This introduction frames a special two-part issue consisting of eleven essays and a visual dossier, which collectively investigate the conceptual, political, historical, and cultural relationships between China and the human. By juxtaposing China and the human as two discrete categories, … Continue reading “Introduction: China and the Human”
Issue: Issue 109 China and the Human, Part I
China and the Human, Part I
Homo Dissensum Significans, or The Perils of Taking a Stand in China
Gloria DaviesThis essay begins with the proposition that to engage with the idea of the human in Chinese is to encounter, at some point or other, a rhetorical disposition to benevolence, understood as the Confucian virtue ren. The moral affects of this … Continue reading “Homo Dissensum Significans, or The Perils of Taking a Stand in China”
The Animal Other: China's Barbarians and Their Renaming in the Twentieth Century
Magnus FiskesjöUntil the mid-twentieth century, the written Chinese names for China’s “barbarian” others included components that purposefully classified such people with animals. This long-lived official definition of ethnic others as subhuman was accomplished by using a range of standard orthographic building … Continue reading “The Animal Other: China's Barbarians and Their Renaming in the Twentieth Century”
Cosmologies, Globalization, and Their Humans
Eric HayotThis essay argues that the work of Chinese film director Jia Zhangke constitutes an important commentary on the relationship between globalization, humanness, and China. It begins with a discussion of Jia’s relationship to international art-house and documentary realism, focusing on … Continue reading “Cosmologies, Globalization, and Their Humans”
Worlding Oneness: Daoism, Heidegger, and Possibilities for Treating the Human
Mei ZhanThis essay argues for the “reworlding” of Daoist “oneness” by making it visible, thinkable, and doable as an immanent analytic. With a focus on dynamic articulations of oneness, especially how the idea “heaven and human are one” animates and is … Continue reading “Worlding Oneness: Daoism, Heidegger, and Possibilities for Treating the Human”
I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human
Dai JinhuaThis article reads a Chinese blockbuster film, City of Life and Death (dir. Lu Chuan, 2009), as an allegory of China and the human for contemporary China. This movie illustrates the historical entanglement and tension of China and the human in twentieth-century … Continue reading “I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human”