Ecosophy of Time: Can Xue, China, and Global Modernism

abstract: Since modernist studies took a transnational turn in the 2000s, the historical genealogy of modernism on the global scale has been a contested zone. What temporal logic(s) can we, modernist scholars, adopt to carry out a more ethical engagement with practices, traditions, and locales rarely admitted to the previously Anglo-Eurocentric discourse of modernism? This article turns to Can Xue—a widely translated writer from the 1980s Chinese avant-garde school ( xianfengpai )—and discusses how her post-2000 works reflect an "ecosophy of time" that offers an effective mitigating formula not only to her own predicament of asynchrony between China and the world literature market but also to the "time problem" of global modernism(s).