This dissertation, Anxious Consumption: The Fantastic, Affect, and Transnational Cultural Flows in 1970s-1990s Japan, traces an alternate genealogy of consumption in 1970s-1990s Japan through reading the fantastic in literary and media texts. My use of the term “fantastic” broadly conceives of the category beyond its common limitation to the supernatural and otherworldly, to indicating a form of pervasive structural anxiety behind consumer culture’s celebratory façade of material prosperity and images of economic “progress." Rather than a specific subject position of any particular individual or group, I approach the fantastic as a liminal affective force that is fluid and constantly in-motion, capable of enveloping, implicating, and bypassing various bodies it comes across, while holding the power to disrupt ideological borders, the confines of static forms of identities, and categories such as gender, race, class, and nationality. Emerging at a historical moment characterized as a de-politicized plunge into self-indulgent celebrations of consumerism, the fantastic complicates this narrative through its power to unveil the workings of otherwise seamless immaterial forces of control within a consumerist landscape. Through its power to reveal and de-familiarize what has been naturalized, the fantastic surfaces as an indication of unease—from expressing unspoken anxiety experienced on the affective register, to revealing nationalistic agendas of the nation state. In the texts that I examine, the fantastic is represented by expressions of anxiety manifesting as the abject, Otherness, and the monstrous feminine— liminal figures that, I argue, reveal the psychological structure underlying cultural production in 1970s-1990s Japan. Through reading across various media forms—fiction, literary- nonfiction texts, newspaper reportage, manga, magazines, and protest leaflets—I trace fantastic’s mobilizing force in de-stabilizing dominant and homogenizing frameworks through which consumption in postwar Japan has been narrated. Chapters one and two focus on the affective dimensions of consumption. These chapters look at the on-going negotiation between biopolitical capture and liberatory potentials within consumer culture in an urban landscape. Chapters three and four look at the material dimensions of consumption, focusing on the mapping of consumption onto iterations of space and notions of mobility—across boundaries of nation, race, and species. These chapters examine how marginalized bodies excluded from national visions of prosperity and development make visible limitations of nation states, or human-centric modes of sensing.

This dissertation analyzes the role of sound in language use in early Chinese texts. By focusing on developments of sound-based recurrences such as rhyme and paronomasia, focusing on the classical, foundational texts from the third to first centuries BCE, I offer a new understanding of how textuality, the writing system, and language itself were conceptualized during these centuries. Overall, I argue that these sound-based devices underwent transformative functional and structural changes, in which their primary focus shifted from composition to interpretation. I trace the importance of sound in language use from the Later Mohist textual material through other Warring States texts, including the “Masters’ literature” (zǐ shū 子書), all the way to Hàn dynasty material. Specifically, this dissertation highlights that sound recurrences in early Chinese texts occur both as a structuring element for longer material – whereby sound coordinates textual units – and as a means to express conceptual and ontological connections valid for ancient language users. Additionally, this dissertation proposes to computationally apply existing historical phonological data at scale to digitized early Chinese textual material in order to detect phonological recurrences. Key findings of this study include, firstly, that early Chinese rhymes and paronomasia did not only fulfill ornamental and mnemonic functions but could also form the basis for performative segments, arguments, and ontological connections postulated by and in texts. Secondly, functions of paronomasia shift over centuries, changing from compositional devices to decidedly interpretive tools.

Manchukuo was a state that was established by the Japanese military in Manchuria (Northeast China) in 1932 and collapsed in 1945 with the defeat of Japan. Immediately after its founding, the Japanese Kwantung Army, later joined by the Manchukuo Army, initiated a series of "bandit suppression"(tōbatsu; 討伐) campaigns to consolidate the new regime. This dissertation will focus on "bandit suppression" in Manchukuo as a means of illuminating the state's claims to legitimacy, its ability to mobilize at different levels, and the involvement of "bandit suppression" in other dimensions of state building. By examining how "bandit suppression" was perceived, represented, and practiced in the context of Manchukuo's state building, I will argue that the perception of the "bandit problem" and the practice of suppression campaigns in Manchukuo embodied the state's pursuit of legitimacy. Furthermore, the ideological, administrative, and legal construction of the state, as well the widespread mobilization of different groups of people in the "anti-bandit" campaigns also facilitated the state building process of Manchukuo.

Through the lens of "bandit suppression," I will suggest that the crucial concern of the state was to obtain legitimacy as the foundation of governmental power. Confronted with domestic disorder and the influence of Chinese nationalism, for Manchukuo itself to gain recognition and legitimacy for its continued existence as a state, it had to create a consciousness of its right to govern and the recognition by the governed of that right. Besides, to obtain legitimacy and consolidate state authority also involved "the capacity of a political system to engender and maintain the belief that existing political institutions are the most appropriate and proper ones for the society." Therefore, the campaigns against "bandits" were often accompanied by the proclamation of the founding ideas of Manchukuo, including the principles of the "Kingly Way" (ōdō; 王道), "ethnic harmony," and bringing peace and order to the people. In this sense, "bandit suppression" embodied "a state historiographic discourse about order, ordering, justice, and freedom."

One of the major philosophical problems in Early China was the relationship between the person and the world, and in particular, how to act in relation to the world. This dissertation addresses the problem of agency in Early China, and pursues three main guiding questions: how to act efficaciously in different situations, how to cope with uncertainty and unpredictability in ordinary life, and how to achieve control and freedom.

I offer a critical and systematic analysis of an extraordinary model of successful action that I call “adaptive agency” or “adaptation” (yin 因). As opposed to other models of action attested in early texts, such as the prescriptive and the forceful, the adaptive agent necessitates great capacity of situational awareness, reflection, flexibility, and creativity in order to produce responses ad hoc: strategies of action designed for specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. This model for choosing an action as an adjusted response to a specific situation guarantees the agent a higher success rate in his actions, let these be in political, military, professional, medical, religious, ethical or ordinary life contexts.

This dissertation is both born from a new methodological orientation and a contribution toward establishing it, by means of exemplifying how we can build meaningful critical theories in Early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history without using the obsolete hermeneutical categories of school of thought, book and author. I trace tensions and similarities in the Early Chinese approach to the problem of agency cross-textually, using a large range of textual materials and research methods. The philosophical proposal of adaptive agency is particularly suitable to this kind of methodological project, for it consistently appears across a wide variety of texts, authors, and intellectual orientations throughout the Early Chinese period, and therefore could not be studied by using the traditional hermeneutical categories.

My dissertation deals with cultural confrontations between the so-called “barbarian/nomadic” North and the “civilized/Sinitic” South in the multi-lateral world of Middle Period China (800–1300). The Jin dynasty (1115–1234), ruled by the Jurchen conquering minority, has received insufficient scholarly attention especially in the literary field. It was dismissed in late imperial China as either an illegitimate, alien regime compared to the Han Chinese-ruled Southern Song polity (1127–1279), or a scaled-down and short-lived predecessor of the Mongol Yuan empire (1271–1368). My research, however, fleshes out the overall Jin literary culture and poetic production in particular, and illustrates the burgeoning literati culture in North China under Jurchen rule. By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, I argue for the plurality and constructedness of Middle Period China as an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space.To envision a comprehensive picture of Jin dynasty poetry and literati culture, my dissertation is organized in a tripartite structure with seven chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 outline the cultural history of Jin literati community. Integrating socio-historical studies and bibliographical research, I examine the origins and developments of Jin literati, including both Jurchens and Han Chinese, as well as their identity negotiation and cultural legitimacy under Jurchen rule. Chapters 4 and 5 compare the contemporary northern and southern literary fashions. In particular, I combine literary analysis and digital tools to map out both discursive force and social networking that shaped the Jin literati group. Chapters 6 and 7 shift from poetry contests in the North-South space to literary traditions of the past – they explore the historical provenances of Jin literati culture, as well as the Jin refashioning of poetic legacies from previous Tang and Northern Song dynasties. Jin material culture including book history and literati art are also integrated into relevant discussions. In conclusion, I argue that the pluralist topology of Northern Song, Southern Song, and Jurchen Jin literary pasts kept intertwined with and superposed on each other, which always potentially spoke for the heteroglossia and constructedness of Middle Period China.

This dissertation explores Japanese commercial, intellectual, and material engagement with medicines imported by the United East India Company (VOC) and its successors from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Medicinal substances sourced from across India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East like cinnamon, cloves, and saffron constituted a major part of Dutch trade to Japan from the seventeenth century onward. Various disruptions and reorganizations of the Dutch trading network at the turn of the nineteenth century caused an increase in the supply of these goods to Japan. This coincided with renewed scholarly efforts to translate and adapt “Dutch medicine” (ranpō) for use by Japanese physicians, apothecaries, and consumers. Interest in and consumption of “Dutch medicine” peaked in the nineteenth century, and it was available across Japan as commercial medicine (baiyaku) sold in shops and by itinerant merchants. Drawing from a wide range of visual, material, and textual sources in Japanese, Dutch, and literary Chinese, this study contributes to a better understanding of the objects, mechanisms, and agents involved in early modern global trade. The Dutch trade in medicinal substances was representative of the inherently hybrid and intra-Asian nature of the goods and ideas brought to Japan by the VOC and its successors. The adaptation and consumption of these products engaged a diverse group of historical actors beyond the socio-political elite, most notably apothecaries and merchants who leveraged growing interest in “Dutch medicine” to sell their wares. As a whole, this dissertation dismantles the teleological and Eurocentric narratives of rangaku and “Dutch influence” that have informed so many histories of early modern and modern Japan, instead offering an understanding of medicine and medical knowledge that is shaped by global circulations, local practices, and the diversity of the early modern marketplace.

This dissertation delves into the evolution of the concept of newness in early imperial China, arguing that its emergence as a positive attribute was neither self-evident nor inevitable but the result of a deliberate intellectual construction spanning from the third century BCE to first century CE. The Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) is often perceived as a period of consolidation and stagnation, dominated by a sanctioned Confucian orthodoxy and marked by a perceived lack of innovation. Yet Han intellectuals actively theorized and valorized “newness” (xin 新), shaping a discourse that framed their own time as a moment of renewal and creative transformation.Drawing on a range of sources, including canonical texts, historiographical narratives, philosophical treatises, and court discussions, this dissertation seeks to reconstruct the intellectual and discursive landscape of the Han dynasty, uncovering perspectives that have been obscured by later historians and modern interpretive frameworks. It foregrounds key figures in the mid-to-late Western Han such as Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE), Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), and Huan Tan 桓譚 (ca. 23 BCE–56 CE), illuminating how their writings contribute to the construction of newness as both a rupture from the past and a continuation of traditions. Rather than merely reflecting historical change, the discourse of newness in this period functioned as a critical agent in shaping imperial ideology, historiography, and intellectual production. This dissertation thus reinterprets Han intellectual history by demonstrating that its scholars did not merely preserve or systematize earlier traditions but conceptualized their era as one of dynamic transformation. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on historical consciousness and intellectual renewal in imperial China, challenging narratives that marginalize the Han in accounts of Chinese intellectual history.

My dissertation is driven by the desire to understand time in the era of hypermediation, when images are no longer mimesis but the driving force for reality. Exploring Japanese cinema, photography, and critical thoughts from the 1960s to 1980s as well as the philosophy of time in the long 20th century, I theorize expressing time as a critical phenomenology of time that generates the affect of resistance to confront the technological maneuver of space-time, from the inception of storage media to the Cold War paradigm of cybernetics and system thinking.

This dissertation explores how people living in the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the latter half of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) dealt with illness. Doctor-based care has most often captured the attention of historians, but the proportion of time doctors physically spent with patients was dwarfed by that provided by domestic caregivers. To elucidate the medical landscape of Edo and describe how urban residents cared for sick family members, I draw from a rich body of family records. These include more than a dozen diaries and over fifty family records written between 1750 and 1868, composed by men and women of diverse social status and occupation such as samurai, commoners, popular authors, and doctors.

Chapter One illustrates how day-to-day management of illness was implemented by family members rather than by medical practitioners, demonstrating the key role of women as mobile caregivers and the ways in which illness bound families together. Chapter Two examines what sufferers consumed when they fell ill, revealing the importance of adjusting diet, self-medicating, and record keeping within the home. Chapter Three depicts the role of religious sites and therapies in the lives of Edo residents, showing the importance of family members’ prayer by proxy.

Against this backdrop of therapeutic options, Chapter Four explores how families interacted with medical practitioners by using the records of three Edo physicians to trace their daily routines. Diaries of families who hired physicians show that they often saw several doctors over the course of a single illness. Seeing a doctor was not a binary relationship between patient and practitioner but an enterprise that mobilized multiple family members. Chapter Five argues that illness in late Tokugawa Japan was a social event on the scale of weddings or births—one that could bring dozens of visitors to the home, all bringing gifts. In total, this dissertation contends that health care in early modern Japan was rooted in the family, and that the patterns of therapeutic practice seen in early modern diaries were fundamentally shaped by familial participation in illness management.

The Shuihu zhuan, or The Water Margin as it is usually rendered in English, is one of the major vernacular xiaoshuo novels of the Ming dynasty, and continues to be widely read today. Though little is known about its author or the circumstances of the production of its text, it is known that printed editions of it began to appear on the cusp of a major expansion in publishing activity in sixteenth-century China, and that the vernacular fiction genre flourished along with publishing. The Shuihu zhuan is a major example of both this genre and this publishing trend. Yet behind the very familiarity of its received text are a number of editions that served varying functions in their milieus. The aim of this dissertation is to follow the transformations that the Shuihu zhuan underwent as it appeared in these various incarnations as a means of highlighting some of the major shifts in publishing and modes of consumption of vernacular fiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To do so, I employ both historical analysis of the circumstances around the editions' publication and close readings of paratextual materials included in the editions themselves.

Though the novel would later be widely published at the hands of the commercial publishers and has come to be strongly associated with popular and commercial traditions, the earliest editions of the Shuihu zhuan were the products of official and private entities of the Jiajing-era elite. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I contextualize the Shuihu zhuan in this setting and attempt to uncover the social functions a work of the nascent genre of vernacular fiction served within these elite social circles and within the book culture of the era. I examine the overall publishing projects of these entities in order to determine the social space occupied by their output.
							
The following two chapters are concerned with later, commercial editions of the Shuihu zhuan. At the hands of editors and commentators, these editions were transformed in order to meet the tastes of wider audiences. Prefaces and commentaries aimed to shape the way the Shuihu zhuan was read. Secondary scholarship on the traditional fiction commentaries has typically treated them as an early form of exegetical literary criticism and an agent in the elevation of the vernacular fiction genre; in these chapters, I argue that the commentators appropriate elements of the novel in order to express their own ideas. Moreover, I show that by using vernacular fiction as a channel of expression, commentators reached large audiences outside the traditional literati class without governmental interference.

This study investigates Qing institutions and its ventures of conveying ideology in the eighteenth century. It begins with portraying the sovereign’s felt challenges from the scholar-officials’ placement. The Qianlong emperor’s solution utilized commissions to impose bureaucratic trials upon the candidates’ perceived merits. In particular, he made heavy use of the education commissions, which bridged literary policies between the imperial center and the provinces, as the premier venue of evaluation. The commissioners came with the best scholarly credentials. Their omnipresence in compilation, education, and examination tasks had brought ideological production and propagation together under the throne’s heedful observation. Empowered by this new role, the commissioned academicians were able to fulfill an ambitious vision of textual promulgation, moral cultivation, and literary training to achieve an unprecedented level of ideological conformity among the educated sector of the populace. They earned imperial attention and support as a result of the Qianlong emperor’s professionalized approach to a Yongzheng-era reform. In return, newly-minted Classical commentaries produced at the imperial court were distributed through these commissioners to reach the empire’s lettered communities. The outcome, proven by substantial reports, was positive in both the emperor and the commissioners’ favor. Invested in a reciprocal relationship, these commissioners’ efforts were intertwined with the state’s avid agenda for cultivation, education, and examination reforms. This process refreshes our knowledge about this era’s state capacity of ideological practice as well as the state’s institutional integration with scholarly elites during the Yongzheng-Qianlong continuum. The ideological activism of this era was motivated by multiple factors that were highly dependent on the institutional premises. Hence, it was developed as a governing tool as opposed to an imminent need or interest. I use the archives of memorials and edicts to describe and analyze the institutional precondition, logic, setup, function, and logistics of utilizing scholars and delivering ideas. I focus on the institutional changes and their impact on collective performance. I argue for a strong correlation between emperorship and organizational coherence in the use of intellectual projects and the intra-bureaucratic discussions on pertinent topics. Consequently, the institutions of conveying ideology became an organic part of the imperial rule.

In traditional narrative of Chinese literary history, Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) is arguably the “greatest poet of China,” and it was in the Song 宋 (960-1279) that his greatness was finally recognized. This narrative naturally presumes that the real Du Fu in history is completely accessible to us, which is not necessarily true.

This dissertation provides another perspective to understand Du Fu and the “greatness” of his poetry. I emphasize that the image of Du Fu that we now have is more of a persona that has been constructed from his available poetic texts. Poets in the Song Dynasty, especially those in the eleventh century, took initiative to construct this persona, and their construction of Du Fu was largely conditioned by their own literary and intellectual concerns.

The entire dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 investigates how Du Fu’s poetic collection emerged. His collection, as it was compiled and edited, not only provided a platform, but also set restrictions, for the construction of Du Fu. Chapter 2 examines how Du Fu used to be remembered before his collection took form. Memory of him before the eleventh century was considerably different from his received image. The remaining chapters focus on three major aspects of Du Fu’s persona – namely his images as a poet-historian, a master of poetic craft, and a Confucian poet – to analyze how and why Du Fu was constructed as such in the Song. Song poets accepted poetry as a medium loaded with valuable information, and they thus explored Du Fu’s poetry for history; they concerned themselves with issues pertaining to poetic craft, and retrospectively looked for examples in Du Fu’s poetry as established standards; they, as scholar-officials, committed themselves to the state, and declared Du Fu as their model. In sum, Song poets provided particular readings to Du Fu’s particular poems, and claimed these readings as the result of Du Fu’s intentional production. Through interpretation of Du Fu’s surviving poems, they constructed Du Fu as China’s greatest poet.

"Mediating Me: Digital Sociality and Smartphone Culture in Contemporary Japan" examines the relationships between Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphones, and shifting notions of sociality and selfhood in contemporary Japan, especially among youths. This dissertation is situated within Japan’s historical status as a pioneer in mobile communication during the 1990s, the rise in SNS usage following the Triple Disaster of March 11th, 2011, the start of the Reiwa era, and the heightened digital mediation necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid evolution of mobile communication and digital technologies vis-à-vis ongoing shifts in Japanese society motivates the research question that drives this dissertation: How can the digital serve as a lens in observing change and continuity in Japan, especially with regards to gender and identity? This dissertation is based on fieldwork conducted in Japan between August 2019 and August 2020, and remotely between August 2020 and October 2021. Through an integration of interview data, media analysis, and ethnographic vignettes called “Mediations,” this dissertation elucidates how perceived norms and moral standards centering on the embeddedness of the digital in everyday life are constantly (re)negotiated. Each chapter explores how digital platforms are used and imagined in different ways by different users, ranging from schoolgirls to Black Japanese youth activists. As each chapter demonstrates, the uses and imaginations of smartphone ownership and SNS usage are contingent on various factors, including but not limited to life stage and crisis. As a contribution to the burgeoning field of digital anthropology, this dissertation also highlights the indispensability of digital ethnography in an increasingly digitally mediated society—both prior to and during pandemic times. Although centering on Japan, this ethnography of smartphone and SNS usage contributes to broader understandings of digital sociality, digital embeddedness, transnational digital networks, and digital ethnographic methods.

This dissertation explores the invocation of the angry dead as both a social practice of genealogical imagination repeatedly thematized within Heian literary texts and as itself a narrative act whose structure generated a particular voice integral to the development of classical Japanese fiction. I argue that in the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, the process of becoming a powerful vengeful spirit, or even suffering as a victim of such a spirit, provided political, religious, and familial legitimacy in elite aristocratic culture. By closely investigating narrative techniques in a wide range of texts—from canonical literature, such as The Tale of Genji and Tale of Hōgen, to official historical chronicles, poems, and religious treatises—I trace a larger literary practice of invoking vengeful spirits as rhetorical devices in order to narrate the unspeakable, challenge stable meanings, and provide powerful genealogical links to the past, present, and future.

Chapter One delves into one of the most famous of all premodern narratives, The Tale of Genji. By closely examining the multiple roles of female narrators, I argue that women not only mediate the voices of vengeful spirits but that the emergence of these vengeful spirits facilitates the development of the narrative itself. Chapter Two continues to explore The Tale of Genji by illustrating the significance of kinship in the process of becoming a vengeful spirit and how connections to such spirits reinforce genealogical legitimacy. Chapter Three evaluates the writings of Jien, an archbishop from premodern Japan’s most powerful aristocratic family, the Fujiwara, further examining the interdependency between genealogical legitimacy, Buddhist rhetoric, and vengeful spirits by focusing on Jien’s written prayers and his historical account, Gukanshō. Chapter Four reconsiders writings related to one of the most feared vengeful spirits in Japanese history, Retired Emperor Sutoku, who publicly declared his intention to become a vengeful spirit and cursed his own descendants. In total, this dissertation constitutes the first comprehensive literary and historical analysis of vengeful spirits in premodern Japan and argues for understanding these spirits through the intertwined relationship between narration and genealogies.

This dissertation examines the historical evolution of Korean print culture by studying the ways in which the reading public expanded its boundary beyond the confines of canonical texts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this dissertation, I analyze the unexpected trajectory of the development of the Korean literary culture, which dynamically diversified its spectrum and encouraged the growth of new authors and readers, despite the powerful controlling mechanisms of the regime: the examinations and the police censorship from 1880 to 1931.

These dynamisms originated from the socio-cultural contexts of the nineteenth century. In Part One, I examine how elite kinship organizations, literati associations, and new religious groups sponsored new cultural activities without the requirement of the classical curriculum for passing the civil service examinations. In the late nineteenth century, these three indigenous institutions, which had accumulated cultural capital, began to access printing, using either the new machine press or old woodblock printing, to present their subcultures to wider audiences. My goal is to show that Korean culture was not homogeneous in the nineteenth century, despite its having looked so under the civil service examinations and police censorship. Korean vernacular language and classical Chinese both contributed to the diversity of literary culture by developing new genres, such as popular literature, pedagogy, statecraft study, and philology.

In Part Two, I investigate how the Korean society responded to powerful impacts from the outside after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The basic goal of Part Two is to contextualize the regime shift from the Chosŏn kingdom to the colonial empire in the context of Korean print culture. Under the Japanese occupation and colonization of Korea, the market economy, public school system, and the colonial empire dramatically transformed what Koreans read and how they wrote. The vernacularization of the literary culture proves that the interaction between the colonial regime and Koreans contained a complexity that cannot be simplified by nationalism. Indigenous writers adapted to the new regime and competed for profit and fame by projecting their books as the new vision of Korea. The complicated cooperation and negotiation between the regime and the society not only illustrates that the unexpected transgressions enriched Korean literary culture, but also suggests that Korean books were at the center of rivaling discourses and imaginations from the 1880s until the early 1930s.

This dissertation investigates Chinese impressions of Guangdong, the southernmost province of the Qing Empire (1644-1912), as an administrative or territorial unit, as a political concept, and—most importantly—as a source of identity. It interprets autobiographies, biographies, poems, literary letters, and political treatises as expressions of a new provincial identity informed by imperial decline, foreign ideas, and transcultural exchanges. By the beginning of the twentieth century, long before Guangdong would experiment with capitalism and economic decentralization in the 1980s and 1990s, its literati were already grappling with the issues of local autonomy, state control, and self-representation. By examining the writings of five literati who experienced China’s tumultuous transition from empire to nation—He Ruzhang 何如璋 (1838-1891), Deng Chengxiu 鄧承修 (1841-1892), Qiu Fengjia 丘逢甲 (1864-1912), Ou Jujia 歐榘甲 (1870-1911), and Liang Jushi 梁居實 (1843-1911)—this dissertation explores the historical context of the autonomy of contemporary Chinese provinces. It suggests that narrating a history of provincial identity and central-local relations outside the purview of statist and nation-centric perspectives can infuse fresh insights into tired historiographical and political credos about reform and revolution as well as provide an example that would supplement studies of nationalism of other parts of the world. Created in its current form during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties, Guangdong has developed a life of its own. It represents a locus for identity that is simultaneously cultural, ethnic, political, and personal. This dissertation thus focuses less on textual representations than on the personal inventions of provincial identity by selected Guangdong literati. Although marginal to the dominant discourses on state-oriented reform and revolution of their day, the vision of Chinese provincialism articulated by these literati accompanied the rise of ethnic Han nationalism. Through them, this dissertation explores the provincial roots of China’s national identity. It demonstrates how provincialism was fused with nationalist ideas in the late Qing Empire and has continued to influence debates on culture, history, and statecraft in contemporary China.

In this dissertation I set out to question the status of the Analects (Lunyu 論語, or The Selected Sayings) as the most authoritative source of Confucius's teachings and, in the process, to rethink Confucius's place in early Chinese intellectual history.

Part one is a roadmap to the thousands of Confucius sayings preserved in the early corpus. It includes an in-depth discussion of Confucius quotation markers as well as a comprehensive list of texts that quote Confucius. In the course of the chapter, I argue that Confucius quotation before the advent of the <italic>Analects</italic> was a dynamic, creative practice in which authors treated Confucius sayings as venues for the re-performance of inherited wisdom.
							
Part two presents the main argument for revising the dating of the Analects based on a reverse chronological survey of Confucius quotation practice in the early period. I conclude the chapter with the argument that the Analects was compiled between the 150s and 130s BCE, roughly three centuries later than the traditional account would have it.
							
Part three brings the focus back to the <italic>Analects</italic> itself to read the text as a product of a Western Han political, intellectual, and textual milieu. The chapter develops as a series of nine case studies, each of which identifies a different compilation strategy employed by the <italic>Analects<italic> compilers. 
							
In a concluding chapter, I synthesize the arguments of the first three parts and discuss the implications of my findings for the study of early Chinese thought. In an epilogue, I also develop one concrete scenario for the creation of a Western Han <italic>Analects</italic>.

This dissertation explores the steel manufacturing industry’s place in the media culture of South Korea from the 1960s to the present, by covering a series of pioneering yet little-known media experiments led by Pohang Iron and Steel Company (now POSCO), South Korea’s oldest and largest integrated steel producer. While remaining attentive to the ways that steel-industry corporate media was mobilized within the rubric of Cold War geopolitics, I call attention to a central node for mapping an alternative media network that it belongs to: industry. I use the notion to reflect on specific technologies used by workers of any field, and their resultant bodily experiences, which formulate the aesthetics of corporate media produced within that industry. Therefore, I start from the question of what the steel industry is to begin with, in order to understand its industrial media aesthetics. To demonstrate how the blooming of the steel industry marks a watershed moment in the media culture of South Korea, I focus on Pohang Iron and Steel Company’s construction of integrated steel mills completed in 1973, where all the steps of steel manufacturing, from smelting iron ore to producing steel plates, were carried out in linearly connected facilities for the first time in South Korean metal-processing history. On the government promotion level, the integrated steel mill was narrativized as the unenlightened subject’s transformation into a “steel-willed” earnest citizen, willingly sacrificing for the nation. However, steelworkers’ training manuals, diagrams, and essays were emphasizing how the very linear structure of the integrated steel mill opened up encounters with the extreme temperamentality of metal that they had never experienced in non-integrated steel mills. I see this ambiguous linearity as key evidence for reading the steel industry as a site where the intersection of the human and the nonhuman is foregrounded, belying the formulation of steel manufacturing as the epitome of a regime leader’s successful leadership. Accordingly, I probe how the steelworker’s sensorial experience at the Pohang Iron and Steel Company’s integrated steel mill has formulated its corporate media aesthetics until today, transcending the presumed boundaries of industrialist and post-industrialist society as well as the periodization of the Cold War and post-Cold War.

This dissertation focuses on the religious commitments of the Peng clan of Suzhou. From the early to mid-Qing dynasty (1644-1911) the Pengs were arguably the most successful corporate lineage in the entire empire in terms of civil examination performance. They were also pioneers of a charitable style of status justification in which the Pengs explained their worldly success as divine reward for their good works. By the early eighteenth century, many of the Pengs’ peers and social inferiors promulgated their claims as well. In the thriving genre of morality books (shanshu) particularly successful Peng patriarchs served as iconic shorthand for the terrestrial reward of civil examination success for philanthropic acts. Examination hopefuls and morality book consumers throughout the empire sought to obtain a portion of the prosperity of the Pengs by emulating their charitable commitments.

Drawing on source materials ranging from autobiographies and genealogies to the transcripts of spirit-writing sessions, I focus my study on the pivotal figure of Peng Dingqiu (1645-1719). Dingqiu’s 1676 optimus distinction and self-presentational strategy were critical in the consolidation of the concrete and symbolic power of the Peng lineage. Exploring the role of spirit-writing altars in intra-elite relations, I argue that Dingqiu’s claim of a prophecy of his civil examination success had wide ranging consequences for his descendants and his own posthumous persona. In documenting the collective devotional commitments of the Peng lineage in realms such as a tower complex devoted to the deity Wenchang and local Daoist institutions, I provide a nuanced portrait of elite religiosity and its impact on the late imperial cityscape. Simultaneously, I use attention to the familial lineage in order to explain the centrality of religious modes of discourse in elite self-organization.
							
A descriptive catalog of works by Peng lineage members from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries illustrates the scope of members’ cultural impact and provides a basis for understanding how successive generations represented their ancestors through editorial and publishing endeavors.

Throughout the late imperial period, conflict and disunity in Chinese politics were tied to a lack of consensus in classical scholarship. As the civil examinations grew in importance, intellectual partisanship and political factionalism became inextricably intertwined.

Generations of Chinese scholars during the Song-Yuan-Ming-Qing dynasties recognized this problem and many sought a solution, while some Late Ming intellectuals resigned to individualism and relativism. Partly in reaction to such Late Ming trends, Qing dynasty scholarship developed methods and techniques that used textual evidence to forge indisputable consensus in the reading and interpretation of classical texts.

Qing evidential research in Canton was at its nineteenth century peak when scholars like Fang Dongshu (1772-1851) and Chen Li (1810-1882) began to question it. They declared the movement’s attempt to establish intellectual consensus a failure and viewed the exclusivist values of its methodology as the cause of that failure. They also traced this exclusionism back to Cheng-Zhu daoxue in the Song-Ming dynasties and argued that it was being perpetuated in Qing dynasty evidential research.

This dissertation systematizes these exclusivist values under the label of a “lineage orientation” in Chinese classicism and politics. It then demonstrates how nineteenth century Chinese scholars countered the lineage orientation with methodological innovation in the pursuit of variations on the concept of pluralism. The notion of pluralism, as a solution to disunity and partisanship, was then further developed by Gu Jiegang (1893-1980) and others in Republican China.