{"id":211,"date":"2019-10-19T08:30:25","date_gmt":"2019-10-19T08:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/?p=211"},"modified":"2019-11-01T17:19:46","modified_gmt":"2019-11-01T17:19:46","slug":"love-has-no-boundaries-and-what-that-can-teach-us-about-the-self","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/2019\/10\/love-has-no-boundaries-and-what-that-can-teach-us-about-the-self\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Love has no boundaries’, and what that can teach us about the self"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a hopeless romantic. So, when we were assigned readings on new conceptualisations of love in China, I jumped on the chance to learn more about something that resonates deeply in me. I ended up reading Lee Haiyan’s Revolution of the Heart: a genealogy of love in China, 1900-1950,<\/em> which maps the way perceptions of love changed within Chinese society. Lee does this by taking Chinese sentimental fiction as her source material. With the rise of popular press in China, it became a genre that was both widely-written in and widely-consumed – pervasive, in short. This pervasiveness meant that sentimental fiction had a social utility: an ability to reflect on and perpetuate certain views within society.1<\/a><\/sup> Therefore, in applying a historical analysis to works within sentimental fiction, Lee argues that we can shed light on what ‘the social order, the self, and sociality’ were like at the time, and how they were expressed.2<\/a><\/sup>. To demonstrate Lee’s point, I take as reference her analysis of Hu Chunbing’s play, Ai de geming\/\u611b\u7684\u9769\u547d<\/em> (The Revolution of Love), and expand on the serious historical implications her analysis of it has on our understandings of the self, vis-a-vis\u00a0<\/em>the external world.<\/p>\n

Zhong Sanmin<\/em> is the rebellious son of a well-to-do compradore merchant. His name, Zhong<\/em> (invoking\u00a0Zhongguo, China) Sanmin (invoking Sun Yat-sen’s\u00a0<\/em>sanmin zhuyi, the Three People’s Principles), marks him as a\u00a0 … Nationalist patriot … [Sanmin] steadfastly courts a free-spirited New Woman appositely named Hua Ziyou (free China).<\/em>\u00a03<\/a><\/sup><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the extract above, Lee references the lovers’ names, arguing that the symbolism contained within them indicates that love and revolution were seen as an ‘essential oneness’ in Hu’s time.4<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Private emotions can <\/em>be united with public political commitment; the public action of revolution is just another means of expressing the private feeling of love. Moreover, one could also speculate that Hu, in naming his characters after nationalistic and revolutionary ideals, believes that love is a necessary factor drives revolution. Of course revolution is, by no means, guaranteed through the use of love on its own. However without love, revolution cannot emerge and\/or is fruitless. Either way, no matter what inference we draw out, Lee’s point is Hu’s characterisation of love and revolution as an ‘essential oneness’ gives rise to a unique understanding of the self. (( <\/em>Lee Haiyan. The Revolution of the Heart: a genealogy of love in China, 1900-1950 <\/em>(Stanford, 2007), p. 276 )) If we believe that love and revolution are two sides of the same coin, then love exists externally<\/em>\u00a0as much as it does internally,<\/em> with the boundary between the two\u00a0fluid<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I think this point comes with some very serious – but important- historical implications. I turn to the philosophy to explain why. ‘Internalism\/Externalism’ is a dichotomy that is used in philosophical debates to draw a distinction between the external world and the self. Traditionally conceptions of this distinction take ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to mean ‘inside the skin’ and ‘outside the skin’ respectively.5<\/a><\/sup>. However, if internal feelings, like love, can arise in external events, like revolutions, then this means that internal feelings can arise outside the skin – a contradiction. Traditional philosophical interpretations of the internal\/external distinction thus fail to explain cases of the sort that Lee describes. This poses a serious problem for history. If we have been analysing Chinese history with the presupposition that there is a\u00a0distinction<\/em> between the internal and external when no such distinction really<\/em> exists, then our historical analysis is misguided. This means that our understanding of Chinese society, and particularly the way in which individuals relate to the outside world, needs to be overhauled – an unsettling thought. On the bright side, at least we now know better.<\/p>\n

  1. Lee Haiyan. The Revolution of the Heart: a genealogy of love in China, 1900-1950<\/em> (Stanford, 2007), pp. 4-5 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. Lee Haiyan. The Revolution of the Heart: a genealogy of love in China, 1900-1950<\/em> (Stanford, 2007), p.7 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  3. Lee Haiyan. The Revolution of the Heart: a genealogy of love in China, 1900-1950 (Stanford, 2007), p. 276 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  4. Lee Haiyan. The Revolution of the Heart: a genealogy of love in China, 1900-1950 <\/em>(Stanford, 2007), p. 276 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  5. Farkas, Katalin. ‘What is Externalism?’ in Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol 112, No. 3 <\/em>(February 2003), p. 189 [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I am a hopeless romantic. So, when we were assigned readings on new conceptualisations of love in China, I jumped on the chance to learn more about something that resonates deeply in me. I ended up reading Lee Haiyan’s Revolution of the Heart: a genealogy of love in China, 1900-1950, which maps the way perceptions … Continue reading “‘Love has no boundaries’, and what that can teach us about the self”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,4,17,16],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-20th-century","tag-china","tag-lee-haiyan","tag-love"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}