Harvard University Press Blog

Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy

Harvard’s Michael Sandel is an unusually prominent thinker in North America and Europe, but in China he’s a verifiable celebrity, inspiring what New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos describes as “near religious devotion.” On one recent trip, the border guard checking passports told Sandel that he was one of his heroes. Scalpers around the country make huge profits selling tickets to his talks. He is a regular on state television, and China Newsweek selected him as 2011’s “most influential foreign figure.”

Part of Sandel’s fame in China is surely due to the engaging style of his lectures, which rely heavily on interactions with the audience. Other factors include the rarity of public discussions of morality in China, where market reforms and exponential economic growth have left a “moral vacuum” in their wake, along with a thirst for alternatives to communist and market-based systems of thought. It’s also helpful that Sandel’s ideas, with their communitarian inflections, echo traditional Chinese teachings about private and public ethics.

Those echoes and connections are the focus of a new volume of essays on the ways in which the ideas that Sandel offers intersect with, resemble, and differ from Confucian and Daoist thought. Encountering China: Michael Sandel and Chinese Philosophy collects nearly a dozen original pieces from leading scholars who tease out how the affinities between Sandel’s work and the major Chinese traditions help audiences to confront questions of utmost significance in Chinese public life: What is the role of the individual to the family, and of the family to the community? What is the relationship between the virtue of a social institution and the virtue of those who lead it? What is the significance of individual liberty if the common good is based in shared values? How does one celebrate human diversity while cultivating a strong sense of community?

“China is now in search of a public philosophy beyond GDP,” Sandel writes in his reply to the volume’s contributors. “As in so much else, China’s success or failure in this quest will matter greatly for its own future and for the rest of the world.” Abiding by the pluralist conception of the common good which Sandel has always defended, the contributors to this collection provide access to and encourage participation in the spiritual and moral debates that have begun to permeate life in the world’s newest superpower.

This Friday, February 2nd, Sandel will mark the publication of Encountering China by joining Joseph C. W. Chan, Chaibong Hahm, Tatsuo Inoue, and Hongmei Qu for a roundtable discussion chaired by Elizabeth Perry, Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Organized by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and co-sponsored with the Asia Center, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Korea Institute, the event is open to the public and takes place at 3pm in the Tsai Auditorium at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies.

“Genius Grants” for Sunil Amrith and Viet Thanh Nguyen

Among the twenty-four members of the 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—recipients of the so-called “Genius Grant”—are two recent HUP authors: Sunil Amrith, whose Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants we published in 2013, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.

Here’s the MacArthur Foundation’s clip on Amrith, who was recognized for “illustrating the role of centuries of transnational migration in the present-day social and cultural dynamics of South and Southeast Asia”:

And their spot on Nguyen, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, and honored by MacArthur for “challenging popular depictions of the Vietnam War and exploring the myriad ways that war lives on for those it has displaced”:

Crossing the Bay of Bengal and Nothing Ever Dies are emblematic of concerns that’ve become central to our publishing program—migration, displacement, transnationalism, environmental history, climate change, and cultural memory, to name but a few aspects of these capacious works—and we’re thrilled to see this continued recognition for their authors. Congratulations to Amrith, Nguyen, and the rest of the 2017 class.

Liu Xiaobo and the Responsibility of Being Alive

The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo died today, a few short weeks after the Chinese government revealed that he was suffering from cancer that had progressed beyond treatment during his political imprisonment. The course of his life was forever altered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, and, as Perry Link notes at NYR Daily, Liu felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, “the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died.” His widow Liu Xia reports that he dedicated his Nobel Prize to them in 2010, as he’d done in 2003 after receiving an award from the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation. In the following passage from his statement of thanks for that award, excerpted from No Enemies, No Hatred, a volume of Liu’s essays and poems edited by Link, Liu Xia, and Tienchi Martin-Liao, Liu Xiaobo declares his acceptance of the honor “in the names of the souls of the dead,” and speaks of the responsibility of the living.

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I receive this award today, May 31, 2003, only four days before the anniversary of that bloody morning in June fourteen years ago. I do not know whether my work has been worthy of the people who died and cannot claim to deserve this award. I can understand the honor only as a tribute to those who continue to speak the truth inside a system built on lies and as an offering to the souls of the dead, delivered through me, of memory that refuses to be erased.

I feel that those who perished that day are looking down on me from above. They look down on a person privileged still to be alive. They have been looking down for fourteen years now. I was a participant in the 1989 movement and observed how, in that dark night and early dawn, it was sliced by bayonets, pierced by bullets, and crushed by tanks. The glinting tips of the bayonets still stab in the recesses of my memory. As one of the survivors, I see before my eyes two things—the souls of those who died for a free China and the violence, the lies, and the bribery of the killers—and I am haunted by the grave responsibility of being still alive. I do my best to make every word from my pen a cry from the heart for the souls of the dead. I use my memory of their graves to combat the Chinese government’s pressure to erase memory; my searing desire to atone for having survived helps me resist the temptations to join the world of lies.

We may feel contempt for a regime that kills people and disgust when it lies to explain its killing, but we can feel only despair if a nation makes allowances for such a regime and forgets the people who were killed. How much more is this the case when the killings were on open display to the world and when the physical deaths of the victims have so well proven the moral deaths of the killers?

The crimes of the Communist dictatorship are many, and the victims whom we do not know about are far, far too numerous—both the souls of the dead from killings and the prisoners of conscience who remain behind bars. One way to compensate for their suffering is to be sure that we reflect upon it scrupulously in memory, and one of the moral preconditions of honest memory is that we utterly refuse the regime’s indoctrination and refuse as individuals to repeat its lies. We fortunate survivors, and anyone who lives outside the regime’s metal bars, must, each of us as an independent person, hold fast to memory of the victims and refuse to sell out to the material comforts that participation in the official lies can bring. To do anything less is to surrender the meaning of life, to sell one’s personal dignity, and to lose sight of what it means to be a human being. Nothing can substitute for individual responsibility.

Japan’s Popular Song Era

Since the 1980s, popular culture has been one of Japan’s most important and most visible exports, from video games and film to fashion and J-pop. But where did Japanese cool come from? What did it mean for Japan to have a “popular” culture? What was “Japanese culture” before the pop? And did popular just mean “Westernized?”

In Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents, historian Hiromu Nagahara faces all of these questions by tracing the rise of Japan’s pop music industry. As can often be the case with stories of mass culture, Nagahara’s exploration of how and why popular songs came to occupy a central position within twentieth-century Japanese cultural politics centers on concerns for hierarchy and democracy in the production, consumption, and critique of art, media, and culture. Indeed, the book demonstrates how the emergence of a highly capitalized culture industry threatened to upend existing hierarchies of culture and taste, provoking vigorous backlash from the political, cultural, and educational elites of Japan. In doing so, Tokyo Boogie-Woogie offers a new understanding of twentieth-century Japan by connecting the cultural history of mass entertainment with the social and political history of the transformation of the nation into a mass middle class society.

But don’t forget about the songs themselves. Here, courtesy of Nagahara, a playlist of tracks considered in Tokyo Boogie-Woogie:

And here’s a bit from the book:

Between the late 1920s and 1960s, an impressive array of musicians, intellectuals, government officials and other members of Japan’s cultural elite not only debated the merits, or lack thereof, of popular songs, but also made attempts at managing and countering the broader set of societal problems that were associated with the songs. This was true from the very outset of the genre’s emergence in the late 1920s. Produced by record companies that were largely funded by Western capital and disseminated through channels such as cinema, radio, and cafés, popular songs quickly came to be recognized as the audible symbols of what contemporaries called modan (modern)—a term that gained currency in the late 1920s as an adjective to denote all that was seen to be part of Japan’s mass-oriented, speed-driven urban modernity. As such, the popular song genre was immediately associated with contemporary trends such as the perceived Americanization and eroticization of Japanese culture—trends that found critics across the political spectrum and were captured by another, more sensational, contemporary phrase, ero guro nansensu (erotic, grotesque, nonsense). In this way, numerous songs came to be identified, with varying degrees of plausibility, with countless contemporary cultural, social, and political phenomena, be it mass consumption, war time nationalism, occupation-era poverty, or—as is perhaps true even today—the allegedly ever-degenerating juvenile mores.

 

In Search of Bengali Harlem

Last week the Whiting Foundation announced the second class of recipients of the Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship, which celebrates and supports faculty in the humanities who embrace public engagement as part of the scholarly vocation. Among the 2017-2018 cohort is Vivek Bald, a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker who will use the time and funding granted by Whiting to continue his recovery of the stories of South Asian immigrants who quietly became part of some of the most iconic neighborhoods of color in the United States. He tells some of those stories in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, which we published a few years back, and he’s working now to complete a documentary titled In Search of Bengali Harlem, a collaboration with the playwright Alaudin Ullah and musician/composer Vijay Iyer.

Here’s the description of the project from the Whiting Foundation’s site, where you can also see a preview of the film:

One of the earliest groups of Muslims to settle in the United States risked their lives to come to the country amid the harsh restrictions on entry of the Asian Exclusion Era (1890-1940). South Asian men working under indenture-like conditions on British steamers jumped ship in northeastern ports and linked up with clandestine networks of their fellows to start new lives working in restaurants and factories across the country. Many made their way to Harlem, where they integrated through marriage into African-American and Puerto Rican communities, in effect “disappearing” into the neighborhood.

Vivek Bald will use the Fellowship to help complete a documentary film recovering the lost history of these men, their families, and their contributions to American urban life. The story unfolds from the perspective of Bald’s collaborator, Bangladeshi-American playwright Alaudin Ullah, who is in search of answers about his parents’ own path to Harlem. As the search ripples outward, the film illuminates a larger twentieth-century history of Bengali Muslim settlement, inter-marriage, and cross-racial community-making in U.S. cities. As part of the Fellowship project, Bald will also implement a digital crowd-sourcing project to collect and share more stories of the descendants of these immigrants.

Bald, who became a documentary filmmaker before pursuing his PhD, met Ullah in the 1990s. That encounter inspired the extensive archival research that culminated in Bald’s book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. The new documentary and website build upon this scholarly work, closing the circle to bring to life the family narrative that introduced Bald to this powerfully multicultural American moment.

The Whiting Foundation believes that “scholarship in the humanities is crucial in pushing forward the boundaries of our knowledge and understanding of the world,” and that “engagement with the humanities provides a blueprint for full, informed participation in civic life in a pluralist democracy; teaches the habit of thinking deeply and broadly, ensuring that we ask questions about history and context when making important decisions; and develops skills that allow us to contribute more to a productive economy, including analytical thinking, facility with complex ideas, clear and persuasive communication, and evidence-based decision-making.” We most certainly agree.

Continuing Agony in Tibet: The Destruction of Larung Gar

Tibet in Agony: Lhasa 1959, written by Jianglin Li and translated by Susan Wilf, draws extensively on newly available Chinese civil and military sources to provide the most comprehensive assessment to date of the pivotal moment in modern Tibetan history: the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile and the Chinese takeover of Tibet in 1959. The book stands as a critical counter to the official Chinese narrative on Tibet, which is still being shaped today. The Chinese government’s efforts in recent months to destroy Larung Gar, the world’s largest Buddhist institute, have offered further evidence of its fear of any movement, religious or social, that it can’t fully control. Below, in Wilf’s translation, Jianglin Li places the assault on Larung Gar in the context of China’s history of crackdowns on Tibetans.

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Recent bulldozing at the enormous Larung Gar Buddhist Academy complex in Sichuan is emblematic of the Chinese Communists’ refusal to tolerate Buddhism—or any religion—as a rival source of authority. The forcible eviction of thousands of the academy’s resident monks and nuns is an incalculable loss for the entire Tibetan community. In addition to tending to people’s spiritual needs, the modern Tibetan Buddhist clergy also spearheads a public drive for responsible, ethical behavior. Thus, the Communists’ blind intolerance goes beyond religious persecution: it places them paradoxically on the wrong side of many other pressing issues, from animal cruelty to AIDS prevention.

For example, when the Dalai Lama called upon Tibetans in 2006 to help save endangered species by giving up their tradition of wearing exotic furs, they responded by tossing their animal pelts into bonfires. The Chinese Communist reaction to this demonstration of faith in the Dalai Lama has been to force Tibetans to wear furs to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party instead, and many Tibetan objectors have been beaten or jailed.

In recent years, the monks and nuns of Larung Gar and other Tibetan Buddhist centers have promulgated a set of modern vows for lay Tibetans—persuading people to renounce common vices such as gambling, fighting with weapons over pastureland, alcohol abuse, smoking, unsafe sex, and needless animal slaughter. With the expulsion of the clergy, however, these initiatives may be doomed.

The Chinese Communist repression of Tibetan Buddhism dates to the 1950s, when most monasteries were systematically dismantled in the name of “religious reform.” All religious leaders who were unwilling to be co-opted by the Communists either fled into exile or went to jail. As the Tibetan ethical system deteriorated along with the loss of leadership, the Communists attempted to instill “socialist values” in a series of campaigns, reaching a climax in the Cultural Revolution, which destroyed the few remaining monasteries and left an ethical vacuum in its wake.

When religion was allowed a limited revival in the 1980s, Larung Gar Buddhist Academy was founded. Through its welcome of a highly diverse student body, it soon became the largest Buddhist academy not only in the Tibetan regions, but in the world, with somewhere between ten and twenty thousand students. Han Chinese students came too, and took their message back home, spreading the influence of Tibetan Buddhism in Chinese society. Increasing numbers of people turned to the religion, partly filling the ethical void.

The religious comeback put the Chinese Communists into a double bind: they could not close the monasteries again, nor could they allow religion to mushroom beyond Communist control. In 1993, then Party Secretary Jiang Zemin formulated a “religious policy for the new era,” requiring religious believers to love the Motherland and the Party above all else, and to “adapt religion to socialism.” But who would decide which religious tenets should be “adapted?” The Communist Party, of course. It has conducted large-scale evictions at Larung Gar before, in 2001. And when Kirti Rinpoche, head abbot (in exile) of Kirti Monastery in Sichuan, issued a popular set of thirty-two basic ethical precepts for contemporary Tibetans, the Communists banned it.

The signals from the Chinese Communists to the Buddhist community are clear. Despite their lip service to social stability and harmony, what the Chinese Communists want most of all is to show everyone who’s boss.

Of Ethical Memory

When it comes to war, ethical memory illuminates how war neither emerges from alien territory nor is fought by monsters. War grows on intimate soil, nurtured by friends and neighbors, fought by sons, daughters, wives, and fathers. Our ambivalence about war’s identity simply expresses ambivalence about our own identities, which are collectively inseparable from the wars our nations have fought. These are the wars for which we have paid, from which we have benefitted, by which we are traumatized. Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.

When it comes to war, the basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is thus not only about remembering and forgetting certain events or people. The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is instead more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead a final step in the dialectics of ethical memory—not just the movement between an ethics of remembering one’s own and remembering others, but also a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human. Any project of the humanities should thus also be a project of the inhumanities, of how civilizations are built on forgotten barbarism toward others, of how the heart of darkness beats within. No wonder, then, that for Jorge Luis Borges, remembering is a ghostly verb. Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited. The troubling weight of the past is especially evident when we speak of war and our limited ability to recall it. Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies

From The Sympathizer to Nothing Ever Dies

When Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer was named winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction earlier this month, the honor was but the latest addition to the accolades the book has been collecting since its April publication, including the 2015 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and inclusion on over 30 best of the year lists. The book—historical fiction, literary thriller, coming-of-age tale, and black comedy in one—begins in April 1975, the last days before the fall of Saigon, when its nameless narrator is sent to California to spy on South Vietnamese exiles whom the Communists suspect of plotting to take back their country.

At one point in The Sympathizer, the narrator, now engulfed by an American society bent on reshaping the story of American defeat, explains that “this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors.” Just because America so dominates the telling, of course, doesn’t mean that the Vietnamese don’t have their own stories, and with The Sympathizer Nguyen succeeds in forcing recognition of that fact.

While The Sympathizer approached through fiction what Americans call the Vietnam War and what Vietnamese call the American War, Nguyen now does the same through criticism in Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which we’ll publish this spring. We asked Nguyen, who teaches English and American Studies at the University of Southern California, what the differences between fiction and nonfiction offer him as a writer. His response:

Writing fiction saved me as a scholar and critic. Thirteen years ago, when I received tenure, I was exhausted as an academic. I did not enjoy the academic life and the thought of writing another academic book like my first one filled me with dread. I left the academy for two years and wrote fiction full-time in the hopes that it would save my soul and my profession. It did, although it was only the beginning of a long, arduous path towards becoming the kind of writer that I envisioned myself to be. One aspiration I had was that writing fiction would make me a better scholar and critic. By paying attention to things like rhythm, form, narrative, and character, perhaps I could revivify my dead academic prose. And it worked. But it wasn’t only the case that my scholarly writing became more lively, and hopefully more compelling. As with fiction, form cannot be separated from content. My critical prose was transformed but my critical insights also achieved more force, carried along by the flow of prose and narrative. I wanted to convince the reader not only through what I had to say, but how I said it. I wanted the reader to be moved, and the only way to do that was to move myself, through the force of both ideas and language. The result is Nothing Ever Dies, a book that is informed by the lessons of fiction about the power of emotion, passion, and intuition.

With Nothing Ever Dies, Nguyen offers an ethics of memory and forgetting, demanding recognition of the full humanity of all touched by war. In insisting on the complexity of the people involved, he also forces us to reject the neat lines history draws, conflicts “clearly demarcated in time and space by declarations of war and ceasefires, by the inscription of dates in history books, news articles, and memorial placards.”

And in both books Nguyen deals with questions central to the identity of a nation: How do we remember the living and what they did during times of war? How do we remember the nation and the people for whom the dead supposedly died? And how do we remember war itself, both war in general and the particular war that has shaped us?

The Social Politics of Imagined Realities

In Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, new this month, Masuda Hajimu reveals social and political forces normally seen as products of the Cold War actually to have been instrumental in fostering the conditions from which the conflict sprung. Below, he examines how the dynamics he identifies as having contributed to the pervasive global logic of the Cold War can be seen anew in our own time, when the “War on Terror” becomes ever more entrenched as the rubric with which we explain the world.

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Many thousands of volumes have been written on the issue of the Cold War. Many other “Cold War” products are available, as well, whether directly related to the history of the Cold War or not. If you go to the Amazon website, for example, you can find nearly 80,000 items related to the term “Cold War,” from John Lewis Gaddis’s history books to a Cold War Veteran license plate frame, to the new album from American indie rock band Cold War Kids. However, none of these books and items, with a few exceptions, dare to explore a simple but fundamental question: What, really, was the Cold War?

The answer has been taken for granted: It was a global confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, fought within geopolitical, diplomatic, ideological, and cultural arenas in the second half of the 20th century. The conflict began, it is commonly believed, with the conduct (and misconduct) of top leaders, such as Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and so on, and ended abruptly with the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. However, such neat narratives do little to further our understanding of the Cold War, and even less to help us understand our world today.

When I began my project in 2005, I did not expect to write my book in the way I did, but, looking back, I think I was feeling uneasy about the ways in which the history of the Cold War had been written, remembered, and pushed aside. What I tried to do in my book, therefore, was to think about another meaning and function of the phenomenon we call the Cold War, and, in so doing, to deliberate on what it really was. Viewed in this different way, I see the essence of the Cold War world lingering today in our lives and thinking in this age of the War on Terror. In fact, to think about contemporary implications of my book right now is a bit hard and even depressing, because it is so deeply relevant for us, especially in the post-Charlie Hebdo world.

Fiona Ross Wins Typography Award

Each year at its annual TypeCon conference, the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) presents the SOTA Typography Award to an outstanding member of the type community. We’re delighted to share the news that this year’s award was given to designer, researcher, and teacher Fiona Ross, with whom we’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating on the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI).

The MCLI—the first five volumes of which will see publication this January—makes available original texts and modern English translations of the masterpieces of literature and thought from across the whole spectrum of Indic languages over the past two millennia. Even aside from the scholarly challenges of translating and editing these works, just preparing the digitally optimized regional typefaces for the vast array of Indian languages included in the library has been as monumental a project as any this Press has undertaken.

From the beginning it was clear that the involvement of Ross, a virtuoso of non-Latin typeface design and a pioneering negotiator of the relationship of technology and typography, would be essential. And so it’s been. To date, Ross and John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks have designed typefaces for Bangla, Hindi, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, all of which will be made available, free of charge, for non-commercial use upon publication of the first books in which each appear.

Tim Jones, HUP’s Director of Design and Production, describes the collaboration:

There is little I can do to truly express or explain how amazing it has been to work with Fiona and John on this incredible project. Fiona has taught me and everyone else here at HUP so much about the complexities and challenges of typeface design, and has shared a great deal of her unmatched knowledge of the history of non-Latin typography. Seeing her and John go from concept to final form has made all of us better designers. Fiona’s dedication to research and fidelity is inspiring, and her artistry seems unparalleled. That she is such a delightful and thoughtful person on top of it all is extraordinary. We feel very lucky indeed to be part of this effort alongside her.

The spread below shows Hudson’s and Ross’s work on the Murty Gurmukhi typeface for Panjabi text, as illustrated by the opening pages of Sufi Lyrics.

 Photo of SOTA Typography Award © Luke Dorny, via flickr