Welcome to our 89th issue. This volume consists of two articles, a book review, write-ups of the two winners of Ming Studies Book Prize, and Ming News.
The two articles in this volume are at the intersection of philosophy, history, and literature. Both are intrigued with how their subjects took the old and familiar and brought to it a new meaning by which they explored the world in a new light. Both also focus on the ongoing discussions in questions about identity, the self, and one’s innate place in the world.
Paolo Santangelo in his article “Self-cultivation According to Li Zhi and Its Paradoxes” returns to Li Zhi after his earlier exploration in volumes 85–86. Here he focuses on the question of selfishness and explores how this paradoxically was the method by which Li Zhi opens up a useful intellectual tool that allows one to ground an ethical morality and bring betterment to man and society. He explores this in tandem with Li’s use of Buddhist (+Wang Ji) emptiness as a means of liberating oneself from the shackles of conformity, bias, and authoritarianism.
Minaru Takano in “Military Migration and the Poetics of Place: Migrant Literature of Li Dongyang (1447–1516)” looks at a different question: who was Li Dongyang and how long did it take for him to become this person? The question for Dr. Takano is to what extent did Li, the founder of the “Chaling” School of poetry, embody a Chaling (Hunan) identity or to what degree had he acclimatized and become a Beijing ren? Dr. Takano explores the complexities of a poet aware of and negotiating with the distance between his grandfather’s hometown and his own residence in Beijing, while revisiting key moments that impacted that negotiation.
Both articles also display an awareness of an extension of the Ming into the present. In the work of Li Zhi, Santangelo highlights how Li Zhi is a philosopher of importance to our own time and place. Takano subtly puts down a question that every migrant needs deal with: when do you call home the place you end up in?
We next turn to the write-up for the Geiss-Hsu Ming Book Prizes. Established through a grant from the Geiss-Hsu Foundation, the committee (comprised of Anne Gerritsen, David Robinson, and Sarah Schneewind) chose two outstanding books for recognition this year. For Best First Book, the committee selected Yuhang Li’s Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China. For the Best Overall in Ming Studies, they selected Lynn Struve’s The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World.
Fang Jun’s review of Timothy Brook’s The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China follows.
We end with Ming News, with listings of conferences, workshops, and talks on the Ming. (As always, you are invited to send information to the editor at Ming Studies about Ming activities that are going on.
We’ll see you next volume.