The surreal and the real: T’ien Hsia (1935–41) and 1930s Shanghai

This article explores how the Shanghai-based general interest magazine T’ien Hsia (1935–41) engaged with European surrealist movements in the 1930s. The first part of the article explores how the magazine’s literature and artwork responded to surrealist tendencies and ideas and argues that the prevalence of these tendencies and ideas intensified from 1937 in response to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the resultant Japanese colonization of Shanghai. Whilst surrealism offered a vehicle for a variety of responses to warfare – such as escapism, political comment, and black humour – it was also a movement through which the magazine’s transnational editorial team, including Wen Yuanning, a charismatic young writer-diplomat who had graduated from Cambridge, John C. Wu, and the American-born journalist Emily Hahn, could assert their distinct brand of liberal cosmopolitanism. The second part of the article explores how terms like ‘cosmopolitanism’, together with other postcolonial theory-related concepts such as ‘hybridity’ or ‘decoloniality’, help to illustrate the magazine’s turn towards the surreal as symptomatic of both its publication in Shanghai, a semicolonial treaty port that brought together a myriad of national identities and artistic styles, and also of its editors’ aims to provide a sense of cohesiveness and collaboration that transcended national boundaries.