Description
Why are disabled characters ubiquitous across modern Chinese literature from its very inception? How can we explain this persistent aesthetic investment in disability? In Crip China: Ablenationalism and Disability Aesthetics, Hangping Xu offers a compelling account of Chinese modernism and modernity through the lens of disability, or what he calls “a cripistemology of modern China.” Central to the book is a critique of “ablenationalism” as a recurring ideology in modern China: a national fantasy that imagines ideal citizens as productive, disciplined, often masculine, and physically or mentally able. Within this cultural logic, Xu argues, disability repeatedly emerges as a thematic and aesthetic device that shores up normative subjectivities always already on the verge of collapse. Through close readings of literature, film, and digital media, he shows how disability at once sustains and disrupts this national fantasy. Refusing to reduce disability to stock narratives of pathology, pity, and pathos, Xu explores it as an intersectional political identity and embodied experience—one that enables new forms of collectivity and articulates an ethic of care for a more hospitable world beyond ablenationalism. By placing modern Chinese literary studies in conversation with critical disability studies, Crip China both rereads the modern Chinese canon and reorients disability studies beyond its Euro-American genealogy. Comparative in scope and method, the book also brings crip Chinese literature into broader debates in comparative literature and world literature.