Rethinking the Body in Modern China: Nation, Modernity, and Transnational Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel examines the production and circulation of knowledge of the human body in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Whereas scholars have argued that material practice and lived experience of and around the body contribute to the substantialization of abstractions such as the nation and modernity, it is notable that the epistemic knowing of the body can simultaneously shape, and be shaped by, the nation and modernity. Drawing upon the history of gender, medicine, science, and law, each paper on the panel examines a specific way of knowing the body in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China in relation to China’s struggles for modernity and national identity: the gendered body redefined through Western psychology; the labored body discovered as a metaphor of national subjectivity; the human corpse examined for international rivalry; and the medical device analogized to a body organ. These changing modes of knowing were connected not only with China’s societal, intellectual, and political environment, but also with transnational networks of knowledge. These papers thus probe into the transnational links that respectively articulated the accommodation of Western medicine, generated a shared image of labored body that channeled China and other nations, revalidated Chinese traditional knowledge in a multinational confrontation, and invoked the imagination of modernity that affirmed the dichotomy between China and the West. Grappling with the dialectical relationships between nationalism and transnationalism, these papers underline the significance of the knowledge of the body, as it connected nation and individual and embedded China within the global context.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Luwei Yang, Washington University in St. Louis

Chair

• Xinzhong Yu, Nankai University

Individual Presentations

• Zangzao or Hysteria? Disease of the “New Women” in Late Qing and Early Republican China - Xueqian Zhang, HKIHSS, The University of Hong Kong

• Life and Death Underground: Miners’ Body, Working Space, and the National Subjectivity of China - Xi Ma, The University of Melbourne

• Law, Empire and Chinese Traditional Forensic Knowledge: A Case Study of Nagasaki Qing Navy Incident - Zhiqiang Shi, The University of Tokyo

• “Man in the Iron Lung:" Medical Landscape and Metaphorical Body in Early Republican China - Luwei Yang, Washington University in St. Louis

Discussant

• Xinzhong Yu, Nankai University