Crip China

“Thoughtfully contextualizing ableism and disability, Crip China reinterprets Chinese literature, generating new critical disability studies methodologies and insights. Cogent analyses, an impressive source base, and attention to crip authors distinguish Hangping Xu’s work. Of equal importance, this highly original book details and practices deep ethics of care.” - Susan Burch, author of Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions, Professor of American Studies and former director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Middlebury College

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“A tour de force with incisive theoretical intervention and brilliant literary analyses, Crip China: Ablenationalism and Disability Aesthetics compellingly demonstrates that disability functions as a narrative modality through which history itself has been written. Rather than a marginal concern of a marginalized group, the book argues that over the long twentieth century, the disabled bodymind has been a productive and malleable trope to shore up the ableist and masculinist project of Chinese national sovereignty. Engaging the cutting-edge theory of ‘crip aesthetics, ’ the author Hangping Xu develops a critical genealogy of the ideological tensions that underlie the formation and canonization of modern Chinese literature. Beginning with the formative moment of the modern Chinese nation-state and with canonical writers such as Lu Xun and Xiao Hong, Crip China goes on to examine the many twists and turns over the decades in political, cultural, legal arenas, concluding in the final chapter on the contemporary poet Yu Xiuhua and her phenomenal rise in international popularity. The close examination of the complexity of the trope of the disabled bodymind demonstrates that it can both facilitate as well as subvert grand narratives of national, revolution and state capitalism. In addition to bringing a fresh and creative perspective to the study of modern China, this work makes significant contributions to critical debates in disability studies, ecocriticism, world literature, and translation studies.

This is also a deeply moving book, in large measure owing to the effectiveness of the author’s own practice of ‘paranoid and reparative’ reading, mobilizing the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of trust, the former to reveal the operations of ablenationalism, the latter to reveal moments of resistance and alternative world making. Such a dual reading practice requires as much heart as intellect work. And the resulting book is a rare and welcome change to the usual style of academic writing. Both its content and its form contribute to the enterprise of crip aesthetic in imagining a differently conceived and differently felt human society.” - Hu Ying, Professor of Chinese literature and feminist theories at the University of California, Irvine, author of Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China (2000) and Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship, and Loss (2016).

Hangping Xu University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

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