YAN LIANKE’S HETEROTOPIC IMAGINARIES
A cancer village, an AIDS village, a rightist re-education camp during China’s Great Famine, and so forth - many of Yan Lianke’s fictional works revolve around remote communities that are comparatively isolated from mainstream Chinese society yet are defined by unusual, distorted, or even perverse features that are indexical traces of a set of structural transformations affecting the nation as a whole. In this respect, these fictional spaces may be viewed as examples of what Foucault calls heterotopias. This chapter examines several of the heterotopian spaces in Yan’s fiction, reflecting on how they are used to highlight a set of distortions and malignancies within contemporary China while, at the same time, offering a vision for possible reform.
