Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The idea that cosmopolitanism does not negate the nation but acts as the nation's supplement underwrites Haiyan Lee's own rather cosmopolitan and critical reflections on Chinese literature and popular culture. Working at the intersection of literature and political theory, Lee demonstrates the fruitfulness of that site for literary and political thinking." -- Bonnie Honig * Brown University *
"In her masterful study of China's evolving cultures, Haiyan Lee examines encounters with ghosts and apparitions, animals, women (especially unattached women), maids and tenants, bourgeois intellectuals exiled to rural areas, class enemies, peasant migrants, and foreigners . . . Lee's detailed close readings bring alive the theoretical ideas concerning the promises and disappointments of living as strangers . . . Anyone concerned about the fate of the humanities will appreciate her thoughtful defence of visual and written culture as a collective endeavour in which readers and viewers participate in "public reasoning" grounded in empathy for the face of other." -- Sabina Knight *
The China Quarterly *
"
The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination clarifies an alternative genealogy for a resolutely global other-directed moral imagination. Through sensitive analyses of stranger-figures (spirits, animals, women, foreigners) in modern Chinese imaginative literature, Haiyan Lee exhumes variant contexts for xenophobia or 'uncivil society' produced by the breakdown, as she argues, of associational life in Chinese political culture. Lee's passionate and urgent defense of a dissident and reparative 'stranger sociality' marks a significant breakthrough in transnational literary and critical studies." -- Leela Gandhi * University of Chicago *
"
The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination is a fascinating inquiry into modern Chinese social and cultural subjectivity in relation to its dialectic other—'the stranger.' It examines how the stranger—in gender, class, racial, ideological, transcendental, and even animalistic sense—has created a space where debates and desires concerning national identity, citizenry, and ethical institution are brought into play. This is a brilliant work." -- David Der-wei Wang * Harvard University *
