Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction -- 2. Autumn days in Beijing, 1978 -- 3. Move to Shanghai, October -- 4. The protest movement begins, November -- 5. The month of Revelations, December -- 6. The winter crackdown, January to early April 1979 -- 7. Spring warmth and cold politics, late April to June -- Appendix: Shanghai's Democracy Movement of 1986.

This is the first in-depth study of Chinese bridal laments, a ritual and performative art practiced by Chinese women in premodern times that gave them a rare opportunity to voice their grievances publicly. Drawing on methodologies from numerous disciplines, including performance arts and folk literatures, the author suggests that the ability to move an audience through her lament was one of the most important symbolic and ritual skills a Chinese woman could possess before the modern era.

Performing Grief provides a detailed case study of the Nanhui region in the lower Yangzi delta. Bridal laments, the author argues, offer insights into how illiterate Chinese women understood the kinship and social hierarchies of their region, the marriage market that determined their destinies, and the value of their labor in the commodified economy of the delta region. The book not only assesses and draws upon a large body of sources, both Chinese and Western, but is grounded in actual field work, offering both historical and ethnographic context in a unique and sophisticated approach. Unlike previous studies, the author covers both Han and non-Han groups and thus contributes to studies of ethnicity and cultural accommodation in China. She presents an original view about the ritual implications of bridal laments and their role in popular notions of "wedding pollution." The volume includes an annotated translation from a lament cycle.

This important work on the place of laments in Chinese culture enriches our understanding of the social and performative roles of Chinese women, the gendered nature of China's ritual culture, and the continuous transmission of women's grievance genres into the revolutionary period. As a pioneering study of the ritual and performance arts of Chinese women, it will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of anthropology, social history, gender studies, oral literature, comparative folk religion, and performance arts.

In recent decades, historians of European history have produced many studies on the history of emotions. Based on the hypothesis that emotions are neither a biological essence nor a universal fixed attribute, they have sought to trace constructions of human emotionality as reflected in literary and other works in a particular society over time. This new sub-discipline, the study of what is often termed "sentimental culture", has illuminated the interaction between the articulation of an emotional sensibility and significant social trends of the age, including the rise of humanitarian discourse, radical Protestantism, and a destabilizing of sexual norms. From the new perspective of the cultural history of emotion, the modern idea that emotions express individual inwardness and autonomy now appears to be contingent and culture bound. In the case of China, while there has been an abundance of studies of the cult ofqing情 ('passion, desire') in the late Ming, there are few works dealing specifically with the historical construction of emotion in pre-modern China, particularly from a linguistic point of view.