This dissertation examines how early-twentieth-century Chinese, Caribbean, and British writers reimagine the globe as a space-time of plural cohabitation, in response to imperialism’s barring of racialized others from a singular order of modernity. Engaging Chinese and Caribbean entanglements with European and Japanese imperialisms, I argue that the fin-de-siècle experiences of inhabiting a spatially and temporally circumscribed globe—in proximity with a proliferation of culturally and ethnically “different” others—prompted articulations of global space-times that diverge from the unilinear trajectory of imperial conquest and modernization. As increased technological and media connections made the idea of the globe tangible through the concrete materialities and historicities of ethnicized others, debates over the latter’s coevalness generate comparative knowledges of racialization and transnational horizons of global modernity. My four comparative chapters explore models of global time produced through spatial relations with racial/ethnic others—integrating, circulating, assembling, and refracting. The case studies include Wu Jianren’s and H. G. Wells’s fantasy Sci-Fi of “global utopia,” Lao She’s and Jean Rhys’s inter-war urban novels on racialized flânerie, Xiao Hong’s and Virginia Woolf’s wartime ethnographic fiction, and Lu Xun’s and Frantz Fanon’s first-person essays on interpellated experiences of watching colonial cinema. Combining literary close reading with a transnational survey of cultural history, I demonstrate that if the articulation of an interconnected global time finds itself invariably entwined with racial/ethnic others’ embodiment of other times—whether as modernity’s anterior or its antithesis—then the lived experiences of inhabiting otherness become generative sites for imagining other, pluralized global times. Ultimately, this dissertation rethinks “ethnic otherness” as an uneven relation constitutive of global modernity’s space-time structures, showing how twentieth-century literature offered productive challenges to dominant conceptions of globality that turn ethnic plurality into captivity.

本博士论文探讨了二十世纪上半叶中国、加勒比与英国作家如何在帝国主义将族裔化他者拒斥于单一现代性秩序之外的背景下，将全球重新构想为一个多元共生的时空。通过考察中国与加勒比地区同欧洲、日本帝国主义的交织历史，我认为，世纪之交的作家们前所未有地意识到自己正生活在一个在时空被统一限定的地球上，与诸多文化及族裔“他者”比邻而居；这一体认促使他们构想出新的全球时空观，有别于以帝国扩张与现代化发展为核心的线性进步叙事。随着技术革新与媒介联结日益加深，“全球”这一概念经由族裔他者所具身化的物质历史经验变得可感。正因如此，历史上围绕这些他者“同时代性”（coevalness）展开的讨论，催生了关于种族化的比较性认识和跨国现代性的崭新视野。本论文由四个章节组成，分别以整合（integrating）、流通（circulating）、拼接（assembling）与折射（refracting）四种空间关系为切入点，探讨与族裔他者概念交织生成的全球时间模式。研究案例包括：吴趼人与H·G·威尔斯（H. G. Wells）的“全球乌托邦”科幻幻想、老舍与简·里斯（Jean Rhys）书写两次世界大战间宗主国都会移民经验的都市小说、萧红与弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf）在二战背景下的虚构民族志书写，以及鲁迅与弗朗茨·法农（Frantz Fanon）关于观看殖民电影时询唤体验的第一人称论述。结合文本细读与跨国文化史梳理，本文论证：当互联全球时间的表述不可避免地通过援引族裔他者所具身化的异质性时间得以塑造——无论其被构建为现代性的前史抑或对立面——那么，栖居于“他者”的日常经验本身，便成为生成多元全球时间的质料。通过将“族裔他者性”重新思考为构成全球现代性时空结构的一种不均衡关系，本文揭示了二十世纪文学如何富有建设性地挑战了将族裔多元性囚禁其中的主流全球性观念。