China from the Margins

This book explores and brings to light untold stories from the margins of Chinese society. It investigates and reveals grassroots and popular cultural beliefs, amusing anecdotes, items of lore, and accounts of the strange and the unusual. It delves into questions of identity formation, considering gender, sexuality, class, generational divides, subcultures, national minorities and online communities. It examines heritage-making practices and the persistence of marginalized memories. Bringing together views from cultural studies, literature, gender studies, cultural heritage, sociology, history and more, the book argues that neither the margins nor the centre can be understood in isolation, and that by focusing on the margins, a fuller picture of Chinese society overall emerges, including new perspectives on spatial and social marginality, on hierarchies of marginality, and on neglected spaces, voices and identities.

List of Figures

List of contributors

Preface

Introduction (Emily Williams & Loredana Cesarino)

Part 1: Marginal Identities & Subcultures

Chapter 1: Corey K. N. Schultz, 'Jewish Models and Modelling Jews: Representations of Jews & Jewishness in the Harbin Jewish Museum'

Chapter 2: Brian Haman, 'Austrian Jewish Exiles from the Margins of China: Mark Siefelberg, Hans Schubert, Susanne Wantoch, and Richard Frey'

Chapter 3: Andrew Law & Qianqian Qin, 'Hegemonic Han Identities & alternative subjectivities: the contemporary Hanfu movement as a marginal cross-generational subculture'

Part 2: Memory in/of Marginal Places

Chapter 4: Yu Hua, 'Place, Home & People in the Making: Stories of Liangzhu Culture Village'

Chapter 5: Emily Williams, 'Marginal histories at the Centre of the Revolution: Red Collecting in Shaanbei'

Chapter 6: Giulia Rampolla, 'Marginality as a Dreamland: Native Place, Everyday Life, Nostalgia and Coming of Age in Three Works of Wei Wei'

Part 3: Marginal Spaces in Literature

Chapter 7: Janice Kam, 'The Inn in Wuxia Narratives'

Chapter 8: Federico Picerni, 'From the Periphery of Literature: Marginal Urban Lives and Recognition(s) in the Picun Literature Group'

Chapter 9: Eugenia Tizzano, 'Returning to a Marginal Genre: Liminal Space and the Return of Gui in Mo Yan's Fantastic Tales'

Part 4: Gender at the Margins of Literature

Chapter 10: Barbara Witt, 'Mistresses, Maids and Servants' Wives in Lin Lan Xiang: The Everyday Life of Women in a Fictional Late Imperial Chinese Elite Household'

Chapter 11: Li Meng, 'Four Marginalized Women and Loser Subculture in the Ren Xiaowen's Fiction Life is Like That'

Chapter 12: Cesarino Loredana, 'Marginal Fears in Yue Jun's Ershilu (1792-94): Terror and Desire in the Story of Hu Haohao'

Index