Abstract
This article focuses on American author Agnes Smedley's creative non-fiction writings on China, seeking to recover her as an important transnational figure in light of an uneven reputation. For while Smedley is known and read in China, she is virtually forgotten in the United States. To reassert her relevance, and to balance her reputation, I employ the 1933 work Chinese Destinies as a case study to discuss Smedley's interest in everyday life as a site of socio-political analysis, a mode of inquiry that anticipates later methodologies in the social sciences. I begin by establishing how Chinese Destinies maintains a surprising focus on everyday life, despite the wartime setting. Emphasising her background as a novelist, I then explore how Smedley is able to thematise everyday life in two different ways: first as a site of trauma, and then as a space of resistance. In this way, I argue, her work has historiographic implications, and I go on to situate her engagement with everyday life within a broader debate about historical agency and causality. As part of my conclusion, I speculate as to why Smedley's creative brand of literary non-fiction is not as recognised as similar work by her contemporaries.