This panel investigates the complex processes of literati identity formation in pre-14th century China, where the performance of scholarly status required continuous negotiation between personal ambition and systemic constraints. It contributes to existing scholarship framing literati identity as a dynamic construct—simultaneously textual, spatial, and political—by examining how these dimensions interacted across different historical moments. Our session offers four critical junctures where literati defined and redefined their roles through creative engagements with tradition, landscape, and institutional power.
The rationale for this panel emerges from three scholarly needs:
- To move beyond binary analyses of literati as either political actors or cultural producers by examining how identity was performed across multiple registers;
- To foreground material and spatial practices (e.g., garden-building) as equally vital to identity formation as textual production;
- To trace continuities in identity negotiation from the medieval (Sou Shenji) to the 14th Century (Yuan gardens), moving beyond periodization boundaries.
Session Structure (105-minute format):
- Introductory framing by presider (5 min)
- Four 15-minute papers (60 min total)
- Synthesized Q&A prioritizing interdisciplinary dialogue (25 min)
- Unstructured discussion (15 min)
Individual Contributions:
Leihua Weng (Kalamazoo College) opens with “Scholars as the Alien Kind: Knowledge and Power in Sou Shenji (In Search of the Supernatural),” demonstrating how 4th-century Sou Shenji used fox spirits to represent the literati’s practices in the existing monopoly structure of knowledge. Her analysis of supernatural narratives reveals early tensions between meritocratic ideals and hereditary privilege that would persist in Chinese power structures for centuries.
Chengjuan Sun (Kenyon College) demonstrates in her “Xin Qiji’s lyrics done in jest” how 12th-century geopolitical marginalization transformed poetic play into a coping mechanism for political realities. Her paper intersects with Weng’s through their shared focus on outsider literati, but highlights how performative genres like xizuo enabled both subversive critique and psychological resilience within constrained political environments.
Wanhan Xing (University of Michigan) in her “Gardens, Textuality, and the City: Identity Building in Middle-Period China” discusses in her how Northern Song Luoyang gardens served as contested spaces where exiled literati renegotiated “centrality” through bodily engagement with curated nature. The application of Genette’s epitext theory innovatively connects print culture’s temporal effects to spatial practices.
Zhenxing Zhao (SUTD) shifts focus to Yuan dynasty material culture in his “'Man Honors the Mountain’: Yang Weizhen (1296-1370) and the Aesthetic Turn in Literati Self-Fashioning.” Through Yang Weizhen’s garden writing, he reveals how literati aestheticized political disengagement, using landscape design to articulate new scholarly subjectivities that influenced Ming-Qing garden culture.
Diversity Statement:
Our panel brings together early-career and senior scholars from R1 universities, liberal arts colleges, and international institutions. Geographically, we represent research traditions from North America, Asia, and comparative literature studies. Methodologically, the papers balance close reading (Weng, Sun), material culture analysis (Xing, Zhao), and theoretical innovation (Xing).
Our panel works on premodern intellectual cultures to examine how literati strategically navigated their social worlds—through self-fashioning, institutional negotiation, and creative adaptation of tradition. By situating our discussion at MLA, we aim to foster dialogue between sinologists and scholars of European/global early modernities about comparative approaches to scholarly agency, particularly how marginalized or dissenting voices employed textual, spatial, and performative strategies to claim authority.