The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

Ling Hon Lam is Assistant Professor in the Chinese Program in Berkeley’s East Asian Languages and Cultures Department. His publications include “The Matriarch's Private Ears: Performance, Reading, Censorship, and the Fabrication of Interiority in The Story of the Stone” (HJAS 65.2), “Reading off the Screen: Toward Cinematic Il-literacy in Late 1950s Chinese Opera Film” (Opera Quarterly 26.2-3), and "Bao-yu's Multimedia Classroom: Reading, Performance, and the Vicissitudes of the Voice from The Story of the Stone to Its Film Adaptations" (in Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone).Ling Hon Lam is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley.

Haun Saussy, University of Chicago:
Sounds, including words, reverberate in spaces, including the “inch-space” of the heart. Framing the history of the emotions in original and surprising ways and undoing traditional oppositions between “inside” and “outside” through attention to the spaces that nurture or limit feeling, Ling Hon Lam puts Chinese vernacular literature in a new place and gives us the sensation of belonging to a continuous, centuries-long community of spectators. This is cultural history of astonishing scope and imagination.

Wai-yee Li, Harvard University:
Lam argues with verve that the vocabulary of spatiality and theatricality is crucial for understanding emotions in the Chinese tradition. From the earliest formulations of the functions of poetic articulation as a space of social, political, and cosmic resonance to the logic of self-division and of being a spectator to one's emotions in Ming fiction, Lam offers new and interesting perspectives on Chinese literature.

William Egginton, Johns Hopkins University:
The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China is a daring rethinking of emotion as it was conceptualized in early modern China. Up-ending the dominant characterization of emotions, Ling Hon Lam shows that emotions were implicitly situations of space, conceived of and perceived in spatial terms. Challenging expectations and rectifying suppositions about the most basic level of human interaction with the environment and culture, Lam elucidates questions central to the philosophy of affect and to ontology from an unprecedented comparative perspective.

Wei Shang, Columbia University:
Brilliantly written and boldly conceptualized.

David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University:
Ling Hon Lam’s book is a major breakthrough in early modern Chinese literary and theater studies. Lam challenges conventional wisdom that sees emotion as an expression of inner faculties, and seeks to reframe emotion as affective performativity, theatrical manifestation, and above all, spatial construct. He draws from performing arts and media studies, identifies philosophical and psychological contestations, and ponders the power of the theatrics of emotion both on the stage and in everyday life. Historically informed and theoretically provocative, Lam’s book will set a new standard for Chinese theater studies and cultural and spatial history.