“Postmodern” Space in the Heart of Beijing: From the National Theater to the Palace Museum

Abstract

I would like to draw on Wai Chee Dimock's notion of “deep time” as “denationalized space” to situate the present study in the context of postmodernism and globalization (“Time” 760). Dimock argues that “literary space and time are conditional and elastic; their distances can vary, can lengthen or contract, depending on who is reading and what is being read” (“Planet” 174) and that “the continuum of historical life does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any spatial locale” or “to any temporal segment”: “periodization, in this sense, is no more than a fiction” (“Time” 757). Within this constellation of ideas, the “postmodern” space in the heart of Beijing stretches back to ancient China as much as it reaches forward to contemporary thought. In this sense, “postmodern” space, as a quotation (of other quoted spaces), is both postmodern and antipost-modern, postmodern in the sense that the past has collapsed into the present and antipostmodern in the sense that postmodernism is as postmodern as it is ancient, so that it loses its foothold in contemporaneity and its need for periodization. In the pages that follow, I will discuss the “postmodern” space manifested in the National Theater of China and the Palace Museum (also known as the Forbidden City) in terms of a blurred spatial dichotomy of inside and outside.

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