MCLC: Making Sense of Chinese Senses--cfp

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Making Sense of Chinese Senses–cfp
CFP: Making Sense of Chinese Senses: Representations of Perceptions in Classical, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Culture
I would like to organize a panel for the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies. Are you or any of your students or colleagues interested in joining me?
The representation of the Chinese body has been the subject of many recent and less recent studies. Scholars such as Angela Zito, Tani Barlow, Judith Faquhar, Eva Kit Wah Man, Ari Larissa Heinrich have focused on several distinct aspects: aesthetics, ethics, politics, sexuality, genre, biopolitics. An alternative way to come to terms with the body is to question the ways in which the body is simultaneously inextricably intertwined with the inner and the outer world of the self. For instance, modern and contemporary philosophers (Merleau-Ponty, Jean Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, and John Searle, among others) have analyzed different bodily perceptions to ponder on the relationship between self and the world. In traditional Chinese culture, instead, qing 情 was considered to be the fundamental link between the inner (内) and the outer (外) sphere. […].  As Maram Epstein has observed in Competing Discourses, [q]ing is extremely difficult to translate because of the way it was historicized […]. [It may be divided into] four main discursive groupings:
Physiological: the body of emotions with which the individual responds to his or her environment as in modern ganqing 感情, “emotion,” which is often reduced to the single emotion of romantic love.
Spiritual: the true and the real inner spirit, always positive, contrasted to external artificiality.
Phenomenological: a morally neutral usage to describe discrete and unique phenomena in contrast to the universal and unchanging Truths (li 理) as in the vernacular shiqing 事情, “affairs,” “matters,” or qingkuang 情况, “conditions”.
Aesthetic always positive, a true aesthetic sensibility, disposition, or intellectual interest, as in the vernacular qingqu “interest,” “appeal” (63-65).
None of these four groupings explicitly refers to bodily perceptions. It was Lu Xun’s vision of the slide that portrayed a decapitation scene that brought about a revolutionary change in Chinese literature. “Seeing” became then the “privileged sense” to redefine the relations between the self and the outer world as well as the foundation of the creation of the subject’s consciousness. Unsurprisingly, studies that focus either on visuality (Rey’Chow’s Primitive Passions and Carlos Rojas’ The Naked Gaze) or on trauma (Michael Berry’s A History of Pain, David Wang’s The Monster That Is History), albeit in radically different ways and with completely different aims,  describe the act of “seeing” as intrinsically linked either to psychoanalytical self-awareness or subjectivity.  Nevertheless it is impossible to overlook the fact that the primacy of vision as well as the modern legacy of the classical notion of qing  (represented by the so called Beijing school (京派)  was challenged in the 1930s by the  School of the new-sensationists (新感觉派) that made perceptions primary and independent objects of representation. Needless to say, from 1950s to the end of the 1980s, with the gradual displacement of the individual with the collective body, representations of individual bodily perceptions were extremely rare. It was Li Zehou 李泽厚 in his Four Lectures on Aesthetics  (美学四讲)  published in 2001 who underscored the pivotal role on individual bodily senses and sensory organs in the construction of a post-socialist aesthetic discourse. Reading contemporary Chinese literature (late-born generation of writers’ narrative, Mo Yan’s and Yan Lianke’s groundbreaking novels)  cannot but bring us to reconsider the body not only in terms of “embodied consciousness”--a kind of consciousness determined less by epistemology and hermeneutics than by perception and cognition ( which, as neuroscientists have amply demonstrated are both intrinsically related to sensory organs)--but also as a biopolitical subject. In other words, contemporary Chinese literature is neither willing to ignore the consequences of the birth of the individual self in post-socialist China nor to forsake its traditional social mission.
It is also impossible to neglect the centrality of the body in both visual art, as Silvia Fok has convincingly demonstrated in her Life and Death: Art and the Body in Contemporary China, and photography, as it is clear in Ren Hang’s 任航 masterpieces.  Yet as Ren Hang’s short life and premature death suggest, exposing, representing the “nakedness of the body” is still very risky and problematic.
Some of the questions that may be addressed are:
Are perceptions related to genre?
How do representations of perceptions differ in different media?
How do representations of perceptions differ in different genres (poetry vs narrative etc.)?
How did representations of perceptions evolved throughout time?
How do representations of perceptions relate to culture?
Are representations of perceptions culturally specific?
How do biopolitical discourses relate to representations of perceptions?
Melinda Pirazzoli (melinda.pirazzoli2 at unibo.it)
Adjunct Professor of Chinese Literature
University of Bologna
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 17, 2017
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center
To stop receiving these emails, click here.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20170617/e21c3206/attachment-0001.html>