Floating Hair and National Allegory: Smuggling the Silk Road into World Literature
Abstract
This article examines contemporary Chinese literature through Mao Zedong’s metaphor of intellectuals as “hair” that must attach itself to a social “skin,” arguing that artistic production acquires significance through its relation to collective life rather than through the ideal of autonomous “art for art’s sake.” Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s theory of national allegory, Ozmun contrasts the fragmentation and inwardness of much contemporary Western literature with literary traditions that link individual destinies to broader social, political, and historical processes. The article centers on Ba Longfeng’s novel Silk Road Romance, which follows a young Kazakh-Dungan woman’s reverse migration toward China and combines popular romance conventions, internet culture, historical debate, and geopolitical themes in a deliberately accessible “high-low” literary form. Through Ba’s critique of postmodern literary elitism and his embrace of the Xi-era discourse of “Positive Energy,” Ozmun argues that a new Chinese literary sensibility seeks to represent modernization, poverty alleviation, civilizational confidence, and the macro-historical transformations of the contemporary world. The protagonist’s romantic conflict between a Russian-Kazakh oligarch and a Chinese intellectual is ultimately interpreted as a national and civilizational allegory for the contemporary Silk Road, China’s changing global position, and the emergence of a literature oriented toward collective historical movement rather than isolated individual experience.
Keywords
Chinese Literature, Mao Zedong, National Allegory, Positive Energy, Silk Road
