Call for Papers: Pain in Modern and Contemporary China, in-person session at the AAS Annual Conference, Seattle, March 14-17, 2024.
Is pain only pain? The study of pain in today’s humanities is rare perhaps because it is too familiar to be overlooked, or perhaps it is assumed to be merely a scientific problem in a modern mind. Yet, as Michael Berry notes in his History of Pain, pain, be it physical or mental, is a defining feature in modern and contemporary China. If war, famine, persecution, purge, and massacre permeated twentieth-century China, disillusion, displacement, suppression, and ecological crisis are still haunting its people in its contemporary time. This session proposes to examine pain as presented and represented in different cultural products in modern and contemporary China. Contributions are welcomed to investigate the nature of pain in a particularly Chinese context, complicate the double mystery of bodily and mental pain, address the tension between lyrical art and epic history, or highlight the most urgent but muffled sociopolitical issues in the past and at the present.
Please send your abstract (250 words max) by July 30, 2023 to Sijia Yao at syao@soka.edu.