Heterogenesis and the Affective Economies of Catastrophes

An emergent duo nan xing bang 多难兴邦 (catastrophes give rise to a stronger national community) discourse sets out appropriating major catastrophes befalling the disparate peoples in China into a totalizing signifying chain of national resilience and solidarity. Literary works and films assist this statist drive as they generate a common affective economy of suffering and national overcoming, not only to elicit the emotional labor of sympathy for those affected but also to nationalize the experiences of distraught individuals and specific localities. Closely reading two recently published literary treatments of the 1960 famines and the little-known 1920 Haiyuan earthquake, respectively, this article shows that literature could also participate in “rescuing history from the nation” by fully accentuating catastrophes’ role in fracturing landscapes, disrupting the myth of political cohesion, and, above all, dissenting from the narration of a unified, ascendant national community. The article uses a methodology of the Deleuzian heterogenesis in constituting the radical particularism in the two texts. It argues that the method of heterogenesis is most effective in questioning nationalism's reliance on homogeneity as its imaginative end.