"Chinese Connection" in Diasporic Nationalism: An Analysis of Fist of Fury as a National Allegory

Abstract

According to Balibar, nationalism is an ideological tool used to create affective bonds among people as a nation community produced through a state-led nationalization process. On the one hand, this process retrospectively nationalizes, or appropriates, the so-called pre-history of a nation-state that includes different polities and institutions not necessarily reducible to those of nation-state. On the other hand, it progressively nationalizes society, intervening in almost every sector of private life, especially through universal schooling and the nuclear family. (Balibar, 1991) Although these two nationalization processes are clearly distinguishable in their object-history and society and method-appropriation and intervention, they essentially share a commonality in that both are repressive in nature: nationalization of the pre-history of a nation-state means no other than teleological and evolutionary writing of history to exclusively legitimize and privilege the nation-state, which seems to be the culmination of human civilization but is in fact just one of various political forms that have existed so far. Nationalization of society is only possible when private spaces are systematically repressed and controlled by the centralized state that is in charge of the entire nationalization process. (Balibar: 92) As Duara has demonstrated, for example, the top-down statist nationalization in imperial China eventually led to the suppression of fengjian tradition, in which the centralized imperial state was checked by autonomous local powers and communities, as well as by civil-society discourses throughout the 20th century. (Duara, 2003: 147-175)