Realism in the Global Age of Modernism in China and the United States

If realism is often caught up in an oversimplified binary with modernism, what happens when modernist studies become increasingly expansive in geographical, temporal, and generic terms? This chapter reviews the recent critical approaches to reconfiguring the conventional narrative of nineteenth-century European realism’s demise and transition into modernism. Specifically, it traces the reification of the modernism/realism dichotomy back to Cold War ideologies, explores global modernist scholars’ turn toward the Soviet cultural system as an alternative model of world literature, and examines the tendencies in postcolonial and ethnic studies to read peripheral realist texts as ethnographic writing. Paradoxically, the attempt to recuperate realism (especially non-western or peripheral realisms) often ends up reaffirming the biases toward modernist modes of representation as more sophisticated and self-reflective. The second half of this chapter considers the material repercussions of this continual marginalization of realism. It includes a case study of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–1995), whose celebration as a sinophone global modernist today has largely obscured her repeated attempts to pivot to anglophone realist writing from the 1950s onward. The rise and fall of Chang’s career as an émigré bilingual writer in the United States attests to a deeply politicized and deeply unequal international division of creative labor, in which non-western authors are often relegated to the role of the native informant. For the peripheral writer, realism is not necessarily an aesthetic choice but a political and artistic compromise they must make if they are to gain entry into the Euro-American “global” literary market.