"China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject"--these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. But what does this language of essential difference accomplish? The essays in this book are an attempt to cut short the recitation of differences and to answer this question. In six interpretive studies of China, the author examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study. Among other subjects, these essays offer a historical and historiographical introduction to the problem of comparison and deal with translation, religious proselytization, semiotics, linguistics, cultural bilingualism, writing systems, the career of postmodernism in China, and the role of China as an imaginary model for postmodernity in the West. Against the reigning simplifications, these essays seek to restore the interpretation of China to the complexity and impurity of the historical situations in which it is always caught. The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.
The Princess Nun tells the story of Bunchi (1619–1697), daughter of Emperor Go-Mizunoo and founder of Enshōji. Bunchi advocated strict adherence to monastic precepts while devoting herself to the posthumous welfare of her family. As the first full-length biographical study of a premodern Japanese nun, this book incorporates issues of gender and social status into its discussion of Bunchi’s ascetic practice and religious reforms to rewrite the history of Buddhist reform and Tokugawa religion. Gina Cogan’s approach moves beyond the dichotomy of oppression and liberation that dogs the study of non-Western and premodern women to show how Bunchi’s aristocratic status enabled her to carry out reforms despite her gender, while simultaneously acknowledging how that same status contributed to their conservative nature. Cogan’s analysis of how Bunchi used her prestigious position to further her goals places the book in conversation with other works on powerful religious women, like Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila. Through its illumination of the relationship between the court and the shogunate and its analysis of the practice of courtly Buddhism from a female perspective, this study brings historical depth and fresh theoretical insight into the role of gender and class in early Edo Buddhism.
Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies in imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern monsters—doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations—bodily metaphors that became ubiquitous in the literary landscape from the Meiji era (1868–1912) up until the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937. Such monsters have often been understood as representations of the premodern past or of “stigmatized others”—figures subversive to national ideologies. Miri Nakamura contends instead that these monsters were products of modernity, informed by the newly imported scientific discourses on the body, and that they can be read as being complicit in the ideologies of the empire, for they are uncanny bodies that ignite a sense of terror by blurring the binary of “normal” and “abnormal” that modern sciences like eugenics and psychology created. Reading these literary bodies against the historical rise of the Japanese empire and its colonial wars in Asia, Nakamura argues that they must be understood in relation to the most “monstrous” body of all in modern Japan: the carefully constructed image of the empire itself.
This book examines the period leading up to the Hong Kong handover in 1997 - the 'countdown of time', and by using iconic cultural symbols such as the countdown clock, the Hong Kong Museum exhibitions and cultural heritage sites, argues that China has undergone a transition to neoliberal state, in part through its reunification with Hong Kong. The problem of synchronization with the world, a Chinese phrase that epitomizes China's engagement with modern capitalism since the first Opium War, was characterized throughout the 20th century as a 'humiliation', 'weakness', 'tragedy' and 'disaster', with China in the role of the victim of capitalist globalization. During the reunification with Hong Kong, these conventional expressions were replaced by new ones such as 'de-humiliation', 'return', 'self-esteem' and 'revival'. Hai Ren gives an ethnographic and historical analysis of this cultural and political transformation of China's globalization experience by looking closely at public history practices in mainland China and Hong Kong and how the reconfiguration of everyday life and cultural norms led to the development of this neoliberal China. As a book which straddles Chinese and Hong Kong, history, politics, cultural heritage and museum studies more generally, it can be regarded as a work of cultural political economy which will appeal to students and scholars of all of the above.
Our work life is filled with emotions. How we feel on the job, what we say we feel, and what feelings we display—all these are important aspects of organizational behavior and workplace culture. Rather than focusing on the psychology of personal emotions at work, however, this study concentrates on emotions as role requirements, on workplace emotions that combine the private with the public, the personal with the social, and the authentic with the masked. In this cross-cultural study of "emotion management," the author argues that even though the goals of normative control in factories, offices, and shops may be similar across cultures, organizational structure and the surrounding culture affect how that control is discussed and conceived.
An encounter between Frankes philosophy of the unsayable and Eastern apophatic wisdom in the domains of poetry, thought, and culture. In Apophatic Paths from Europe to China, William Franke brings his original philosophy of the unsayable, previously developed from Western sources such as ancient Neoplatonism, medieval mysticism, and postmodern negative theology, into dialogue with Eastern traditions of thought. In particular, he compares the Daoist Way of Chinese wisdom with Western apophatic thought that likewise pivots on recognizing the nonexistent, the unthinkable, and the unsayable. Leveraging François Julliens exegesis of the Chinese classics challenge to rethink the very basis of life and consciousness, Franke proposes negative theology as an analogue to the Chinese model of thought, which has long been recognized for its special attunement to silence at the limits of language. Crucial to Frankes agenda is the endeavor to discern and renew the claim of universality, rethought and reconfigured within the predicament of philosophy today considered specifically as a cultural or, more exactly, intercultural predicament. Franke rethinks East-West philosophical traditions to show the subcurrents in Western thought that correspond to the centrality of apophasis in Chinese and Asian thought, whether it be the empty transcendent or the Way as indicator or allusion. He shows how apophatic thought confounds the transcendent-immanent duality and reworks it into an inseparability that can be consequential for our philosophical understanding of a natural universality. Prasenjit Duara, author of The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future The broad coverage of William Frankes book is impressive as it discusses many issues in philosophy, religion, and literature, but at the same time it also has a clear focus and a special apophatic approach to the various issues in the humanities. It is innovative, creative, and makes an important contribution to East-West comparative studies and cross-cultural understanding. Highly recommended. Zhang Longxi, author of From Comparison to World Literature Up to now François Julliens conception of Chinese thought has not had a full representation in English. This book responds to that gap and opens a dialogue with other traditions of apophasis. Haun Saussy, author of Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China By highlighting Western phenomena that are comparable to the Chinese, mainly in the apophatic tradition, Franke succeeds in exposing the biases and blind spots in Julliens as well as in Halls and Amess respective treatment of Chinese philosophy. This book will stand as an important resource for the future of scholarly debates in these areas. Karl-Heinz Pohl, editor of Chinese Thought in a Global Context: A Dialogue Between Chinese and Western Philosophical Approaches
"In Seeing Stars, Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes, revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena, the products of both particular historical moments and broader discourses of celebrity. Drawing from media coverage, biographies, literary works, athletes’ memoirs, bureaucratic memoranda, interviews, and films, Frost argues that the largely unquestioned mass of information about sports stars not only reflects, but also shapes society and body culture. He examines the lives and times of star athletes—including sumo grand champion Hitachiyama, female Olympic medalist Hitomi Kinue, legendary pitcher Sawamura Eiji, and world champion boxer Gushiken Yokoō—demonstrating how representations of such sports stars mediated Japan’s emergence into the putatively universal realm of sports, unsettled orthodox notions of gender, facilitated wartime mobilization of physically fit men and women, and masked lingering inequalities in postwar Japanese society. As the first critical examination of the history of sports celebrity outside a Euro-American context, this book also sheds new light on the transnational forces at play in the production and impact of celebrity images and dispels misconceptions that sports stars in the non-West are mere imitations of their Western counterparts."
"The demise of state-owned enterprises, the transformation of collectives into shareholding cooperatives, and the creation of investment opportunities through stock markets indicate China’s movement from a socialist, state-controlled economy toward a socialist market economy. Yet, contrary to high expectations that China’s new enterprises will become like corporations in capitalist countries, management often remains under the control of the onetime bureaucrats who ran the socialist enterprises.The concepts, definitions, and interpretations of property rights, corporate structures, and business practices in contemporary China have historical, institutional, and cultural roots. In tracing the development under founder Zhang Jian (1853–1926) and his successors of the Dasheng Cotton Mill in Nantong into a business group encompassing, among other concerns, cotton, flour, and oil mills, land development companies, and shipping firms, the author documents the growth of regional enterprises as local business empires from the 1890s until the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949. She focuses on the legal and managerial evolution of limited-liability firms in China, particularly issues of control and accountability; the introduction and management of industrial work in the countryside; and the integration and interdependency of local, national, and international markets in Republican China."
"The Analects (Lunyu) is one of the most influential texts in human history. As a putative record of Confucius’s (551–479 B.C.E.) teachings and a foundational text in scriptural Confucianism, this classic was instrumental in shaping intellectual traditions in China and East Asia until the early twentieth century. But no premodern reader read only the text of the Analects itself. Rather, the Analects was embedded in a web of interpretation that mediated its meaning. Modern interpreters of the Analects only rarely acknowledge this legacy of two thousand years of commentaries. How well do we understand prominent or key commentaries from this tradition? How often do we read such commentaries as we might read the text on which they comment? Many commentaries do more than simply comment on a text. Not only do they shape the reading of the text, but passages of text serve as pretexts for the commentator to develop and expound his own body of thought. This book attempts to redress our neglect of commentaries by analyzing four key works dating from the late second century to the mid-nineteenth century (a period substantially contemporaneous with the rise and decline of scriptural Confucianism): the commentaries of He Yan (ca. 190–249); Huang Kan (488–545); Zhu Xi (1130–1200); and Liu Baonan (1791–1855) and Liu Gongmian (1821–1880)."
"The Uyghurs, a Turkic group, account for half the population of the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. This ethnography presents a thick description of life in the Uyghur suburbs of Yining, a city near the border with Kazakhstan, and situates that account in a broader examination of Uyghur culture. Its four sections explore topics ranging from family life to market trading, from informal socializing to forms of religious devotion. Uniting these topics are an emphasis on the role folklore and personal narrative play in helping individuals situate themselves in and create communities and social groups, and a focus on how men’s concerns to advance themselves in an agonistic world of status competition shape social life in Uyghur communities. The narrative is framed around the terms identity, community, and masculinity. As the author shows, Yining’s Uyghurs express a set of individual and collective identities organized around place, gender, family relations, friendships, occupation, and religious practice. In virtually every aspect of their daily lives, individuals and families are drawn into dense and overlapping networks of social relationships, united by a shared engagement with the place of men’s status competition within daily life in the community."
