A Response to David Jasper’s Academic Adventures in China

Christianity and Literature Vol. 62, No.4 (Summer 2013) A Response to David Jasper's ''Academic Adventures in China" Zhange Ni I read David Jasper's books when I was an undergraduate student at Peking University, interested in the comparative study of religion and literature. Although Professor Jasper mentioned in his essay that he first arrived in China in 2008, his writing preceded him. In the last few years of the twentieth century, in the English Department of Peking University, Prof. Yiqing Liu regularly offered a fascinating course entitled "Bible as Literature:' This course introduced her students to the field of religion and literature, its research questions and approaches, and major scholars such as Eric Auerbach, M. H. Abrahams, Nathan Scott, David Jasper, and my future PhD adviser, Anthony C. Yu. I left China in 2000. I first studied theology at Fordham University and then went on to get my PhD in religion and literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2009. In 2010-2011, I did my postdoctoral research at the "Women's Studies in Religion" Program at Harvard Divinity School. Currently, I am teaching in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. My research is focused on the intersection ofthe discourses of world religion and world literature and how this intersection impacts literary production and reception in North America and East Asia. This summer, I was invited by the Institute of World Religions at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University to give a few lectures. Chinese universities have been making real efforts to generate a dynamic academic atmosphere across cultural and other boundaries. They invite renowned scholars such as Prof. Jasper to teach in China, where their expertise and experience are tremendous resources for Chinese scholars and students. Meanwhile, Chinese universities send their students to European and American universities with government funding, encouraging these young people 593 594 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE to explore the world. Although I am a very junior scholar and have only recently begun to study religion and modern Chinese literature, I was invited with the expectation that I share my experience of studying and teaching in America with young students, in addition to introducing the latest trends in the field and presenting my own research projects. Now I am writing from a hotel room on the campus of Beijing Normal University, toward the end of my academic adventures in China. To pay tribute to Prof. Jasper who, together with many others, initiated me into the field of religion and literature, I would like to reflect on my conversations with Chinese scholars-established professors, fresh PhDs, and graduate students. They are discovering the process of approaching religion as an open question and from a critical perspective. This newly emerging and rapidly escalating critical attention is pushing forward their investigations into Chinese modernity in general and modern Chinese literature, arts, and aesthetics in particular. The topic of my lecture series was the post-secular turn in the study of religion and literature. I introduced Talal Asads genealogical research on the symbiotic formation of religion and the secular in the Christian West as well as the latest scholarship on secularism and religion-making in East Asia (such as the work of Vincent Goossaert, David A. Palmer, and Peter van der Veer). I emphasized that religion and the secular are interdependent concepts co-emergent from the modern, Western, and Christian context. Both concepts gained a particular salience at the time of modern state formation, the rise of capitalist economy, and a series of attendant social transformations. Both concepts were translated into China at the historical juncture when the Chinese imperial system collapsed and gave way to the formation of the modern nation-state. Hence the Chinese variant of secularism was first and foremost a state project that deeply influenced the (re)invention of Chinese religion as commensurate with modern sensibilities and modes of governance. The audience for my lectures was comprised of scholars and students from several universities in Beijing and from diverse fields-religious studies, anthropology, history, foreign languages, comparative literature, and Chinese literature. Although it is Beijing Normal University and the Institute of World...