Frog in a Well

Art/Asian American/Cultural/Museums/US-Japan/明治

Doing Ironic Irony Ironically: Play-Acting Satires of Orientalist Japonisme?

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Update at end
Evan Smith of “Big, Red, and Shiny” reports:

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has found itself mired in controversy over an in-gallery program responding to Claude Monet’s La Japonaise, a portrait of the artist’s wife Camille clad in a kimono and posing with a fan. Replicas of the red kimono are available during free hours on Wednesday evenings through July for visitors to try on in the gallery, providing the opportunity to “channel your inner Camille #Monet.”

In response to protests, the museum issued a flier which appears to have been written backwards:

Key Messages

The MFA celebrates art from all cultures and time periods. “Kimono Wednesdays” are an effor to engage visitors with Monet’s portrait and our current celebration of Japanese art and culture throughout the Museum with the exhibitions “Hokusai” and “in the Wake” and our recently reopened Tenshin-En Garden (this year marks the 125th Anniversary of the Museum’s Department of Asian Art).

These replica kimonos were made by a well-known kimono maker in Kyoto for a commision by Japanese broadcaster NHK for the travelling exhibition “Looking East,” which explored how the art and culture of Japan inspired 19th-century artists, like Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet. The kimonos were available to try on at Museums in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagoya.

The chance to try on a kimono (more accurately uchikake) — just like Camille Monet’s in La Japonaise — presents an opportunity to inform our visitors about “japonisme” and the influence of Japanese art and culture on Monet and other Impressionists. It provides an opportunity for visitors to consider how heavy the robe is; how it feels to wear it; what choices the artist made in creating the pose; and how he used paint to capture the effects of the textile.

Monet appreciated Japanes art and had built a personal collection of Japanese wood block prints and theatrical costumes. The kimono that Monet’s wife is wearing in the painting is presumably one from Monet’s own collection.

Isn’t this racist/orientalist?

We don’t think this is racist. We hope visitors come away with a better understanding of how Japanese art influenced the Impressionists like Monet. However, we respect everyone’s opinion and welcome dialogue about art and culture in the museum

I feel like this is cultural appropriation, and I think you should stop having these events.

The Museum is a place for dialogue and we appreciate your feedback. At this time we are planning to continue “Kimono Wednesdays” through the month of July, and hope it prompts many conversations about art and culture in Japan and the West.

What is Japonisme?

Beginning in the late 19th century, a craze for all things Japanese brought a radical shift in Western art that came to be known as japonisme. By the 1870s, japonisme had engulfed Paris and Monet’s La Japonaise is a commentary on the Parisian fad for all things Japanese. Camille’s blod wig was meant to emphasize her Western identity

Morgan Pitelka noted the echoes of the Lords of the Samurai parody “Lord, it’s the Samurai” (his review here), and some other good commentaries. There is also, being 2015, a tumblr blog collecting materials about and objecting to the exhibit, Stand Against Yellowface. (which would have saved me typing the above transcript, had I found it a half-hour earlier).

The museum’s position seems to me weak in any number of ways:

The relationship between Japanese woodblock prints and Impressionism is well-documented, easy to illustrate in a respectful fashion. There’s nothing necessary about using La Japonaise in this way
If the goal is to illustrate the physicality of a work, there are innumerable works that could get the “living picture” treatment. This seems clearly an attempt to capitalize on social media and stunt replications of famous artworks, but selection and execution count.
The museum clearly thinks that invoking Japanese sources exonerates it from racist implications. It does complicate the question somewhat, but it’s not at all clear to me that ‘authenticity’ excuses bad behavior.
Is it unequivocal that Monet’s work is a critique of Japonisme? I don’t know enough about the work to be sure, but there’s a huge range of satire: it can be ‘poking fun’ without seriously critiquing; it can delegitimize it’s target by exposing hypocrisy/cruelty/etc.; Monet’s work seems firmly in the former category, at best.
If Monet’s work is a critique of Japonisme, is replication of the scene in any coherent way an extension or replication of the intent?

Finally, and most interestingly, I think, the Museum’s invocation of ‘dialogue’ shows the institutional failure to truly understand their role and effect in the 21st century cultural environment. Museums are classic ‘top down’ educational institutions: they show, but rarely look around; they lecture, but rarely listen; they educate, but rarely learn. “Interactive” in a museum context means playing an educational game or getting to share an emotional response that gets seen for a few hours before the slate is wiped clean for new patrons. “Community engagement” means letting schoolchildren look at stuff, or having a quiet Thursday afternoon lecture for retirees and scholars. And once a work is ‘a classic’ it has to be treated lightly, justified, preserved as a valued attraction, not seriously critiqued.

It’s not going to work for much longer.

Update: MFA has modified the program to eliminate the playacting: We apologize for offending any visitors, and welcome everyone to participate in these programs on Wednesday evenings, when Museum admission is free. We look forward to continuing the Museum’s long-standing dialogue about the art, culture and influence of Japan.

1980s/globalization/India/Nationalism/World

The Right Turn

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Jonathan Dresner / 2 Comments

Basharat Peer interview with Pankaj Mishra on China and India is worth reading, and not that long, but I was particularly struck by this bit towards the end:

“India used to be the democratic exception and most other countries were authoritarian or dictatorships. Mr. Modi with his corporate chums is the greatest Indian exponent of capitalism with East Asian characteristics. I think one has to think of Mr. Modi along with Suharto, Lee Kwan Yew, and the CCP provincial bosses who then make it big in Beijing. These are all control freaks supported by the corporate and technocratic classes who prefer top-down solutions and rapid decision-making, and have contempt for anything that doesn’t directly advance their interests. So the rise of the middle class in Asia has assisted the growth of authoritarian populism rather than democracy.
…
The Chinese cannot but be wary of Mr. Modi and his over-the-top bonding with Shinzo Abe, the most aggressively nationalist leader Japan has known in years.”

That reminded me of a discussion on twitter in which I posited that East Asia as a whole was taking a fairly clear turn to the right, politically: more centralized authority, more nationalistic, more controls on journalism and limitations on freedom of speech, more militaristic, and more accepting of a neo-liberal economic model which includes defunding education and social welfare systems. At the time I didn’t include India in that discussion, but clearly that’s an error: Modi is making very similar moves to Abe, Park, and Xi, and is supported by a political and social movement that’s pretty easy to compare, I think, to the others.

I argued 11 years ago that Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Deng, Nakasone, et al, represented a generational shift towards nationalism and globalization in the 1980s; three decades later, after unprecedented technological and social changes, I think we may be seeing another generational convergence of neoliberal nationalist leaders, “authoritarian populists” as Mishra called them, on the world stage pushing us further down that path.

Books/Cultural/Environment/Food/Historiography

Food History Themes and Exceptions

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

Once is a fluke.
Twice is coincidence.
Three times is a conspiracy.

There’s a theme that runs through a great deal of food history writing, nearly all of it that I’ve read: more is better. Oftentimes it’s a subtle lack of alternatives, a kind of quiet whiggish narrative of increasing cultivation, intensification, crop improvement, industrialization and globalization, accompanied by (cause and effect are somewhat obscure in this model) rising populations and improving standards of living, culminating in overly prosperous fat people as a kind of natural progression. (I’m thinking most concretely about a text I assign, Andrew Smith’s Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in American Cuisine, but it’s not at all alone in this.)

Sometimes this has been problematized by histories that point out that all calories are not created equal and that food choices are not ‘all things being equal’ — Mintz, Sweetness and Power is the obvious reference here, with its critique of sugar as both the product and enabling food of industrial capitalism — but this seems to be a minority position among historians. Not among food writers, mind you, but food is a funny field in which ‘folk wisdom’ and mythic histories of modern declension are rife. It’s a commonplace to say that most of what we consider ‘traditional’ is the 19th century’s hazy memories of the 18th century, or the 20th’s imagined 19th, but food history is a field in which sentimentality runs up against hard fact.

There are histories, though, which take the progressive narrative as an explicit and defensible thesis, coming across as unsympathetic to environmental or traditional or nutritional critiques of modern foodways. I’ve read two histories that fall squarely into this category now: In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America by Maureen Ogle, is almost belligerent in its equation of expanded animal protein stocks with American character and power. I was expecting a more cultural approach, and perhaps a skeptical one, but the end result is more a traditional business history than anything else. (It’s possible to write business-oriented history that’s neither neoliberal nor neomarxist, as Jonathan Rees’s Refrigeration Nation shows) The other is Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History, and she has a piece in Jacobin (discussed here, among other places) which distills this element of her argument.

I have no quibble with Laudan’s critique of the ahistorical basis for fad diets and nostalgia: frankly, one of the really fun things about thinking about food history, is that it’s a fantastic entree (so to speak) into the world of social and cultural history, and the immensely contingent nature of contemporary life. Laudan’s book is thorough and unsentimental and interesting (and I’m assigning it next year) and while I’m not entirely convinced by the political/religious argument (which breaks down to a class argument under modernity, though without entirely admitting it), it’s thoughtful and thought-provoking. For the Asianists in the audience, I’ll just say that this comes closer than even most world history textbooks to a truly global history; it’s hard to avoid a Western emphasis in the modern age, but that’s because of the Western emphasis in the modern age; the balance and coverage is excellent.

But the article seems to have an excluded middle: It’s true that industrialized, intensified food production coupled with industrial transport and the modern cold chain has produced nutritional and cultural benefits; it’s also true that corporate decisions and capitalist imperatives have produced environmental and cultural and health costs that are not sustainable. It’s also true, and Laudan’s own work shows, that food cultures and habits change as political and cultural ideologies shift, and there’s no reason to think that our present foodways, as much fun as they are, represent a necessary future or even an inevitable present.

I guess I’m spoiled: one of the first historical works I read that took food seriously was Susan Hanley’s Everyday Things In Premodern Japan which thoroughly integrates food into the web of physical and social culture. Farris’s Japan to 1600 also integrates agriculture and environment and cuisine into a social history in thoughtful and complicated ways. Not all such attempts are successful but I thought that there would be more progress on this front by now.

Web Sites/Web Sites and Resources

Digital Sinology

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

Looking for something fun to read? Shuge.org has a whole mess of interesting old Chinese books, all totally free to download.

So if you want ethnography of minority groups (This is a pretty hot topic)

Military manuals (Like many of these this is a Qing text, although many of them are re-prints of earlier material)

Or just a pornographic fan (Most Qing dynasty porn seems to have come from Japan)

(Take that Randall Munroe!)

If you like these sorts of things, this site is for you. Most of this seems to come from the Harvard-Yenjing collection, and it is good to see them, willing or not, fighting the good fight to open up digital sources even to those not associated with a major university. While I enjoy the site a lot, it is a sad reminder of how digital sources are re-creating the intellectual divide that was eroded in my younger days by photocopies and Interlibrary loan. Today, again, if you are not part of the academic elite you are just a frog at the bottom of well, struggling to see all the things that others can see without any struggle at all. It is good to see someone democratizing knowledge.

Thanks to the FB group for the reference.

Anecdotes/Literature/Poetry/Translation

Li Bai and the whale

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

One of the books I will be using in class this Fall is Sanyan Stories by Feng Menglong. In class we will be using the much condensed version from University of Washington Press, but students will also have the option dipping into the full 3- volume edition for their projects.

Feng Menglong (1574-1646) was a late Ming folklorist, card sharp, classical scholar, frequenter of the pleasure quarters, civil-service examination failure and local bureaucrat. He is best known for his massive collection of vernacular stories which has been translated by Yang Shuhui and Yang Yunqin. He collected, edited and published three collections of vernacular tales that are both a pivotal part of the evolution of Chinese fiction and a lot of fun to read.

One of the stories that stuck me was “ ‘Li the Banished Immortal’ Writes in Drunkenness” from volume 2.

Li is of course Li Bai China’s most famous poet, and it is great to find a fuller version of some of the apocryphal stories about him. As one might expect for a poet so famous he ends up at court, and he will spend the whole story involved in political intrigues. As a famous poet he is someone the powerful want to be associated with although he, as a famous poet, tends to want to run off an be a hermit.

Court life does not really suit him, and as a famous teller of truth he used his poetry to let the emperor know that Consort Yang is sleeping with An Lushan. Consort Yang tries to get him dismissed from court, but as the emperor is a man who recognizes talent (one of the key things a ruler needs to do) he gave Li

“a gold badge on which he wrote, “By imperial order, Li Bai the Carefree Academician and Blithe-spirited Scholar (What novel official titles!), shall be paid, upon demand, five hundred strings of cash by the county and a thousand strings of cash by the prefecture to defray his wineshop bills. Any military or civilian official, soldier or commoner who shows him disrespect shall be punished for disobeying and imperial decree.””

Needless to say, giving Li Bai a coupon for unlimited free wine is like….well, giving Li Bai a coupon for unlimited free wine. (I’m not the master of metaphor here.) Despite the fact that he has nothing more important to do than drink and write, Li spends some time using his status to chastise overbearing local officials. He also spends some time trying to avoid being added to the court of an usurper and, of course, drinking a lot.

In the end he ascends to heaven on a whale. At first I thought this might be a kun 鯤, like in Zhuangzi 1.1.. A quick google search found me two pictures however.

I am partial to the second one.

Books/Gender/Literature/Translation

Zhuangzi’s brain

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I have been reading Wilt Idema The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun. The book is a translation of various versions of the story of Zhuangzi and the skull, ranging from the original text to Lu Xun. Idema has been collecting these stories for a long time, and this is the only English language book I know of that traces one set of stories through 5,000 years of Chinese literature. This is the perfect book if you want a tour of Chinese literature with Zhuangzi and Wilt Idema as your guides.

You can read the original story here. Originally it was about Zhuangzi having a conversation with a skull and getting a lecture on the pointlessness of most of the things humans worry about.

This story was of course re-worked many times. The skull grew into a skeleton, and the Quanzhen Daoists used pictures of it as a visual aid as they evangelized.

Skeleton, O skeleton, your face is oh so ugly.

All because in life you loved women and wine.

Cunningly smiling you took your fill of meats and furs.

So your blood and flesh gradually melted away.

Gradually wasted away—but still you continued to lust.

Lusting for riches, spending your semen you reaped no rewards.

Your desires were without limit but your life had its term.

And now today you have become this skeleton.

The story also eventually gained some add-on stories that became associated with it, one of which is the story of Fanning the Grave. This first appears in the Ming in Feng Menglong‘s collection of stories. Here Zhuangzi meets a woman who is fanning a grave mound, and finds out that she is hurrying to dry her husband’s grave so that she can re-marry. This of course is a naughty thing to want to do, but Zhuangzi uses his magic powers (he is more capable of magic stuff than he was in the oldest versions) to quickly dry the grave and takes the fan back to his wife. She reviles the widow and tears up the fan. Zhuangzi promptly dies, and as soon as he is safely in his coffin a handsome young prince shows up who had been hoping to study with the master. Zhuangzi’s wife falls in love/lust with him, but then the prince falls ill and it turns out that only the brain of a living or newly dead person can save him. The widow takes an ax and opens Zhuangzi’s coffin, only to have him sit up an announce that he is alive and that the prince and his servant are in fact Zhuangzi. His widow is so ashamed she hangs herself, and Zhuangzi bangs on a pot and sings a song about the importance of not getting attached to life.

Fanning the grave is sort of a disappointing add-on for a modern reader, since Zhuangzi is the only classical philosopher I can think of who even has a wife. Fanning the Grave is clearly based on this. In the original, when Zhuangzi is drumming on a pan and singing after his wife died Huizi upbraids him ‘You lived with her she raised your children, and you grew old together” (與人居長子，老身死，不哭亦足矣，又鼓盆而歌，不亦甚乎.) This is literally the only example of talking about affection between husband and wife that I can think of in a classical philosopher. To turn it into a misogynist story about the evils of women is kind of a bummer.

The Feng Menglong version, which Idema only summarizes, is actually more interesting than that. In the Ming version this is actually Zhuangzi’s third wife, (one died and one he divorces for an undisclosed misdemeanor) and she upbraids him for this. “Women of moral rectitude are superior to men.” Zuangzi himself comes off as more of a companionate marriage husband in the Ming version than you might think. The widow uses the prince’s servant as a go-between as she tries to arrange a match with the prince, and the servant (i.e. Zhuangzi) gets paralytically drunk after she charges him with arranging a match. Maybe he was actually disappointed by her behavior? Rather than just seeing it as a confirmation of the evil of women? After the whole thing happens he burns the house down and never marries again, and the event causes him to finally achieve the Dao as he leaves all of human existence behind. It not impossible to read this as a story of a love marriage gone wrong.

Leaving aside what I think of the Feng Menglong story, Idema gives us a great collection of texts that show late imperial ideas of filial piety. Fanning the Grave was a very popular story, and we get a Manchu version of it in a text for bannermen and a Precious Scroll that Daoists used not only to tell stories about the pointlessness of life, but also to rant about the importance of filial piety. This may seem an odd thing to put into a Daoist text, but here it is, from a planchette writing. This bit is describing to a wife how she is in fact the daughter of the family she has married into, and thus she should not be loyal to her uterine family. This is a common theme in lots of discussions of Chinese families, but this is one of the most undergraduate-friendly readings to use for this.

You have always been
The bride of the son
Of your parents-in-law
But were temporarily
Lodged at your mother’s place
To grow up into an adult woman,
And only after your marriage
Did you come home
To the place to which you belong:
Your parents-in-law
Actually are
The two parents that gave you life.
In offering tea
And presenting presents, (part of courtship ritual)
They incurred many expenditures;
In inviting matchmakers
And entertaining guests,
They undertook much hard work.
They love their son
And love his wife
Without any distinction in kind
Since they hope that you,
Husband and wife,
Will provide for them in old age.
So how is it possible
That a good lad,
Who originally was a filial son,
Will not care at all
For his father and mother
Once he has been married to you?
Even though you
May not sow dissension
Between flesh and blood with your words,
It will be because
He dotes on you
And so damages his ambition and energy.
You should therefore
Speak to your husband
And explain to him in clearest terms,
‘If my parents-in-law
Brought me here
To assist and support you, my master,
That was first of all
Because they wanted me
To help you in serving your parents,
So how can you,
Because of me,
Be remiss in feelings of filial piety?’
This is the way
In which women
Should try to speak to their husbands;
This is the way
To love your husband
And help him fulfill his filial duties.
How can you
Flaunt your power
And treat everyone without respect?
Eventually
You don’t pay
Any attention to your parents-in-law!
Any money
That their son
Will make, you will hide at your place
To buy clothes
And have food
While keeping that couple in the dark.
Concerned about appearances,
You are obsessed
By the clothes and jewels you’ll have,
So when you have cash,
You only make plans
For the profit of your own little family,
Or you have your mother
Or younger brother and sister
Lend the money out to gain interest,
Afraid that when your parents-in-law
Get their hands on it,
His brothers will all divide it evenly.
You say that it was you,
Your diligent spinning and weaving,
Together with your colorful embroidery But
who could know
That by hiding this money
You’re a witch that calls down disaster!
You are unwilling to lend
Your parents-in-law
A single yarn, half a grain of rice;
Among sisters-in-law
These trifling matters
Fill your eyes with a furious hatred.
Abusing your husband,
You’re ‘a chicken that crows at dawn,’
A woman who wants to be the boss,
And when all matters
Mostly go wrong,
It is all because of your meddling.
Just have a look
In the temple
At the hell for pulling out tongues:
The majority there
Are all women
Who suffer those atrocious tortures!
And then there are
Those foul-mouthed women
Who loudly commandeer their men,
Each day causing
Their parents-in-law
To have no moment of peaceful rest.
If her parents-in-law
Revile her but once,
She returns to them their curses tenfold;
If they beat her once,
She immediately threatens
To wet her pants, hanging from a rope!
This kind of person
Seeks her own
Punishments in the underworld courts,
And if she doesn’t die,
She definitely will be
Struck dead by thunder and lightning!
So I urge you,
Women in the inner apartments,
To listen to your parents and obey them

Idema does not get into all the movies that were made based on these stories in the 20^th century, but the book is still a wonderful tour of all the many things this set of stories has been used for.

Communism/Political/Web Sites

Confucianism Today

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

Taisu Zhang has an interesting piece on China File analyzing the recent Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu paper on ideology in China. Zhang is trying to figure out why Chinese leftists are embracing Confucius. By leftists in a Chinese context he is referring, as Pan and Xu do, to those Chinese who are in favor of

National unity
Party-state
Socialist state/statism
National security
Maoism
Chinese characteristics
State sovereignty
Patriotism
Anti-West
Welfare state*
More intervention
Public interest
Legitimacy of labor gains

The cultural set of ideas that go along with this are

Traditional values
Collectivism
Confucianism
Traditional wisdom
Thriftiness

Their opponents, the Liberals, are more likely to favor things like Western Values, Constitutional Democracy, and Free Markets.

Zhang finds the Leftist interest in Confucianism to be curious. Zhang points out that the Late Imperial Confucians who are the most obvious antecedents for the modern “Leftist” traditionalists were in favor of a strongly decentralized economic and political system, which does not seem to go along with their preferences. This is of course true, and he is quite correct in pointing out the weakness of the “old argument that Confucianism is inherently “pro-government” or “pro-authority,” and therefore naturally inclined to lean “left,” rather than “right,” on the current Chinese political spectrum.” This is true enough in a general sense. Late Imperial Confucians favored a decentralized system, but unlike modern internationalist neo-liberals / libertarians in China or elsewhere they certainly did not do so because they saw market relations as morally superior to everything else (or anything else.) I could be wrong about that of course, since it is not really my field, but I think the whole idea of trying to link Chinese poll respondents to a historically accurate and unitary idea of “Confucianism” is not the right way to go.

As an example, I can imagine a Western country with a political grouping that calls itself “Christian” on the grounds that they favor

-Massive public spending to improve the lot of the poor.
or
-National disarmament and pacifism.
or
-Strict regulation of the sexual behavior of citizens.
or
-Purging those of deviant beliefs from society.

Needless to say these don’t go together very well, but they can all call themselves “Christian.”

So what does “Confucianism” mean in China today, if we assume it is not always because of a strong attachment to the actual structures of historic Confucian states? What sort of Confucianism is Ah Q. Public, poll respondent, getting out of historical dramas on TV and that boxed set of the works of Zeng Guofan? I have no idea of course, but I do have at least one data point. I have been reviewing Jing Liu’s Understanding China Through Comics on this site, and having read that and seen every single historical drama ever aired in China (well, one or two of them anyway) I can tell you what type of person a Confucian is. They are the ones who speak truth to power. In Jing Liu’s books the heroes are usually “scholar-officials.” Hai Rui. Wang Anshi. Zeng Guofan. When China is controlled by the corrupt and the self-serving (which seems to be pretty often) they are the ones who stand up for the common people. Jing Liu is not a scholar, of course, but he is trying to write a series of books that explain the lessons of Chinese history to his kids and everyone else. That type of history is best done through heroes and villains (or praise and blame) and I suspect that if you were to do a thorough and open survey of every person in China about what “Confucianism” meant to them you would get more stories about heroic rebels, virtuous remonstrators and brave patriots than you would detailed analysis of Late Qing ideas about decentralized power. In other words, Confucianism may be more of a cultural term than a political one.

Sadly, we can’t do any follow up questions and find out what Chinese might mean by agreeing that “The Eight Diagrams in the Book of Changes explain many things well” since the Political Compass site that generated the data was blocked by the Great Firewall in March of 2015

Historiography/Literature/Tang

Wang Wei and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I have been reading Sarah M. Allen’s Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China. One of the main texts she is looking at is the Taiping Guangji (太平广记), a massive collection of …stuff… that was compiled in the Song Dynasty. I call it stuff because both Allen and Lu Xun saw this type of writing (小说) as, sort of, the beginning of Chinese fiction. The full collection, which has never been translated, consists of thousands of short bits of prose writing, some of which can be called gossip, some hagiography some tales of the weird, some historical anecdotes or, maybe, fiction. I liked the chapter on history “Filling the Gaps: Tales On and Against History.” Allen has some stuff on the “gossipy” stories that give a somewhat different take than you get in the Standard Histories. I call them “gossipy” because they really can’t be understood unless you already know who they are talking about and what the context is, which made even more difficult by the fact that it is impossible to date most of these.

I was taken by the account of the young Wang Wei. Although he was later to become a famously serious Buddhist, poet and landscape painter, as a youngster he first came to the attention of Prince Qi, and of the “eldest Princess” as a pipa player. Although the dates don’t really work out, there is speculation that this “eldest Princess” may be the Taiping Princess. She was the daughter of Empress Wu (yes, that Empress Wu) and among other things recommended lovers to her mom. Why claim that it was, perhaps, the Taiping Princess who was Wang’s patron? Well, in part because it makes a strong contrast with his later image. In the story (I think it is this one ) Wang was running around in a rather outré brocade coat(锦绣衣服，鲜华奇异) and playing music that make everyone dance (非一人不舞也). So something like this

This does not fit well with his later image, (although to be fair he seems to have become more serious later in life) and making his patron the Taiping Princess makes it even worse. Any powerful female in a Chinese historical account is likely to be suspected of outrageous sexual behavior, and this is triply true for someone like the Taiping Princess. It seems sort of implicit to me that the story is suggesting that Wang Wei slept his way to the top, or at the very least came to the attention of an older woman with a colorful reputation.

Why does this matter? Is this just a bit of nasty (and false) gossip spread by his enemies? A valuable (and true) account of how political and artistic patronage worked? Allen is primarily interested in connecting these tales to fiction,and especially in how these narratives became more fixed and became something to collect and edit rather than re-write.

As she suggests in her conclusion, however, they can also be connected to historical writing. An angle for further research is.

a more thorough exploration of the world of gossip of the eighth and ninth centuries…and its relationship with the formal historical record. The writers and historians of middle period China evidently saw anecdotal sources and formal history as existing on a continuum. p.274

Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern scientific history recounts that he was enamoured with the books of Sir Walter Scott as a young man. It was only later that he found out that they were not “really” history, but fiction, and he dedicated his life to drawing a sharp line between the two. Allen’s chapter spends a lot of time on stories of the Tang founding where there is a clear distinction between the Standard Histories and accounts she is reading, specifically on the issue of whether Gaozu or Taizong was the “real” founder of the Tang. This is an interesting enough question, but it seems to be mostly based on the distinction between official and unofficial histories. They are both the same type of stories, only one has official sanction and the other does not. The strong point of the book is how it examines all the things that xiaoshuo could be in the Tang, both agreeing with and going beyond Lu Xun. Unfortunately for us historians there is not as much history in here there could be. I don’t think that saying that “anecdotal sources and formal history exist[ed] on a continuum” is the best way of putting it. Just by calling them ‘sources’ you are putting them in a different category than ‘formal history.’ What is a better way of explaining it? Stay tuned for her next book! While you are waiting for the next book, however, this one is well worth reading.

Books/visual culture

Understanding China

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 2 Comments

Understanding China through Comics Volume 4 is out! As I have reviewed the other volumes, I was sent a free copy of this one.

This volume deals with the Ming and Qing, and like earlier volumes it is both good and interesting.

The purpose of the volumes is to explain all the things that need to be explained in Chinese history. The series is explicitly aimed at the author’s kids (check out the cover) and it aims to tell the story of China, and give the reader some background on all the things they have or should have heard of. The overall theme is the rise of China and the creation of a middle-class society.

The Ming and Qing will clearly be a tricky period for a project like this. Somewhere in this period China is going to have to start to decline. How to deal with this? How also to deal with the foreigners? He does the latter better than the former.

When explaining history it is good to pick some representative figures and focus on them. The first is the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang. He is really China’s only peasant emperor, and thus he get a lot of play. We get a whole page on how he was born in Fengyang county, which years later would be where peasants spontaneously created the responsibility system making this the starting point of China’s drive to a market economy. So just as Zhu liberated China from the Mongols, so to the people of Fengyang liberated China from Maoism, (Not that he puts it that way.)

Zhu himself is presented as both a bold warrior and a man of the people.

This is somewhat odd, given that Volume Three was quite critical of rulers who ignored or oppressed scholar-officials, and lord knows Zhu Yuanzhang did that. Instead, his dislike for the traditional elite is portrayed as concern for the poor and he is praised for his willingness to stick it to the rich. Unfortunately this paragon died from the exhausting work of trying to keep China’s corrupt officials under control.

The problem with the Ming, ultimately, was that unlike the Song, it was a passive dynasty that was not “active at the forefront of development” thus “resulting in a natural economy dominated by small-scale agriculture.”

(Liu is getting to be more visual in his presentation, but there are still clunker panels like this.) This does not square well with a lot of recent work on the Ming, which sees it as a period of rapid commercial expansion. Liu talks a lot about the fiscal problems of the Late Ming. The chief problem is lack of an effective tax system and, again, inability to control the wealthy and corrupt. This seems to be a common theme of pretty much all Chinese history for him.

We do get a couple more heroes. Wang Yangming, the Confucian philosopher and inspirer of 3 of the 4 great classical novels. (Nice twofer there.) We also get Hai Rui, the famous honest official.

Hai

Hui Rui is worth mentioning partially because he throws Ming corruption into clear relief and also because he will become important later. In the 20th century when a play was made about him “politicians used it to attack each other. This was a prelude to the Cultural Revolution.”

The Qing is portrayed quite favorably. The Manchus adopted to Chinese culture (no multi-ethnic empire here) and China grew rapidly.

qing

A lot of the economic growth stuff that might have been better placed back in the Ming, like New World crops, ends up in the Qing.

America

He has a lot of cool technological and social change stuff in here, but he always seems to imply that the changes were driven by the policy choices of a developmental state. This of course was not true. While there was plenty of economic progress in the Ming and Qing they did not have modern governments trying to encourage such things any more than the Han or the Song did.

The foreigners are of course problematic, and he deals with them well.

Summer

We do of course get the opium trade and the unequal treaties, although I can imagine much more anti-foreign treatments of this. Liu has the problem of explaining what went wrong with China. It was certainly not that the Qing was hopelessly corrupt and backward. Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang are both treated positively.

Zeng

Nor is it that the foreigners are all evil creatures of great evil evilness. The Japanese are treated pretty respectfully, and the hero of modernization is Phillo Norton McGiffin, the American naval officer who worked for China and fought at the battle of the Yalu.

Here he is in the book

Philo

Here he is before and after the battle.

Philo2

Some comic artists like Art Speigelman will occasionally drop a photograph into the text, and this would be a good choice for that.

The real cause of China’s defeat, according the McGiffin was their lack of learning the modern knowledge he wanted to teach them and their outright cowardice in battle. The Battle of the Yalu has some of the most dramatic visuals of the whole series, and I wonder if Liu has been looking at the many Japanese prints of the battle.

Scanned-image-40-0

Liu is rather critical of the upper class Chinese who served as officers in the Navy but failed to defend China or to do anything but worry about themselves. The elite takes another beating in the Boxer uprising. The Boxers are an interesting case for Liu. You could use them to show how annoying missionaries are, but Liu treats missionaries pretty well in this book. (They are after all, spreading foreign knowledge, which is good.) You could emphasize the revolutionary potential of the aroused Chinese peasantry, or the suffering of ordinary Chinese at the hands of the foreign armies, but neither of those are really his style. Instead he blames the whole thing on members of the traditional elite who are trying to stir up trouble by riling up the naive peasants.

Boxers

It will be interesting to see what a volume 5 will be like, if there is one. Liu seems to see Chinese history as primarily a matter of the elite. When they are good, China is good. When their strong tendency to be greedy and self-serving takes over things go wrong. I’m not sure how well this will work for the Twentieth century, but it will be interesting to see.

Books/Ming/Qing/Teaching

Teaching Late Imperial Chinese cultural history

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 3 Comments

Update

So I think I have figured this one out, with a little help from my friends, both here and via e-mail. I will be using Tim Brook’s Troubled Empire to start with.

Tim Brook himself is teaching this class next semester. He is using his own book, and then the next book in the series (Rowe) and that’s it for books. I like starting with a textbook (or having a short textbook) since students are used to them and when done well they explain what needs to be explained. I don’t like building a class too much around textbooks, however, since I have never had a student have much of an intellectual experience from reading one. Maybe Troubled Empire will break the string.

I decided to use Sanyan Stories next.

This is a short version of the much larger three volume collection of Ming dynasty short stories collected by Feng Menglong. The whole massive three volumes of his collection have also been published, but that is a bit much for undergrads. Sanyan is a bit more than they will want to pay for a few stories, but it does have some good ones. It will also be the center of the research project. I like having them do some research, and I think it will work better if you give them a place to start with. There are more than enough stories in this short volume (and the larger three volumes in the library) to get a perfectly acceptable undergraduate paper on “The Ming exam system as seen by Feng Menglong” or “Commerce and Money in Ming China: The evidence from popular fiction”. Or, if they want, they can just use one of these stories as a jumping off point and do a more traditional research paper (with a fair number of other sources) on “Popular cults in Late Imperial Chinese Cities” or “Wives and Concubines in Chinese Law and Custom” Or whatever.

The final book is Empire and Identity in Guizhou

I kept this one because I want at least one monograph. When I teach the intro methods course I always stress that most upper-level history classes will have at least one monogram (young historians must learn the names for different types of books) for them to read, and so they need to learn how to read and analyze a monolith. This is a good monoplane for this class because it is Qing, it deals with the frontier and identity, it has a rebellion in it and it is a good book.

There will be a bunch of other things as well, but this is the core of the class.

__________________

I will be teaching a class in the Fall that I have never done before.

HIST 433 Bandits and Poets: The Cultural and Social History of Late Imperial China

Prerequisites: Sophomore standing and 3 cr of college history

Examines the cultural and social history of Late Imperial China. Includes elite attempts at creating an orderly Confucian society and also how less powerful groups altered of challenged this vision. Discusses the role of commercialization and commercial culture and China as an Early Modern society.

That was the lame description I came up with when I split Modern China into two parts, with the first part (Late Imperial China, ending about 1830) being more social and cultural and the second part being more political and revolutionary.

So now I need to come up with some readings. There is no textbook. I will recommend Brook and Rowe from the History of Imperial China series to anyone who wants to read them. I tend to avoid textbooks as much as I can, since with our students if you want to read anything you need specific assignments that they will get credit for to encourage them. You can do this with quizzes and stuff, and sometimes I do, but if I am going to encourage them through 200+ pages of reading I want something more than a textbook.

Plus, I really like having them read real books. Dr. Rosen told me many years ago that he had forgotten the names of most of his teachers, and certainly all the essay questions he had answered, but he remembered all the real books he had actually read even 40 years later. The students are going to get bunch of articles and primary source stuff (see this for how I tend to structure these things) and do a research project, so I am thinking three books is about the limit, if not way, way, way over it. My current candidates are….

Yu, Li. The Carnal Prayer Mat. Translated by Patrick Hanan. 1st edition. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.

I think this has to be the first book. A nice modern translation of a book that gives you all sorts of things about commercial culture and family and gender. Also sex.

Songling, Pu, and John Minford. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Yes, like the above it is also an elite text. But it is easy to dip into and brings up all sorts of cool things. If I got rid of it what else would I use?

Weinstein, Jodi. Empire and Identity in Guizhou: Local Resistance to Qing Expansion. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.

I want at least one historical monograph, and this one seems an obvious option. It deals with a lot more Qing and lower class issues. Plus all the cool stuff about frontiers and the Qing as a multi-ethnic empire. What would be better to replace it, especially if you took out Pu Songling?

As I look at this I am thinking of cutting it down to two books, with Carnal Prayer Mat and the Guizhou book staying. A nice bridge book between them would be good…

Any tips or random ruminations are welcome. If you had to teach Late Imperial history around three books, what would they be?

Teaching

How to teach classical Chinese thought?

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 9 Comments

This is more ruminations than anything important, but it is a topic I have been thinking about lately. I usually have to teach Waring States Chinese philosophy in two classes, HIST 206 History of East Asia and HIST 332 History of Early China. Obviously in one I spend more time on it than in the other. In both I usually start with Sima Qian’s story of Sunzi and the concubines, in part because it is a good story, and in part because it is a good way to introduce a lot of themes, like reducing being an aristocrat to a text that can be studied, the shi as wondering consultants, and the idea that with study and mentor-ship anyone can become anything. Even concubines can become warriors. I think I will keep this as the beginning. (Plus, I need Sunzi in there somewhere. Lot of them have heard of him. )

I have usually gone from there to the Confucians, then to the Daoists. In Early China I do more with Mo-zi, the context of all this and the nature of the Classics and the nature of texts and schools etc. etc.. Then I go on to the Legalists, who of course lead into Qin pretty well.

What I have started to wonder is if maybe I would be better off going from Sunzi right to the Legalists. This semester, and many semesters in the past, I find students grasping things better when I talk about ideas that make more sense in a modern context, and the Legalists definitely fit there. Han Fei is easier to grasp for someone from a Hobbseian tradition than the School of the Tillers. To the extent they do “naturally” grasp Confucius or Zhuangzi it is as wisdom literature that they can apply to their own life. That’s fine of course, but I am starting to think that if I want them to approach these texts in historical context (and they are history classes) the Legalists are the best school to start with after Sunzi. The political philosophy makes more sense, Han Fei writes in a less cryptic way that Confucius. (In Early China I can spend more time on the development of rhetoric, naturally.) What to you think? Ignore chronology and go from Sunzi to Han Fei? Or learn how to teach Analects better? I find Analects really hard to do with them, since they can’t do it on their own. Selections from Han Fei they can read outside class and come in with…something at least. Analects not so much.

P.S. I have had luck in the past using Sarah Allen’s The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue to get them into early philosophy. The problem I have with this is that it obviously would not work in History of East Asia and that tends to pull me into more philosophy than I might want in History of Early China.

Military/Sino-Japanese Wars/War

Bombing makes China modern

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

One thing that made China truly modern in 1932 and then again in 1937 was that its cities were being bombed. Here is a cartoon by Sapajou, the White Russian cartoonist who was the face of Shanghai in the 1930’s, if you were a foreigner.

The guardian of the “Temple of 10,000 tortures” seems to be mystified by the threat of aerial bombardment, and well he should, since the bombings of European cities in World War One paled besides the bombings of Shanghai, the world’s first modern city. (Assuming that being bombed from the air makes you a modern city.)

Although foreigners were reluctant to take Shanghai bombings seriously, given that both the bombers and the bombed were Asians, the bombings of Shanghai in 1932 and 1937 fit in well with the developing international understanding of war. Inter-war thinkers believed that “the bomber would always get through” i.e. airplanes were the first version of nuclear missiles: they could not be defended against, and would inevitably destroy whichever target the authorities aimed them at. In fact bombing was far more risky and above all more random than they thought.

Paul Fussell discusses how even those subjected to bombing assumed that the targets were chosen rationally, since even assuming that one was being bombed by evil people was preferable to realizing that war was mostly random violence with only the most minimal connection to any possible goal.

Shanghai in 1937 was (or should have been) one of the last gasps of the old innocence where some could assume that the random violence of bombing was due to incompetence of the bombers rather than the nature of modern war. Here is Stillwell, a septic about the power of aviation, describing the early bombings.

“An imposing list of useless and stupid bombings by both sides on targets which by no stretch of the imagination could be said to have any military value. These targets include, for the Japanese, university buildings, a department store, a mission hospital, a railroad station crowded with refugees, and the car of the British Ambassador. About the only thing lacking is an orphan asylum. The Chinese have to their credit a hotel, and American merchant ship, and a street crowd in a densely populated section of the International Settlement; except for the ‘President Hoover’ these cases can probably be laid to the inexperience and nervousness of amateurs rather than to deliberate intention, and the case of the ‘Hoover’ the the unwarranted assumption that she was a Japanese troop transport. ”

Stillwell, report 9588 August 21-Sept 1 1937

In fact, the inability of the Chinese and Japanese pilots to hit what they aimed at was not due to their being Asians, but to the fact that everyone would end up finding that hard to do.

A nice quote if you are interested in the evolution of ideas about war and bombing, or Western ideas about Asians.

1945-1950/visual culture

Manhua Journey to the West

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

I have mentioned Nick Stember before, but now he is doing a full translation of Zhang Guangyu’s manhua version of Journey to the West. This is worth looking into in part because it influences the visual style of so many later versions and also because it was originally done in 1945 and is in part a parody of the corruption and incompetence of Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime government. Chiang’s government was of course known for its hyperinflation, as if money grew on trees

And also for the brutal work that had to be done to defend the realm.

Nick is not done with the translation yet, but you should check it out.

Literature/Translation

Literary Detectives (SO-27) OR The Strange Affair of the Flesh of the Bosom

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 0 Comment

If you have not read David Lodge’s Small World you should. It is a fine comic academic novel. At one point our hero is in a bar with a bunch of drunken Japanese translators, who are regaling him with Japanese titles of Shakespeare translations, and he then has to guess which Shakespeare play is intended. I had always half wondered where Lodge got all these Japanese titles from, and now, thanks to Google, I know that they come from Shakespeare in Japan: An Historical Survey by Toyoda Minoru

It is a nice read if you are interested in how foreign ideas seep into a culture. Literature was obviously important to the Japanese, and Shakespeare was important to the English, so it is not surprising that they met up. It is interesting, however, how the two cultures manage to speak at cross purposes. Poetry has traditionally had a much higher status than drama in Japan, so it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s poetic output had a much higher profile that you might expect. The plays were at first translated with fairly…creative…titles that reflect what Japanese readers might find interesting in them. Think you can match them up? Some may be used more than once.

The Remains of the Sharpness of the Sword of Freedom

The Strange Affair of the Flesh of the Bosom

The Mirror of the Hero’s Life

Flowers in the Mirror and the Moon in the Water

A Lawsuit about a Pledge of Human Flesh

The Ghost

All for Money

A Tangled Love Story with a Happy Ending

Culture/Food/Pigs

History of Pigs

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Alan Baumler / 1 Comment

As we seem to be the internet center for Chinese history and pigs I thought I would call to your attention Pigs, Pork, and Ham: The Practice of Pig-Farming and the Consumption of Pork in Ming-Qing China, by Chung-Hao Kuo

Dissertation Reviews does a nice job of explaining how interesting this dissertation is. Pork of course has a history, and until the Tang lamb was much more common in China than pork. By the Ming production and connoisseurship started to evolve, with Jinhua ham as a key example. ” The trajectory of Jinhua ham thus mirrored that of pork in general: depreciation from an item of medicinal value to rare delicacy and, finally, to commonplace dish (for most varieties).”

There have been number of recent works on food in Chinese history, and it is sort of odd that there was not more sooner, given how important food is to Chinese ideas about regional identity. I would guess that gathering sources would be a trick, but it is glad to see people getting beyond that.