MCLC: The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination review

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The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination review
Please disregard my earlier posting of this review. Somehow the first paragraph of the review got lopped off. MCLC and MCLC Resource Center are pleased to announce publication of Jonathan Stalling's review of The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (Stanford 2014), by Haiyan Lee. The review appears below, but is best read online at:
http://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/stalling/
My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, MCLC literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.
Kirk Denton, editor
The Stranger and 
the Chinese Moral Imagination
By Haiyan Lee
Reviewed by Jonathan C. Stalling
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2016)
In the introduction to her Strangers and the Chinese Moral Imagination, Haiyan Lee lays out an ambitious theoretical framework for investigating the border zones of “self and other” in Chinese literature, a figure she calls the “stranger.” Lee’s definition of the stranger follows Georg Simmel’s notion of “the wanderer who comes today and stays tomorrow—the potential wanderer, so to speak, who although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going” (10). The “stranger” for Lee opens up an ethical discussion in Chinese literature of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and ideology and treats a wide variety of literary and cultural texts. Those texts range from literature to television, public exhibitions, and film where the lines between self and other become legible in the figures of ghosts, animals, women, domestic servants, sent-down youth, racialized class enemies, migrant workers, and, of course, foreigners. Lee uses these encounters to chart the historical, evolving relationship between what she calls Confucian “kinship sociality” and “stranger sociality,” an evolution the author sees as essential for developing a robust civil society in China.
To underscore the importance of developing a stronger civil society in China, Lee begins the book with examples of moral breakdown. She notes “two consecutive hit-and-run incidents in a narrow market street that left a toddler girl named Yueyue lying in a pool of blood, crushed, inert, and ignored by over a dozen passers-by.” She relays a gut-wrenching synopsis of Blind Shaft, a film about unsuspecting migrant workers killed for their life insurance payouts. She discusses public signs admonishing travelers “not to talk to strangers,” and these episodes set the stage for Lee’s primary notion that the moral failings of the public sphere “have roots in both the Confucian tradition of kinship sociology and the modern state management of stranger sociality” (2). In the introduction to her Strangers and the Chinese Moral Imagination, Haiyan Lee lays out an ambitious theoretical framework for investigating the border zones of “self and other” in Chinese literature, a figure she calls the “stranger.” Lee’s definition of the stranger follows Georg Simmel’s notion of “the wanderer who comes today and stays tomorrow—the potential wanderer, so to speak, who although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going” (10). The “stranger” for Lee opens up an ethical discussion in Chinese literature of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and ideology and treats a wide variety of literary and cultural texts. Those texts range from literature to television, public exhibitions, and film where the lines between self and other become legible in the figures of ghosts, animals, women, domestic servants, sent-down youth, racialized class enemies, migrant workers, and, of course, foreigners. Lee uses these encounters to chart the historical, evolving relationship between what she calls Confucian “kinship sociality” and “stranger sociality,” an evolution the author sees as essential for developing a robust civil society in China. (more…)
by denton.2 at osu.edu on May 16, 2016
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