Chinese Christian Studies and Anglophone Literary Studies

Abstract

The author responds to the most salient matters in Chin Kenpa’s paper in this journal issue on the Chinese biography Wuchanzhe Yesu 無產者耶穌 (Jesus, the Proletarian) by W.T. Chu (朱維之, Zhu Weizhi), with special emphasis on the interrelated matters of linguistic context, uneven academic cultural resources, and agency within publishing networks, in turn outlining inroads for deepening Anglophone–Chinese literary critical conversations through a convergence of biblical studies, comparative literature, and World Literature.

The Gospel According to Marxism: Zhu Weizhi and the Making of Jesus the Proletarian (1950)

“…The global literary antecedents provided a model for Zhu's Marxist presentation of Jesus. As mentioned before, Jesus the Proletarian can be read in this regard as part of world literature (Duran 2018). Indeed, Jesus the Proletarian should not be considered a completely original biography; it bears the stamps of global socialist movements (as one aspect of modernity) and their literary reflections in the first half of the twentieth century.…”