Introduction

After several years’ preparations, especially during the three-year lasting pandemic period when all the editorial staff of the journal were busy inviting submissions, reviewing the submitted manuscripts and finally selecting qualified articles for the first issue, the present initial issue of Vol. 1 of Culture as Text is now presented before the broad reading public. As Editor-in-Chief of the journal, I am very excited about the result and at the same time anxiously waiting for critical comments from our readers and more high-quality submissions. I am also entitled to write this introduction in an attempt to elaborate on the two key words of the name of the journal “culture” and “text”, its connotation and disciplinary coverage. Before elaborating a bit on my own ideas, I would like, as usual, to introduce to the audience the present issue.

When we talk about “text,” it simply refers to both cultural and literary text as well as social text. I wonder whether the potential contributors to the journal grasp our meaning, but indeed, the various published pieces in this issue have already practiced and realized our intended aim.

As for articles of the significance of social text, we have those by Arnd Bauerkämper, Michael de Sain-Cheron and Feng Lihui, in which they all touch upon a wide range of topics concerning the texts of broad social meaning: Bauerkämper’s deals with the internationalization of Left-wing terrorism and counterterrorism in a critical way, which is certainly of broad social concern as various kinds of terrorism have undoubtedly destroyed the established stable social order making numerous people homeless and even die insignificantly. People from different parts of the world all wish to live a happy and peaceful life, as if they were living in a vast “global village” sharing some common interests for future. Thus to the author, although different European countries have adopted strategies in counterterrorism, the specter of a Nazi-like police state still haunts opponents of excessive police and intelligence operations within Germany and Italy, as well. This fact should cause serious attention from all the peace-loving people. De Sain-Cheron’s discusses Nobel Prize winner for Peace Élie Wiesel’s complicated relationship to Christianity and Christians. When reading this piece, I could not help thinking of a significant conference in Tokyo in commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War Two in 1995. I was invited to attend the unforgettable conference as the assistant of the then President of Peking University Wu Shuqing. That conference was co-organized by the prestigious Élie Wiesel Foundation in collaboration with Asahi Shimbun of Japan. Although to the present author, Wiesel as a Jew in origin has to compromise between synagogues and Christians, in Eastern Europe, relations between Jews and Christians are largely characterized by hostility on one side and fear on the other. Nonetheless, Eliezer himself has developed some positive ideas about Christians during the war, thus he could be accepted by both sides as he finally became a theologian transcending the opposite two sides. After reading this article, I feel that a sort of cosmopolitan love and endurance should be highlighted in the present era despite the fact that wars and regional conflicts have never stopped. In the present unstable world, we should not only fight against various forms of terrorism but also call for tolerance and harmonious coexistence among different countries and ethnic groups so as to achieve eternal peace. It is thereby most timely to have the above two articles published in our initial issue. If we say that de Sain-Cheron’s article focuses on a specific person, or even textualizing this person, then Feng’s focuses on a specific Chinese city, or one of the most cosmopolitan megacities in China, which I have frequently visited and which has risen out of a small fishing village with a short period of 40 more years when the Chinese government actively opened up to the outside world and practiced economic reform. Obviously, the successful founding and development of Shenzhen as a cosmopolitan metropolis have undoubtedly proved the legitimacy of the Chinese-style modernization with the so-called Shenzhen speed. This is also a great success of globalization practiced in China as a sort of “glocalization” with Chinese characteristics. Thus I should categorize these three articles as those of social text although they are more or less concerned with literature and culture.

Then comes the text of cultural studies and cultural criticism by Ming Dong Gu and Thomas Beebee. Gu’s is an argumentative essay in which he puts forward this question: Is decoloniality a new turn in postcolonialism? He then critically examines some of the influential ideas in the decoloniality program in relation to issues of postcolonialism and argues for its placement in the context of postcolonialism so as to enrich postcolonial studies and advance the project of decoloniality. Having discussed this controversial trend, he concludes that it is necessary to rethink of the project of decoloniality from perspectives of geopolitics, international politics and global capitalism with the historical conditions of colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism. In this way, he suggests to place the conception of decoloniality in the broad context of postcolonialism which may well enrich postcolonial studies and benefit the project of decoloniality. Since the project of decolonization is increasingly attractive to cultural criticism in the present time, I am sure that his article will invite more discussions or even debates. Beebee’s article deals with three interrelated key words: cultural studies, big data, scalability. As we know that cultural studies in its contemporary sense is characterized by dealing with non-elite culture: not the elite cultural product as literature and art but rather the cultural phenomena in our daily life. The author analyzes and compares two precursor works that plainly gather and analyze Big Data to explain cultural moments: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. To the author, both works raise the question of how their examples can be scaled to the totalizing visions of culture that they seek, and the two researchers take different approaches to the question of scalability. Since the two articles deal with the issue of cultural studies, I just categorize them as those of cultural text.

Apart from the above two parts of articles, the third part is composed of three articles plus one interesting interview, all of which are characterized by literary texts. Bernard Franco, as a French comparatist, points out in his article entitled “Europe in Literature” that “the invention of Europe was first and foremost literary, before being political, economic or social”. Thus Europe in literature is actually a sort of narrativized or textualized “Europe”, attracting different creative artists to imagine and write about this wonderful land. So far numerous writers, either from Europe or elsewhere, have written about this continent, and Europe has therefore become “a way of thinking about literature and the relations between cultures, not only in European nations, but also in those outside Europe whose languages are European”. But on the other hand, the idea of Europe in literature calls for its own transcendence in the more universalist vision of the poet as citizen of the world. According to Franco, on the one hand, in his interview with Eckermann Goethe held ancient Greek poetry to be a universal reference. And later there has formed the idea of a Eurocentric world literature; on the other hand, Goethe also paid considerable attention to literatures of non-European countries, including those from India and China. Thus Goethe’s conjecture on world literature is both cosmopolitan and Eurocentric. In this part we also invited Flair Donglai Shi to have an interview with Elleke Boehmer for she has long played two roles in the university: she is Professor of World Literature in English and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. And at the same time, she is also an acclaimed author of fiction and has published numerous novels and short story collections in the English language. She in the interview not only discusses her latest work on literatures of the South and how writing can be a way of navigating worlds but also shows how she coordinates literary creation and literary studies in the university. Matthew Reynolds’s article is entitled “Critical Translation in World and Comparative Literature”, in which the author has developed his idea of “critical” and “prismatic” translation which certainly plays an important role in constructing and studying world literature. As we know, no one can grasp all the major world languages, so he/she cannot read all the great world literary works in the original. He/she cannot but depend on translation in most cases even if he is a language genius like Goethe himself.

From the above descriptions about the different categories of the articles in this issue, I think that our readers may well grasp why we should have “cultural as text” as the name of the journal. What I want here to emphasize is simply this: our journal welcomes all kinds of articles dealing with topics of both humanities and social sciences. Whether the submitted articles discuss social phenomena or cultural phenomena or literary phenomena, they should regard the phenomena to be discussed in the articles as a sort of “text”. Even analyzing a literary text should not confine it to literary analysis proper, but rather, it should extend the analysis to a wide range of social and cultural context. Our journal especially welcomes those articles crossing the border of countries and nations, and languages and disciplines. Only in this way can our journal be distinguished itself from all the others which either confine themselves to mere literary criticism or cultural studies. Thus “culture as text” does not necessarily mean we only focus on “text”, whether social, literary or cultural. We also attach importance to “textualize” all the social, cultural and literary phenomena so that every article we publish will analyze these “text” in a deep-going way like analyzing a literary text.