Between History and Phantasmagoria: Critical Nostalgic Lyricism in Alai's Poetry and Short Fiction

Abstract

Abstract In his poetry and fiction, Alai creates a historiography of Eastern Tibet replete with the grandeur and magnificence of the past occasionally interposed with some oppressive cultural practices. It is a historiography motivated and energized by nostalgic lyricism, which helps locate and construct a symbolic Tibetan ethnicity. This article proposes that Alai's nostalgic lyricism critically reflects on the inversion of loss and the compensation of lack, thus articulating alternatives against the discontent of the present. In so doing, Alai formulates a minority position against the forces of deterministic historicism and discourse of linear modernity that have constantly placed the minority subject in modern China under threat of erasure.