Affective Oceanscapes: Contextualising Oceanic Feeling in Chinese Cultural History

Abstract

This thesis presents an alternative history of the emergence of Chinese blue culture, focusing on intellectuals and writers’ cultural and affective engagements with the rapidly changing oceanscape from the Qing dynasty to the present. Developing a framework based on a genealogical investigation of the transformative structures of feeling, I focus on close readings of literary works of late Qing Chinese literati through to (post-)socialist and contemporary writers and creative art projects. In considering the ways in which these intellectuals and writers worked tactically in the interplay of the controversial state policies and mundane lives, this thesis also seeks to illuminate a relational politics that questions ordinary-spectacle disjuncture, while building nuanced connections between affects, attention, and engagement with the oceanic.To unfold such politics, my contextual and conjunctural analysis uses concepts developed across the works of Raymond Williams and Lawrence Grossberg, among other cultural and literary theorists. This theoretical basis is extended in dialogue with blue cultural studies that “bring[s] together analyses of geopolitics and wet ontologies with literature [and culture]” (Deloughrey 2019a, 21). In this way, this study is both a history of intellectual interventions within the changing relationship between China and the oceans, as well as a reflection on how such a history could be narrated differently. While advancing a Chinese interpretation of the ocean world, it is also self-conscious about the act of its own interpretation, theoretically addressing the situatedness of different forms of knowledge, the contingency of its own propositions, and the material effects of epistemological and affective works.