This paper will argue that Fu Manchu, supposedly the most evil genius the world has ever seen, is paradoxically the hero of the series in which he appears. After considering the central role of exoticism in Rohmer we can see that, although there is considerable casual racism in his work, his attitude to the Chinese is as much about naïve idealisation as demonisation. Ultimately the characterisation of Fu Manchu as a sympathetic figure – comparable to Milton’s Satan, and popular culture’s Dracula – transcends the context of the Yellow Peril. Reading the books as a serial, this paper will suggest that the early emphasis on Fu Manchu as a man of his word develops over time until the growing mutual admiration between the Devil Doctor and his principal enemies, Sir Denis Nayland-Smith and Doctor Petrie, becomes a romance of respect.

 

Phil Baker’s books include Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis (Macmillan, 1997), described by the Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett as an “important book…[and] a breakthrough in this field.” Since then he has concentrated on the byways of popular and unpopular culture, with further books including The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Dedalus, 2009) and Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist (Strange Attractor, 2011). He reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and other papers, and has recently edited, with Antony Clayton, Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer, a collection of essays to be published by Strange Attractor late in 2013.

 

10.45AM – The Case of the Yellow Peril Then and Now

Dr Ross Forman (University of Warwick)

This paper will look at some of the contexts of Yellow Peril discourse and its resonances in contemporary popular culture, such as the debates around current TV productions, such as Sherlock, Run and Top Boy.

Ross Forman lectures in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His main research focus is British imperialism during the long nineteenth century, with a special interest in the relationship between Britain and China. He is the author of China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

 

11.30AM – 11.45AM – coffee

 

11.45AM – Fu Manchu, Orientalism and Arabophilia

Robert Irwin (SOAS)

Robert Irwin will discuss Orientalism in Fu Manchu and pulp fiction more generally. He will touch on Sax Rohmer’s lack of interest in things Chinese, his passion for Arabs and for Egyptology, his London as capital of the Arabian Nights, London as the locale of ‘gaslight romance’, drug-taking and conspiracies in Orientalist pulp, and the reality of Rohmer’s racism and its debt to the Arabian Nights.

Robert Irwin is a publisher and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His works of non-fiction include The Arabian Nights: A Companion (Allen Lane, 1994), Islamic Art (Laurence King, 1997), Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Allen Lane, 1999), The Alhambra, (Harvard University Press, 2004) and For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (Allen Lane, 2006).  Also Camel, Mamluks and Crusaders, Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (Ashgate) and the editing of and introducing The New Cambridge History of Islam volume 4, Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century, all in 2010 and Memoirs of a Dervish in 2011. He is also a contributor to Lord of Strange Deaths, the Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer (forthcoming 2013). Irwin was formerly a lecturer in the Department of Mediaeval History in the University of St Andrews.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the London Institute of Pataphysics, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Society of Antiquaries.  He is a consulting editor at the Times Literary Supplement and is a Senior Research Associate of the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.

 

12.30PM – 1.30PM – Lunch

 

1.30PM – Rohmer’s Odyssey

 

Antony Clayton

 

Fu Manchu’s creator, Sax Rohmer (Arthur Sarsfield Ward, 1883-1959) was the king of pulp exotica. This biographical talk will look at Rohmer’s early life, his work in Music Hall, his books and travels. 

 

Antony Clayton is the author of Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London (Phillimore and Co., 2002), London’s Coffee Houses: A Stimulating Story (Phillimore and Co., 2004), Decadent London (Historical Publications Ltd., 2009), The Folklore of London (Historical Publications Ltd., 2008) and Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley (Accumulator Press, 2012).  Together with Phil Baker he is editor of Lord of Strange Deaths, the Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer (to be published in 2013).

2.15PM – Mr Ma and Son: Limehouse and the Yellow Peril genre

Dr Julia Lovell in conversation with author Paul French

With the publication of Penguin Modern Classics’ Mr Ma and Son we have at last an English language edition of Lao She’s neglected masterpiece that does justice to the author’s comic genius. William Dolby’s marvelously fluent translation has been rescued from the vaults of the British library where it was deposited back in the early 1970s. Here we see a panorama of 1920s London life through Chinese eyes, from literary soireés in Bloomsbury to Chinatown cafés down in the much sensationalized East End district of Limehouse. Julia Lovell, who has written a new introduction to the novel, will discuss with historian and author, Paul French, the ways in which Lao She’s portrayal of cultural clash in 1920s London gives readers a picture of what it was like to be Chinese at a time when mainstream culture in the West was dominated by notions of a Yellow Peril.

 

Julia Lovell is lecturer in modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where her research focuses principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building. Her non-fiction works include The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (University of Hawaii Press, 2006); The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC-AD 2000 (Atlantic Books, 2006); and The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador, 2011). She has written the introduction to William Dolby’s translation of Mr Ma and Son (Penguin Modern Classics, 2013). Her own translations include fiction by Lu Xun, Han Shaogong, Eileen Chang and Zhu Wen. Lovell writes about China for The Guardian, The Times and The Times Literary Supplement.

Paul French has lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His most recent book, Midnight in Peking (Penguin, 2012), was a New York Times Bestseller, a Radio 4 Book of the Week, and is to be made into an international mini-series by Kudos Film & Television in the UK. He recently published a Penguin Special e-book, The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking, attempting to recover the once notorious 1930s foreign-run Badlands of Beijing. His essay ‘Fu-Manchu, his Daughter and the Dragon Ladies of China’ is in Lord of Strange Deaths, the Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer (forthcoming 2013).

 

3.15PM – The Fu Manchu Complex

 

Daniel York and Justin Audibert will discuss their play, The Fu Manchu Complex, in production at the Ovalhouse Theatre in London.

 

Daniel York was
born of mixed Singaporean/English parentage and grew up in the UK. As an actor his theatre work in London includes Mu-lan’s award winning production of Porcelain at the Royal Court and Fortinbras opposite Alan Rickman’s Hamlet at the Riverside Studios. As a writer and director his feature film script Beautiful Friend has been developed by Film4 and his short film, Mercutio’s Dreaming: The Killing Of A Chinese Actor, was recently nominated for four awards at the World Music & Independent Film Festival.
Last year he was selected as part of the Royal Court’s Unheard Voices initiative for emerging East Asian writers. As a result of this he was invited on to the Royal Court Studio writers.

 

Justin Audibert

Justin Audibert is a freelance theatre director and Associate Director for Red Ladder. Recent directing credits include A Season In The Congo: Parallel Project (Clare, Young Vic), Wrong’ Un by Boff Whalley (Red Ladder), Gruesome Playground Injuries by Rajiv Joseph (Gate Theatre), The Tempest (RSC Shakespeare in a Suitcase), Front by Vickie Donoghue (Rada Festival), Future Regrets by Roz Wyllie (live theatre / RSC), Armley The Musical by Boff Whalley (Interplay) and Company Along The Mile by Tom Bidwell (WYP / Arcola). As an Assistant Director he has worked with Greg Doran, Lucy Bailey, David Farr, Rachel Kavanaugh, Paul Hunter and Sarah Esdaile amongst others. Audibert is an Associate for Told By An Idiot, an Artistic Associate of HighTide Theatre Festival and has directed at numerous drama schools including Drama Centre, GSA and ArtsEd.  He has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company as an Education Associate Practitioner in the UK, the US and Brazil. In 2012 Audibert was the Acting Coach for the finalists of BBC 2’s Shakespeare Off By Heart. He has been Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio, and was the recipient of the 2012 Leverhulme Award for Emerging Directors. Justin trained on the Birkbeck MFA in Theatre Directing.

 

The Fu Manchu Complex runs at the Ovalhouse, Kennington
1 – 19 October, Tues-Sat 7.45pm
BOOK / BOX OFFICE: 020 7582 7680

To all those who read and write China books – Something worth pondering from Ellen LaMotte

American Ellen Newbold LaMotte arrived in Peking in 1916 after a period as a nurse on the European front in WW1. After several visits over several years to the then capital of China during the years of the war she penned a gossipy and interesting snapshot of the city at the time – Peking Dust (free here on Project Gutenberg to download) – in 1919. The opening paragraphs may give a little pause for thought for readers AND writers of China books (your blogger here included!)….

“Two classes of books are written about China by two classes of people. There are books written by people who have spent the night in China, as it were, superficial and amusing, full of the tinkling of temple bells; and there are other books written by people who have spent years in China and who know it well, – ponderous books, full of absolute information, heavy and unreadable.

Books of the first class get one nowhere. They are delightful and entertaining, but one feels their irresponsible authorship. Books of the second class get one nowhere, for one cannot read them; they are too didactic and dull. The only people who might read them do not read them, for they are possessed of deep, fundamental knowledge of China, and their views agree in no slightest particular with the views set forth by the learned scholars and theorists.”

A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism

An interesting looking new book from Oxford University Press, A Taste for China, by Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, which claims to present a new theory of Orientalism and a new account of the role of China in English literature and culture. A rather bold claim and not exactly justified in the blurb as Rape of the Lock and Defoe are well known forerunners of Orientalism. Still, looks worth a read…

Through an examination of England’s obsession with Chinese things throughout the long eighteenth century, this book argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity. In the wake of recent scholarship in the field of eighteenth-century writing that examines English identity and nationalism in the context of trade, commodity culture, and the social role of literature, this study demonstrates how the figure of the Chinese object was variously deployed throughout the period to authorize new epistemologies and subject-object relations, ultimately redefining what it meant to be English. The book opens with a reading of Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters that contextualizes the accumulation of imported material goods from China as part of the process by which early modern English nationalism gave way to a more commercial notion of English identity. Jenkins then considers the appearance of chinoiserie in English writing that ranges from Pepys’ diaries to Restoration drama. Subsequent chapters consider international commerce and the Far East in Daniel Defoe’s under-studied novel, Captain Singleton, and the relationship between subjects and objects in Pope’s The Rape of Lock. Broadly considered, A Taste for China shows that prior to the nineteenth century, English culture did not necessarily organize the world in terms of the orientalist binary, defined by Edward Said. By historicizing British orientalism, Jenkins reveals how the notion of the East as anathema to English identity is produced through various competing models of subjectivity over the course of the eighteenth century.

China’s Role in World War One Remembered in the Pyrénées-Orientales

Just can’t get away from China references! Happen to be writing about China’s involvement in the First World War at the moment what with the centenary up next year – more on that to follow as it progresses. And then happened to be passing through the town of Vernet Les Bains in the Pyrénées-Orientales and came across the town’s Entente Cordiale monument – the only one in France apparently. Of course every French town has a memorial to the men of the area who fell in the war but this monument is a bit different as it celebrates the alliance between Britain and France – and all the other nations that supported the Allies in the Great War. While China wasn’t actually a combatant it did side with the allies and sent the Chinese Labour Corps to Europe so should really be included. And so it is….(more on the memorial from Wikipedia below)…

Near the highest point in Vernet-les-Bains, next to the mairie (town hall), stands a monument to the Entente Cordiale of 1904. It is the only one of its kind in France.

The pedestal of the monument is made of Canigou granite. On it rest two white marble statues representing France and Britain. The pedestal itself is set upon a circular base. That in turn is located on a raised, level area of ground which covers 1,000 square metres and which is bounded by low stone walls.

The idea of erecting this monument was conceived around 1912 by the town council and its then mayor, Monsieur Joseph Mercader. The wealthy British visitors who regularly came to this health spa at that time actively supported the project. A committee of prominent French and British patrons was set up to promote the scheme. Its leading members were Lord Roberts and General Joffre. Monsieur Lambert-Violet, a leading Perpignan businessman, gave the land for the memorial to Vernet. The monument itself was the work of the Roussillon sculptor Gustave Violet, who displayed a model of his proposed work in 1913. However, progress came to a halt in 1914 with the outbreak of World War One. Little further happened until August 1920, when it was proclaimed by presidential decree that work on the monument would proceed but that it would be dedicated both to the Entente Cordiale and to the memory of those killed during the war. At the same time a new appeal was launched for funds to complete the project.

Work on erecting the monument soon got underway. Granite was hauled up from the bed of the River St-Vincent in carts pulled by oxen. The stonemason, Monsieur Herbetta, worked up to fourteen hours a day, often in the sun’s full glare, fashioning and putting into place the enormously heavy blocks of stone. A circle of wrought-iron fencing was erected around the base of the monument. Monsieur Antoine Mercader remembers, as a six-year-old child, how he and other children watched with amazement as the craftsman, Monsieur Serra, poured molten lead into small holes in the ground to seal in place the fence’s iron bars. When the monument was completed, it bore the following dedications:

“To the Entente Cordiale between France and Britain. To the glory of the Allied Nations. To the memory of soldiers from Vernet who died for their country”

Edward Morse’s Glimpses of China and Chinese Homes, 1902

Published in 1902, Morse’s Glimpses of China and Chinese Homes was a follow up to his popular Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings. His trip to China was mostoly to write for  American Architect, and his article for them form the basis for this book. Also included are a number of sketches. Morse knew Japan better than China and had been a professor of Zoology at Tokyo University but this is still a lovely book with some charming sketches.

If you want to read the text you can download it here.

Barthes’s Travels in China now in paperback

French philosophy and theory takes on 1970s China – not always a happy meeting!

In 1974 Roland Barthes travelled in China as part of a small delegation of distinguished French philosophers and literary figures. They arrived in China just as the last stage of the Cultural Revolution was getting underway – the campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius. While they were welcomed by writers and academics, the travelers were required to follow a pre–established itinerary, visiting factories and construction sites, frequenting shows and restaurants that were the mainstay of Western visitors to China in the 70s. Barthes planned to return from the trip with a book on China: the book never materialized, but he kept the diary notes he wrote at the time. The notes on things seen, smelled and heard alternate with reflections and remarks – meditations, critiques or notes of sympathy, an aside from the surrounding world. Published now for the first time more than thirty years after the trip, these notebooks offer a unique portrait of China at a time of turbulence and change, seen through the eyes of the world’s greatest semiotician.

Coco Chanel and Her Chinoiserie Tastes

Watching the movie of the relationship between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky the other night reminded me of Chanel’s tastes for Chinoiserie. There’s a rather nice moment in the movie when Coco welcomes the Stravinsky family (exiled White Russians by this time) into her villa Bel Respiro at Garches and shows them the China Room. However, Chanel had Chinoiserie wherever she lived be it her Parisian apartment at 31 Rue Cambon, her French Riviera villa La Pausa or her suite of rooms at the Paris Ritz. Chinoiserie wherever she was in residence…

the movie recreation of Chanel’s China Room at Bel Respiro in Garches

Chanel’s China screen at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris

Chanel’s bedroom at La Pausa on the Riveria which was draped in Chinoiserie fabrics and wallpaper

Gene Luen Yang’s “Boxers” Graphic Novels

Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers is a great idea – a graphic novel that depicts the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and tries to explain both sides. It’s actually a diptych of graphic novels called Boxers and Saints (sorry, I’m not really au fait with comic culture). Saints is about an unwanted daughter who finds acceptance among the Christian missionaries and their Chinese converts. Anyway, there’s an article here on the books and an interview with the artist who also has a very cool site here too. And, there’s a brilliant trailer on Youtube too.

And of course – you can buy the books here….