Unending Wandering: visions of mobility in Zou Taofen’s Italy

From firenze University Press Book: Words and visions around/about Chinese transnational mobilities 流动

Miriam Castorina, University of Florence

As new technologies and global perspectives have given rise to new forms of travel and mobility in the 21st century, the emerging paradigm of New Mobility Studies has encouraged interdisciplinary discussions about human movements and the resulting cultural exchange and transmission. This critical perspective can apply to the past as well as the present, situating travel and mobility as fundamental activities of cultural construction. The New Mobility paradigm allows for us to observe and study social and other phenomena with a keen focus on the movement of human bodies (Sheller and Urry 2006).

Many of ancient literature’s highest forms have a real or imagined journey at the center of their narration, such as the epic of Gilgamesh or the mythical journey of Ulysses. Still, much work is to be done to acknowledge the culture-forming importance of travel within academic scholarship. As Eric Leed laments in The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (1991, 4):

Travel has not yet been claimed as a field of history, nor is it clear that it need be, that an understanding of how mobility transforms individuals, social relations, cultures would add significantly to our understanding of the past and the present.

Elsewhere, Merriman and Pearce (2017) have enriched the incipient field of Mobility Studies by highlighting how much a humanistic approach to mobility (which also includes travel) can help better understand human dynamics.

Recognizing multiple forms of expression and different types of mobility, this paper focuses on travel writing. Taking as a point of departure the journey of an important historical figure of the New Culture era — Zou Taofen 邹韬奋 (1895–1944) — this exploration of narrative travel presents material from Zou’s influential text Pingzong jiyu 萍踪寄语 (Messages from an unending wandering). A writer, publisher, and entrepreneur, Zou is considered one of the most successful journalists in the history of the Republic of China and probably one of the most read (Coble 1985, 294). Zou Taofen made a trip to Europe between 1934 and 1935 and began to publish his travel experiences in Shenghuo zhoukan 生活周刊 (Life Weekly), a widely read weekly of the period. The final three volumes of his journey abroad — recounting travels in Europe, and the Soviet Union — had a decisive influence on Chinese youth of the time, as evidenced by a survey carried out by Olga Lang before the Second Sino-Japanese war and later reported in Gewurtz (1975, 7).

Zou Taofen’s (forced — as we will come to see) mobility and overseas travel account are taken here as a case study to examine how a mobility perspective is enriched by the valuable contribution of humanities in this field. The choice to concentrate on Zou is particularly significant given the high number of his readers, his great influence on 1930s youth and the urban middle class, and the peculiarities of his writing. Laughlin confirms that Zou’s travel writings are “among the most widely read works of nonfiction in modern China” (2022, 53), while Gewurtz underlines that “the portion of Tsou’s writings that probably contributed the most to student radicalism in the mid-thirties was his travel books” (Gewurtz 1975, 23). Xu Xinmin (1999, 25) shares the same opinion and emphasizes how Zou’s reportage from abroad played a crucial role in the knowledge of the world and China, even among ordinary people. Zou’s movement from and within China not only shaped his creative expressions but also influenced Chinese public opinion, providing an original vision of Italy that so far has not been analyzed.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0068–4.04

Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/iunending-wanderingi-visions-of-mobility-in-zou-taofens-italy/13472