Organizer: Patricia A. Sieber, Ohio State University
Chair: Jingyuan Zhang, Georgetown University
Discussant: James L. Hevia, North Carolina A & T State University
The panel explores the multiple relationships between the codification of vernacular literature, the formation of subject identities, and the socio-political imaginary in 16th through 18th century China. Specifically, the papers examine two interrelated areas of cultural tension: the redefinition of writing and reading resulting from the canonization of vernacular texts and the ideological meanings attached to empire, ethnicity and gender. Thus the papers address the impact of the textual, material and ideological technologies of print culture on the imaginary mapping of the empire and on the creation of early modern subject identities. Sieber argues that Ming readers of Yuan songs reconstituted the connection between ethnicity, political service and literary production during the Yuan in order to create an autonomous author. Ding demonstrates that the print revolution between the 16th and 17th-century opened a cultural space for the interpolation of new, privatized readers. Besio discusses how late Ming recensions of a Yuan play about Wang Zhaojun engaged with Ming discourses on empire, gender and cultural identity. Epstein explores how the mid-Qing novel YesouPuyan constituted socio-cultural alterities differently from narratives of nationhood. Together the papers will provide a new body of scholarship to enrich studies of literary, cultural, and political formation in China and in other historical contexts.
A Few Good Men: Jin Shengtan's Primer for Male Heirs to the Empire
Naifei Ding, National Central University, Chung-li, Taiwan
Ming Wanli (1573-1620) was a period of great flux and change. Book printing was at an all time high, and cities in the Jiangnan region were filled with all kinds of marvelous objects, among which were quantities of drama and fiction that had never before appeared on the market in such quantity and diversity. Some of the leading intellectuals of this age not only read, but wrote, collected, edited, commentated and even printed works of fiction. What was at stake in such cultural practices? How did editorial practices combining the annotative forms of classical exegesis and the contemporary eight-legged essay come to be redeployed for new editions of vernacular fiction directed at an urban reading public? To what extent did such practices allow for disaffected literati to fictionally articulate a personal and historical sense of alienated subjectivity vis-à-vis imperial politics?
This paper will read and compare Li Zhi (1527-1602) and Jin Shengtan (1608-1661) on the Shuihu Zhuan. As a vernacular narrative of rebels at the borders of an "earlier" Imperial moment of crisis (Sung dynasty), interpretations of the SHZ in the Ming Wanli are always already political. And it is precisely as a political lesson highly relevant to their historical moment that both Li Zhi and Jin Shengtan advocated this fiction as a must-read. Li Zhi's preface, and Jin Shengtan's three prefaces, negotiate significantly different cultural and political positions for reading and writing. If Li Zhi's perspective is still determined by a centralizing Imperial presence, Jin Shengtan's reading displaces a politically centripetal perspective with an ethico-aesthetics of narration. Jin's views are directed toward youth and posterity; not the ruler nor officials of the state. In speaking to posterity, Jin envisions his role as that of transmitter, guardian, tutor and author, all at once, and the future as one whose center and borders are not so much geographic, nor primarily political, but in the heart. I suggest that it is precisely in the interstitial spaces between "unorthodox" discursive practices (editing and prefacing fiction), a commodifiable and therefore embattled intellectual entitlement, and the Jiangnan region's urban market for books (rather than an imperial and official readership in the northern capital), that is produced an early modern privatized fictional writing and reading subject-whose empire lies within.
Demarcating the Han: Cultural Identity and Canon Formation in Early Modern Zaju
Drama
Kimberly Besio, Colby College
Since its earliest appearance in the Han dynastic history (Han Shu), the various permutations of the Wang Zhaojun legend have reflected shifting demarcations between 'Chineseness' and 'alterity.' This paper will examine the complex conjunction of Wang Zhaojun texts and discourses on history, gender, and culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In historiography the definition and status of 'barbarian' dynasties was hotly debated. In didactic literature, women's bodies became the grounds for the inscription of cultural identity and resistance against foreign invaders. In the literary arena, plays of the previous Yuan dynasty were selected and incorporated into the literary canon amidst much discussion about the proper relation between literature, empire and subjects. In particular, the alienness of the Yuan figured significantly in critical writings on drama.
Amidst these various contestations the zaju play "Autumn in the Han Palace," perhaps the most celebrated rendition of the Wang Zhaojun legend, came to occupy a prominent place in the emergent canon of Yuan drama. Departing from earlier versions the play narrates the story of Wang's betrothal to a barbarian chief from the perspective of the Han emperor, and culminates in her suicide precisely at the Han Border. In contrast to established scholarly opinion I will not assume that such innovations are simply signs of the play's Yuan provenance (i.e., Han resistance to Mongolian rulers). Instead I propose that the numerous late Ming recensions of the play become most meaningful in their resonance with contemporary discourse on empire, gender and cultural identity.
Embodiments of Cultural China: Sex and Race in the Qing Novel Yesou Puyan
Maram Epstein, University of Oregon
The densely populated landscape through which the Confucian hero Wen Suchen passes in the late eighteenth-century novel Yesou Puyan provides a rich site in which to explore issues of identity formation in a traditional Chinese novel. The worldview represented in the 154-chapter text, no matter how idiosyncratically that of the author, reflects a vision of China as an expansive cultural center whose power radiates out as far as Europe.
Unlike modern nationalist discourses where normative majority identity is constructed in opposition to an exoticized Other, the Confucian ideal, embodied in the hypervirile protagonist, is as positively denaturalized as the heterodox "others" are demonized. The characterizations in Yesou Puyan vary widely, but curiously, the greatest aberrations from the ideal of self-containment exist within China's political borders, while the sinicized foreigners serve to reflect the Middle Kingdom's cultural supremacy. Thus "Chineseness" is an inclusive identity based on acculturation to orthodox ideals rather than political or racial categories.
One central issue this paper addresses is the degree to which various markers of identity, such as sex, race/ethnicity (including Manchu and foreign) and social status, intersect with presumed ability to embody "Chineseness." This paper will contribute to the mapping of a history of how various ethnic and sexed categories were conceptualized and manipulated in premodern China. It will also provide a better basis for analyzing the disjunctures and continuities in subject formation in twentieth-century political and cultural China.