This paper challenges the use of the term “emerging” as a description of the “new” literatures because it implies that these literatures must follow a prescribed course. It also proposes the term “emergent” as an alternative way of looking at the so-called “emerging” literatures. The author first introduced the term “Emergent Literature” at a conference on “Emerging Literatures” at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1986 as a result of his discomfort at the manner in which the term “emerging literatures” was being used at that conference. Borrowed from evolutionary biology, the French term translates into English as both emerging and emergent literature. Unlike the term “emerging,” which belongs to the discourse of economics, “emergent” refers to the appearance of unforeseeable features in an organism’s evolutionary path. In literature it involves the refunctionalization of existing signs and symbols to adapt them to the new realities in which they are now called upon to operate. Further, it focuses on the emergence of new semantic functions and relations, and how we may identify them in literary texts. In other words, the word “emergent” not only means exactly the opposite of the word “emerging” but it also constitutes a sharper lens for observing the new semantic functions than the latter.

I shall examine the representation of “fat” bodies at the close of the 19th and 20th centuries, my major focus being on the late nineteenth century in Germany and England. I shall use the figure of the “fat detective” to examine the shift in the meaning of “thought” in both the popular fiction and high science of the day. The role of “brain mythologies” in constructing the image of “thinking” is also a question in our contemporary culture. How do fat detectives think?

This article identifies and examines a cultural phenomenon which dwells within the liminal fissures of apocalyptic discourses: “libidinal millenarianism.” This force is at once diachronic, rhizomatic and mimetic, in that it constitutes an historical constant which is nevertheless always in flux; a “red thread” which effects new generations in a viral fashion, each era witness to a different strain. I argue that the erotically articulated apocalypse is such a paradigmatic concept in Western eschatological thought that when one talks of “libidinal millenarianism” one is not discussing a specific form of millenarianism but rather its fundamental structure. It is according to such a libidinal economy that History itself demands a climax. Beginning with the case of the Heaven's Gate mass-suicide, I focus on the legacy which informs the “popular secular apocalyptic” texts of today—whether it be found in magazines, on the Internet, in cinemas or on dance—floors. With reference to Derrida’s exegesis of the apocalyptic tone, as well as Baudrillard's observations on the asymptotic trajectory of history, “After the Orgy” examines why the twentieth century in the West has swung between the two poles of anticipation and anticlimax. This article comes to the conclusion that contemporary millenial tension is inseparable from the technology through which it regenerates, and is indistinguishable from the libidinous cathexis which surges through its circuits. Technology is thus both the apotheosis of Apollonian achievement and a Trojan vector for Dionysian proliferation. In emphasizing an everpresent “psychology of belatedness” (along with the inevitable historical hangover accompanying the dawn of a new century), I conclude that Pan is the goat in the machine, living—like us—in the miraculous political space between the (always-almost) apocalypse and the (always-after) orgy.

I wouid like to explore the emergence and evolution of a new time consciousness in the late Qing period which provided the ground for Chinese modernity and made it possible for the “imagined community” of a new nation. This new sense of time was enunciated by intellectuals like Liang Qichao but found its audience in popular and material culture. It was measured by the use of clocks and new calendars (coupled with the old) and a illustrated in print culture, including fiction (novels and stories with variety of narratorial voices) and poetry (especially the “zhuzhici”). I would like to put theory in a richly nuanced cultural context so as to hopefully shed some new light on this timely subject as we all approach a new millenium.

This paper will take the recent international chic of the Chinoiserie fashion as a point of departure to explore the fabrication of identity and desire at the end of the twentieth century. This fashion trend can be read socio-politically in light of the historic transition of Hong Kong sovereignty from Britain to the Mainland China on 1 July, 1997. It can also be examined psychically as a nostalgic lamentation for the lost empire. As a dynamic imbrication of the political and the sexual, it thus turns out to be an overdetermined site/sight of cultural ambivalence. Therefore, situating at the intersection of fashion theory and postcolonial studies, this paper will be divided into three parts to explore how China as a sign is de-signed in the contemporary Chinoiserie fashion. Part I traces the theoretical aporia of the surface model vs. the depth model in contemporary fashion studies by foregrounding respectively the depoliticized and dehistoricized tendency of the former and the pitfall of implied cultural essentialism of the latter. Part II takes the British fashion designer John Galliano, currently the head designer for the house of Christian Dior, as our major example to untangle the complexities of the Chinoiserie fashion in light of gay subculture and drag aesthetics. Part III attempts to further mix Homi K. Bhabha’s “colonial fetishism” and Judith Butler's “gender melancholia’ in a wish to theorize a dis-oriented, post-Orientalist transvestism to map out the multiple cross-cultural and cross-gender fabrications of China.

Shyam Selvadurai, in Funny Boy, and Timothy Mo, in The Redundancy of Courage, break new ground in the portrayal of a coming of age novel by choosing gay protagonists to tell their own story. While there are stark differences between the two—Selvadurai's is much younger and naive, while Mo's is worldlywise and a bit effete—the two books are important examples of authors finding a new (and challenging) agent to demonstrate that alterity has a voice in the building of nations in a postcolonial age that cannot ignore cultural migration in the processes of globalization.