Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty by Isaac Yue

Abstract

Reviewed by: Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty by Isaac Yue Don J. Wyatt (bio) Isaac Yue. Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2020. xii, 205 pp. Hardcover $109.99, isbn 978-1621965046. Paperback $59.99, isbn 978-1638570226. Despite being an inextricable component of what was the traditional Chinese manner of customarily dealing with foreigners, perhaps because of its wholly primeval as well as unseemly nature, from a scholarly perspective, monstrosity has heretofore been only sporadically and discontinuously discussed. Isaac Yue, however, via his Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity: Xenophobia and the Reimagination of Foreignness in Vernacular Literature since the Song Dynasty, warrants our attention by having irrevocably and irreversibly changed this situation. He has elected to focus on this long recognized but uncommonly addressed subject by analyzing its articulation and expression in the early modern vernacular literary tradition from the Song dynasty (960-1279) onward. Yue contends that monstrosity, as a trope within some of China's most celebrated vernacular novels, hardly arose randomly but was a response to the prevailing social milieu of Song and subsequent imperial times, which was one that evinced both an increasing unease about foreigners and an undisguised contemptuousness toward them. Following his explanatory and agenda-setting "Introduction: China and the Foreign," which deftly and straightforwardly sets the operative parameters for the discourse to come, Yue's inquiry into monstrosity, apart from its conclusion, consists of five chapters. Not enough can be said about the crucialness of chapter 1, "China Turning Inward," which Isaac Yue acknowledges as having received its title from the landmark book of the same name by the late historian James T. C. Liu (1919-1993).1 Just as Liu did in that work, Yue in this contextualizing initial chapter argues that there was a perceptible self-isolating that was concertedly manifested by what were otherwise innovative sociopolitical, [End Page 157] economic, and philosophical movements that emerged during Song times. However, it's essential for Yue that he depart from Liu's original thesis in two consequential ways. First, as distinguished from the largely internalist approach adopted by Liu, Yue declares "inwardness" as a function of relations between Chinese and foreigners to be his principal aim. Second, whereas Liu posited an abrupt disjuncture between elite attitudes of the early or Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) and the zeitgeist that developed during the subsequent Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), Yue argues instead for a continuum in outlook, with elements of the xenophobia so often associated only with the latter period having had their provenance, if not actual genesis, in the former one. In other words, in Yue's view, the exhibiting of cultureless behaviors and physical repugnance by foreigners was already an established Northern Song ascription. However, in the immediate aftermath of the sieging and taking of the capital Bianjing 汴京 (modern-day Kaifeng 開封) by Jurchen forces in 1127, to these earlier stigmatizing attributions was added a wanton propensity of foreigners for violence, for combined maximal effect. Moreover, in still another way, the chapter "China Turning Inward" diverges from its namesake text most significantly of all. As did James Liu in his study, Isaac Yue, in his own, places Neo-Confucianism at the center of intracultural change during Song times. However, unlike Liu, Yue makes the then-emergent philosophy the chief agent of what became China's long-lasting xenophobic mindset. Indeed, in what constitutes the darker side of its image that has rarely heretofore been discussed at any length or depth, Yue contends that it was primarily under the aegis of Neo-Confucianism that "xenophobia became a foundational idea which underpinned much of the development of the Song cultural landscape. It is a development that dictated both the self-perception of society and its conception of foreigners and foreignness at large" (p. 18). In chapter 2 of Monstrosity and Chinese Cultural Identity, Isaac Yue himself turns from a consideration of xenophobia in the abstract to an addressing of the subject concretely, and he does so by isolating the prime factor that, from the...