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  • Transcending Cultural Boundaries:Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee Detective Stories
  • Sabrina Yuan Hao

The debate over “high” and “low” culture from the 1970s onward has led to the expansion of the Western literary canon, allowing detective fiction to establish itself as not only a form of popular literature, but a distinctive literary genre. “Beginning as an expression of conservative, bourgeois, ethnocentric Anglo-American values” (Cawelti 9), detective fiction at the same time exhibits the potential to subvert Anglo-American ethnocentricity and accommodate and respond to diverse cultures and ideologies. This possibility has inspired many works within this genre that represent non-Anglo-American cultures and peoples. Such texts are normally set in non-Western locales and feature investigators working within their native cultures, although the reliance of detective fiction on foreign and exotic settings dates back to early examples of the genre. Edgar Allan Poe, one of the first major authors of detective fiction, chose Paris as the setting for his ratiocinative stories and C. Auguste Dupin, a Frenchman, as his detective hero. Agatha Christie also used foreign countries and characters in several of her detective novels; for example, Death Comes as the End and Death on the Nile involve Egypt, both ancient and modern, while Murder in Mesopotamia takes place in Hassanieh, Iraq. British author H.R.F. Keating created Ghote, Inspector of the Bombay police, even though he did not visit India until after he had already written nine Ghote novels. Unlike Keating, English author Arthur Upfield drew on his experience in the Australian outback to create his protagonist, Bony, an Indigenous Australian. Likewise, both James McClure and Alexander McCall Smith spent time in Africa before writing their African detective novels: McClure’s detective resides in South Africa, while McCall Smith’s Precious Botswana is, as her name suggests, a Botswanian native.

Current scholarship on Indigenous and ethnic detective and crime fiction generally follows a line of inquiry that is heavily informed by postcolonial notions such [End Page 551] as power relations, inequality, and cultural ‘othering’ and representation. It is relatively unproblematic for a writer of a particular ethnicity to represent the culture and people to which he or she belongs; however, it is more controversial for white Western authors, who seek to represent ethnic groups to which they do not belong, to avoid accusations of ‘othering’ and cultural appropriation of those cultures and peoples. For example, as a black American, Chester Himes, the author of the Harlem detective series, is generally recognized, and not challenged, as a spokesman voicing black anger, whereas the white British writer Upfield has been accused of inability to maintain a neutral perspective in his portrayal of the Aboriginal detective protagonist Bony because the author himself is not an Indigenous Australian (Rye 55). According to Marilyn Rye, Upfield is seen as having “either idealized the Aborigines into a symbol of the superior state of man when unspoiled by a decadent white civilization or turned them into a symbol of the bestiality of man when unchecked by that same civilization” (56). Other white authors writing outside of their own ethnicities have attracted similar criticism. If, by virtue of his work, McClure presents “a reassuring and apparently hopeful vision of accommodation rather than one of meaningful though disturbing collective action” (Winston 89), McCall Smith “less subtly offers[…] [a] culturally recolonizing role” (Knight 200) in his Precious Botswana series.

These examples and others call forth the key issue that Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen raise in their collection of critical essays, Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective: “Do practitioners of ‘ethnic’ detective fiction need to be ‘ethnic’ themselves in order to be ‘truly’ representative?” (7). Further, should any case of an author writing outside his/her own ethnicity be treated within a model of oppositional power relations? Are any other approaches possible? Answering these questions requires more studies of authors whose works cover wider cultural landscapes beyond those of their own ethnicity. This article intends to pursue these issues through a case study of Robert van Gulik and his Judge Dee detective fiction.

Inspired by his translation of the nineteenth-century Chinese crime novel Di Gong’an 狄公案 (Cases of Judge Dee),1...

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