Sensing China

We are delighted to announce the publication of Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture (Routledge, 2023), co-edited by Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang. This volume brings together 12 chapters by literary scholars and historians, and critically interrogates the deeply rooted meanings that the senses have coded in Chinese culture and society. We also would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and our colleagues who supported this journey.

Shengqing Wu and Xuelei Huang

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

Part I  Understanding the Senses in Traditional Culture

1. Aural and Visual Hierarchies in Texts from Early China: Beyond Epistemology of the Senses (Jane Geaney)

2. The Culture of Smells: From Huchou to Tianxiang, Taboo and Sublimation (Paolo Santangelo)

Part II   Reconfiguring the Senses and Modern Sensibility

1. Smellscapes of Nanjing Road: Cognitive and Affective Mapping (Xuelei Huang)

2. The Kiss as an Art of Love: Touch, Sensuality, and Embodied Experience in Modern Chinese Culture (Shengqing Wu)

3. Radio, Sound Cinema, and Community Singing: The Making of a New Sonic Culture in Modern China (Xiaobing Tang)

Part III  Socialist Corporeality, Sensorium and Memory

1. Making Sense of Labor: Works of Art and Arts of Work in China’s Great Leap Forward (Pang Laikwan)

2. Narrating Sweet Bitterness: Tasting and Sensing the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Lena Henningsen)

3. The Hot Noise of Open-Air Cinema (Jie Li)

Part IV  Senses, Media and Postmodernity

1. Touching Father: Sight, Sound, Touch, and Intermedial Intimacies (Carlos Rojas)

2. The Senses in Recent Exhibitionary Practice in Chinese History Museums (Kirk Denton)

3. Epilogue: “And suddenly the memory revealed itself….”—Making Sense of the Senses in History (Barbara Mittler)