WLL Lecture Series: New Books in East Asian Literature 11/17
BU World Languages & Literatures Lecture Series
New Books in East Asian Literature
The theme for 2020-2021:
Kinship, Sexuality, and Emotions
Orthodox Passions: Rewriting the History of Emotions in Late-Imperial China
Professor Maram Epstein, University of Oregon
Tuesday, November 17, from 4 pm to 5:30 pm (EST) via Zoom
Please register by clicking the link below
https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrde2prjIvG9wBkSQnhbJ0wwnicUB0PiZv
The basic goal of Orthodox Passions: Narrating Filial Love during the High Qing (Harvard University East Asian Series, 2019) is to decenter romantic love as the normative translation of qing 情 in histories of Chinese emotion. By drawing on a wide range of sources that go beyond the usual cult of qing canon, I seek to challenge the May Fourth paradigm that continues to frame filial piety as a repressive ritual obligation that undergirded the despotic system of government and social order in imperial China. May Fourth attempts to produce an enlightenment modernity created the useful fiction of a monolithic feudal tradition that needed to be discarded, and filial piety was just one of the many traditional values that was declared to have no place in the modern. This view has been so dominant that for most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries late-imperial formations of filial piety have received little critical attention. Orthodox Passions reframes the current understanding of filial piety by arguing that it should be understood not as an externally imposed set of ritual practices but as a deeply interiorized emotion that functioned similarly to love in the European west in articulating a self with affective and ethical agency.
In addition to giving an overview of the book and its interdisciplinary methodology, I will discuss its implications for analyzing the embrace of the modern concept of “love” 愛 in China’s early 20th century.
Sponsors: BU Center for the Humanities, Department of World Languages & Literatures, and BU Center for the Study of Asia
