Orderly Disordered Author's Persona: Subalternity under Mystical-Miracles Limbo in R. F. Kuang's The Poppy War

Abstract

This paper probes the intersection of subalternity between Chinese-American migrant workers and Confuscious women victims in the tragedy of Nanjing Massacre (1947-1945), or the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, committed by Japanese troops, as their political identity is reimagined in The Poppy War (2018), an adult grimdark fantasy fiction by a Chinese-American diasporic author, R. F. Kuang. Endorsing on the conceptual tool of ethical singularity within Thematization of Subaltern (1995) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on its base, it allows the young female subaltern heroine, Rin, to enunciate victims of massive rape and genocide within series of her survival strategy deployed in the novel. Rin with her political consciousness obliquely mediates the Cike, a band of dishonored shamans and shapeshifters, to make sense if their subalternity for they fail to perceive it as social construction and liability. Rin’s unique state of mutable death mirrors Kuang’s unique position of an author and political activist who demeans intrepid recalcitrance with an abuse and interpolation of mystical-miracles elements to serve as empty declamation. The absence of subaltern’s body release that is supposed to transgress the benign and pious feminine being into monstrous rotten and poignant female corpse could not infuse the space to manipulate phallocentric vaginal possession. Instead, it is through extraterrestriality Kuang represents subaltern predicaments, ascribes a paradox of agency, and silences the subaltern at last.