The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China PDF Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Get Book Here

Book Description
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China PDF Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Get Book Here

Book Description
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China - from Dreamscapes to Theatricality

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China - from Dreamscapes to Theatricality PDF Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231187954
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature centered on the idea of emotion as space. Tracing how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China, this book is a major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture.

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China PDF Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231187947
Category : Chinese drama
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature centered on the idea of emotion as space. Tracing how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China, this book is a major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture.

Staging Personhood

Staging Personhood PDF Author: Guojun Wang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549571
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Get Book Here

Book Description
After toppling the Ming dynasty, the Qing conquerors forced Han Chinese males to adopt Manchu hairstyle and clothing. Yet China’s new rulers tolerated the use of traditional Chinese attire in performances, making theater one of the only areas of life where Han garments could still be seen and where Manchu rule could be contested. Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming–Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic works against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China. He reveals not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming but also the ways costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition. In case studies of theatrical texts and performances, Wang considers clothing and costumes as indices of changing ethnic and gender identities. He contends that theatrical costuming provided a productive way to reconnect bodies, clothes, and identities disrupted by political turmoil. Through careful attention to a variety of canonical and lesser-known plays, visual and performance records, and historical documents, Staging Personhood provides a pathbreaking perspective on the cultural dynamics of early Qing China.

The Promise and Peril of Things

The Promise and Peril of Things PDF Author: Wai-yee Li
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical contexts. How do things become meaningful? How do our connections with the world of things define us? In Ming and Qing China, inquiry into things and their contradictions flourished, and its depth and complexity belie the notion that material culture simply reflects status anxiety or class conflict. Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She explores how aesthetic claims and political power intersect, probes the objective and subjective dimensions of value, and questions what determines authenticity and aesthetic appeal. Li considers core oppositions—people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found—to tease out the ambiguities of material culture. With examples spanning the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, she shows how relations with things can both encode and resist social change, political crisis, and personal loss. The Promise and Peril of Things reconsiders major works such as The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Story of the Stone, Li Yu’s writings, and Wu Weiye’s poetry and drama, as well as a host of less familiar texts. It offers new insights into Ming and Qing literary and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as the intersections of material culture with literature, intellectual history, and art history.

Cultural Politics of Emotion

Cultural Politics of Emotion PDF Author: Sara Ahmed
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748691146
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
Emotions work to define who we are as well as shape what we do and this is no more powerfully at play than in the world of politics. Ahmed considers how emotions keep us invested in relationships of power, and also shows how this use of emotion could be crucial to areas such as feminist and queer politics. Debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, as well as reconciliation and reparation, are explored through topical case studies. In this book the difficult issues are confronted head on. The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with recent literature on emotions within gender studies, cultural studies, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Throughout the book, Ahmed develops a theory of how emotions work, and the effects they have on our day-to-day lives. New for this editionA substantial 15,000-word Afterword on 'Emotions and Their Objects' which provides an original contribution to the burgeoning field of affect studiesA revised BibliographyUpdated throughout.

Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge

Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge PDF Author: Mao Xiang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546866
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
Amid the turmoil of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in seventeenth-century China, some intellectuals sought refuge in romantic memories from what they perceived as cataclysmic events. This volume presents two memoirs by famous men of letters, Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent by Mao Xiang (1611–93) and Miscellaneous Records of Plank Bridge by Yu Huai (1616–96), that recall times spent with courtesans. They evoke the courtesan world in the final decades of the Ming dynasty and the aftermath of its collapse. Mao Xiang chronicles his relationship with the courtesan Dong Bai, who became his concubine two years before the Ming dynasty fell. His mournful remembrance of their life together, written shortly after her early death, includes harrowing descriptions of their wartime sufferings as well as idyllic depictions of romantic bliss. Yu Huai offers a group portrait of Nanjing courtesans, mixing personal memories with reported anecdotes. Writing fifty years after the fall of the Ming, he expresses a deep nostalgia for courtesan culture that bears the toll of individual loss and national calamity. Together, they shed light on the sensibilities of late Ming intellectuals: their recollections of refined pleasures and ruminations on the vagaries of memory coexist with political engagement and a belief in bearing witness. With an introduction and extensive annotations, Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge is a valuable source for the literature of remembrance, the representation of women, and the social role of intellectuals during a tumultuous period in Chinese history.

The Leisure Commons

The Leisure Commons PDF Author: Payal Arora
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317678923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
There is much excitement about Web 2.0 as an unprecedented, novel, community-building space for experiencing, producing, and consuming leisure, particularly through social network sites. What is needed is a perspective that is invested in neither a utopian or dystopian posture but sees historical continuity to this cyberleisure geography. This book investigates the digital public sphere by drawing parallels to another leisure space that shares its rhetoric of being open, democratic, and free for all: the urban park. It makes the case that the history and politics of public parks as an urban commons provides fresh insight into contemporary debates on corporatization, democratization and privatization of the digital commons. This book takes the reader on a metaphorical journey through multiple forms of public parks such as Protest Parks, Walled Gardens, Corporate Parks, Fantasy Parks, and Global Parks, addressing issues such as virtual activism, online privacy/surveillance, digital labor, branding, and globalization of digital networks. Ranging from the 19th century British factory garden to Tokyo Disneyland, this book offers numerous spatial metaphors to bring to life aspects of new media spaces. Readers looking for an interdisciplinary, historical and spatial approach to staid Web 2.0 discourses will undoubtedly benefit from this text.

A World Trimmed with Fur

A World Trimmed with Fur PDF Author: Jonathan Schlesinger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503600688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources. In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to "purification;" it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger's resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature.

The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China

The Renaissance of Confucianism in Contemporary China PDF Author: Ruiping Fan
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400715420
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new generation of Confucian scholars is coming of age. China is reawakening to the power and importance of its own culture. This volume provides a unique view of the emerging Confucian vision for China and the world in the 21st century. Unlike the Neo-Confucians sojourning in North America who recast Confucianism in terms of modern Western values, this new generation of Chinese scholars takes the authentic roots of Confucian thought seriously. This collection of essays offers the first critical exploration in English of the emerging Confucian, non-liberal, non-social-democratic, moral and political vision for China’s future. Inspired by the life and scholarship of Jiang Qing who has emerged as China's exemplar contemporary Confucian, this volume allows the English reader access to a moral and cultural vision that seeks to direct China’s political power, social governance, and moral life. For those working in Chinese studies, this collection provides the first access in English to major debates in China concerning a Confucian reconceptualization of governance, a critical Confucian assessment of feminism, Confucianism functioning again as a religion, and the possibility of a moral vision that can fill the cultural vacuum created by the collapse of Marxism.