Following profiles on our two An Wang Fellows earlier this month, Shengqiao Lin and David Qihang Wu, we are happy to introduce you to our new Hou Family Fellows in Taiwan Studies. Hardy Stewart is a Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Language at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on Taiwan literature and poetry. Stewart’s dissertation addresses how classical Chinese poetry crossed the Taiwan Strait from mainland China and changed Taiwan. At the center of that study is colonial-era Taiwanese poet Hong Qisheng 洪棄生 (1867-1929) — whom Hardy introduces to us in this Q&A through the lens of a period photograph and all the biographical detail that it conveys.
Stewart both underlines how important it is to think about a poet’s work unbound from the present—to “hear” its time and its place—and also wonders how his stay in New England might shape the writing of his own dissertation. He identifies his preferred quotient for ‘spirals of chaos,’ and the Caribbean literary figure who inspired it. And he preemptively plans around Boston’s woebegone Red Line by psyching himself up for a bike path commute.
What excites you most about the research you will be doing this academic year?
I am continually drawn toward the person and poet who is central to my inquiry, Hong Qisheng of Lukang, Taiwan. There is a photograph of Hong as a young man, held by the Lukang Folk Arts Museum (and available elsewhere online), which begins to capture the ways he compels me. The poet sits in robes, with scroll in hand and a distant stare, and on the wooden table beside him a number of personal effects are set on display: seven texts in a pile, a clock with roman numerals, a teacup with floral patterning, and an opium pipe with built-in accoutrements. The clock and pipe in particular point to an opposition in Hong’s poetry which will energize my research while at Harvard, namely, the possibility of the eternal which he found in drug fugue, against the dawning of a new age which incrementally expelled him.
What made you decide that the Fairbank Center was the right place for you to be at this point in your academic career?
Still in the earlier stages of working on my dissertation and with ample room yet to write, I remain relatively open to the twists and turns of the archive and to the detours and discoveries of conversation, since I aim to avoid the kinds of contortions that can occur when trying to prove predetermined conclusions. The Fairbank Center is an ideal environment for me at this formative juncture because its multidisciplinary community and the forum it provides for discussion offer me a space to explore such contingencies and cross-pollination in the scholarly process. Plus, after spending a good number of years in Berkeley, I hope now to reflect with more critical distance on the research habits which have become routine to me on that coast, as I begin to dialogue with scholars whom I have as yet only read and admired from afar.
How does the poetry that you study resonate in Taiwan today?
From what I gather from Taiwanese scholars and Lukang locals alike, Hong Qisheng is somewhat of a household name on the island. He wrote prolifically during the momentous period spanning the Second Opium War and World War II, when regional questions became increasingly urgent for the globalizing island, and he is a central figure of much critical inquiry there. Historically, and in various political contexts, this scholarship has stressed the poet’s critique of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), showing less interest in Hong’s habitual detachment from Qing dominion (1683–1895) and his sporadic collaboration with Japanese authorities. In Hong, I find a self-proclaimed “man beyond the sea” during Qing rule and a person entirely “beyond the world” during the Japanese era. His poetry expresses layers of alienation which speak not only to the island’s early style but also to matters of more general application, such as the interplay of aesthetics, geography, and politics. Acknowledging also that resonance can distort the original idiom, I hope to cut through the noise of the present to hear Hong’s moment more clearly, without embroiling the poet in contemporary issues about which he did not write.
What are you most excited to do during your time in Cambridge?
On a personal level, I am thrilled that after about a decade I can finally rejoin the timezone of my immediate family, who are dispersed up and down the East Coast. I also can’t wait to cruise the routes of Minuteman Bikeway and wander the stacks of the Harvard-Yenching Library. I am filled with a lot of joy, finally, by the prospect of developing my dissertation at the Fairbank Center, of watching how the chapters I work on in Cambridge are influenced by the community of this time and place.
Did you read any books or articles this summer that you would like to recommend?
I benefitted a lot this summer from the 2021 literature review by Huang Mei-er 黃美娥, “The Past and Future of Taiwan Literary Studies” 臺灣文學研究的回顧與展望, which lucidly traces the major trends and positions of the field from 1987 to the present. I would also recommend a text that was recommended to me: Betsy Wing’s translation of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997, University of Michigan Press), which fortifies my sense that poetry is indispensable — imagining and acting and understanding where other disciplines would fail — while helping me think through questions of regionality and peripherality, such as in the discussion of Saint-John Perse (b. 1887): “It was not where he uttered his first cry (Guadeloupe) that Saint-John Perse engendered his poetics but in the places of its distant origins, its ideal provenance. Poetry has its source in an idea, in a desire, not in the literal fact of birth” (37). Glissant’s comment on the black-sand beach of Martinique, moreover — high waves which “unleash their countless galaxies,” the “rhythmic rhetoric of a shore,” the “coconut palms … hailing with their foliage … the energy of the deep,” the errant silent man (121–127) — and his thoughts on “opacity” more generally, push me to introduce into my study of regional cultures a spiral or two of chaos.