Affective Betrayal: Mind, Music, and Embodied Action in Late Qing China (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781438498782)

Affective Betrayal uses "affect" as an analytical category to explicate the fragility and fragmentation of Chinese political modernity. In so doing, the book uncovers some of the unresolved moral and philosophical obstacles China encountered in the past, as well as the cultural predicament the country faces at present.

At the turn of the twentieth century, China's leading reformer Liang Qichao (1873-1929) presented modern political knowledge in musical and visual representational formats that were designed to stimulate readers' bodily senses. By expanding the reception of textual knowledge from "reading" to "listening" and "visualizing experiences," Liang generated an epistemic shift, and perhaps an all-inclusive internal intellectual, philosophical, and moral transition, alongside China's modern political reform. By tracing the marginalized academic and philosophical positions Liang sought to restore in China's incipient democratic movement, Affective Betrayal examines how his attempts to conjoin Confucian morality and liberal democracy expose hidden anxieties as well as inherent contradictions between these two systems of thought. These conflicts, besides disrupting the stability of China's burgeoning modern political order, explain why the import of modern concepts led to China's continued political impasse, rather than rationality and progress, after the 1911 revolution.

Author: Jean Tsui
ISBN-10: 1438498780
ISBN-13: 9781438498782
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2024
Pages: 342
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.00d