Seeks to introduce an ‘affective turn’ to the study of China’s political modernization process.
Affective Betrayal uses ‘affect’ as an analytical category to explicate the fragility and fragmentation of Chinese political modernity. In so doing, the book uncovers some of the unresolved moral and philosophical obstacles China encountered in the past, as well as the cultural predicament the country faces at present.
At the turn of the twentieth century, China’s leading reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) presented modern political knowledge in musical and visual representational formats that were designed to stimulate readers’ bodily senses. By expanding the reception of textual knowledge from ‘reading’ to ‘listening’ and ‘visualizing experiences, ‘ Liang generated an epistemic shift, and perhaps an all-inclusive internal intellectual, philosophical, and moral transition, alongside China’s modern political reform. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in China’s incipient democratic movement, Affective Betrayal examines how his attempts to conjoin Confucian morality and liberal democracy expose hidden anxieties as well as inherent contradictions between these two systems of thought. These conflicts, besides disrupting the stability of China’s burgeoning modern political order, explain why the import of modern concepts led to China’s continued political impasse, rather than rationality and progress, after the 1911 revolution.
Зміст
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Affective Turn in the Study of Chinese Political Modernity
1. Repairing the Human, Restoring Their Heartmind
2. Reclaiming Qing Philology to Recover the Innate Moral Order
3. To Know Is to Act: The Realization of Cosmic-Moral-Political Oneness in Action
4. Dissolution of Modern Political Languages in the Cinematic Spectacle
5. Musicality —Representing the Rhythm of Political Revolution and the Tenor of Its Moral Discontent
Postscript: Let Us Be Taken by Affect, and to Be Taken Away and Afar
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Про автора
Jean Tsui is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the College of Staten Island, the City University of New York.