MCLC: The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination

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The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my book The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination by Stanford University Press. This book investigates the modern Chinese moral imagination through the figure of the stranger. Strangers are outsiders who come into our communities and stay with us, bringing alien manners and values with them and never quite renouncing their mobility. They are a threat to a community’s peace and order, but they also promise change and renewal. In modern China, the stranger has been a ubiquitous figure that tests the moral limits of a society known for the primacy of consanguinity and familiarity. This book employs the concepts of kinship sociality and stranger sociality to map out the moral dilemmas and responses set in motion by the coming of strangers. It surveys the Chinese moral landscape by following the itineraries of several groups of strangers—foreigners in China, peasant migrants in cities, bourgeois intellectuals in exile, disenfranchised class enemies, unattached women, animals on the edge of human society, and apparitions in a secular age—across a range of narrative and visual genres from the late imperial period to the new millennium. It makes a twofold argument: that the pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China has roots in both the Confucian and socialist pasts, and that imaginative literature is the best training ground for coping with the quintessential condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely thrown together.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Talking to Strangers 
Fear and Hope in China Strangers: A Group Biography Lei Feng vs. Levinas: A Morality Play Strangers: A Reading Guide
Part I. Alien Kind
CH1. The Benighted and the Enchanted
The Chinese Sphinx and the Prevaricating Intellectual The Subaltern Goddess and the Crusading Party The Homespun Priest and the Pilgrimaging Ethnographer The Taiwanese Ghost and the Revenant Daytrippers
CH2. Animals Are Us
Anthropomorphism and Zoomorphism The Bare Life of Animals Animal Totemism Why Animals?
Part II. Fictive Kin
CH3. The Power and Pollution of the Stranger Woman
Fu Caiyun/Sai Jinhua: the Courtesan Who Saves the Empire Zhenzhen: the Spy Who Refuses to Go Home Nixi/Mrs. Samson: the Widow Who Never Was a Wife Li Guoxiang: the Cadre Who Terrorizes a Town From Parvenu to Pariah
CH4. The Country and the City
Civility, Governmentality, and the Making of Ruralites and Urbanites To Be a Gentleman Maids, Tenants, and the Comedies of Stranger Sociality
Part III. Friends and Foes
CH5. The Enemy Within Class Racism and the Logic of Displacement The Water Dungeon and Socialist Horror The Rent Collection Courtyard and the Law of History The Maoist Political
CH6. Foreign Devils “Foreign Devils” and the Unmaking of Tianxia Cosmopolitan Peasants in Devils on the Doorstep Cosmopolitan Nannies in Nannies for Foreigners To Be a Foreigner          
Conclusion: Literature and the Veil of Ignorance
The Writerly and the Readerly What Good is (Chinese) Literature?
For more information, go to http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=22841 Haiyan Lee Associate Professor East Asian Languages & Cultures Comparative Literature Stanford University http://web.stanford.edu/dept/asianlang/cgi-bin/people/bios/lee_haiyan.php
Haiyan Lee <haiyan at stanford.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 12, 2014
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