‘衞慧’와 ‘上海寳貝’에 대한 “의미작용의 정치”

Abstract

My paper challenges the process of semioticization of Wei Hui and her Shanghai Baby by the Chinese government and mainstream intellectual circles, through such descriptions of her and her novel as “banning order,” “disgusting,” “beautiful writer” and “narrative on body,” and attempts to re-semioticize these descriptions by making ‘opposing rule of meaning.’ As Wei Hui herself once mentioned that her novel “talks about Chinese youth culture and urban landscape at the turn of the twentieth-first century,” she goes beyond producing a mere sketch of urbanity and successfully reconstructs the urban reality of Shanghai. In other words, she successfully raises questions about the fin-de-siècle urban Shanghai and the identity of its youth, who have been wandering and floating between Shanghai’s coloniality and post-coloniality. The reconstruction of the fin-de-siècle Shanghai, its neo-colonial identity, and the crisis and concerns about economic and cultural hegemony that it confronts can be an object of post-colonial criticism and work as an alternative ‘political functioning of meaning.’