This interdisciplinary panel examines how individuals and communities across different historical periods and cultural contexts have imagined, practiced, and negotiated forms of bodily and mental liberation through space, embodiment, and discourse. Bringing together work on Tang poetry, Song somatic literature, Ming Qing narrative, and contemporary activist philosophy, the session asks how freedom is pursued not in abstraction but through situated engagements with the worlds people inhabit: sacred mountains, the internal body, domestic religious interiors, and collective spaces of social transformation. The panel is united by a shared concern with emancipatory narratives as historically embedded efforts to create livable forms of agency, solace, and resistance under constraint, rather than stories of escape.

The session speaks to the 2027 MLA presidential theme by showing that liberation is rarely imagined as pure release from history, power, or social structure. The papers show that emancipatory narratives emerge within conditions of entanglement: political proximity, exile, gendered enclosure, and the labor of building new worlds. The panel contributes to scholarship on religion, literature, gender, philosophy, and affect by shifting attention away from freedom as an achieved state and toward emancipation as a process of negotiation, reorientation, and world making. Across different archives, the presenters show how texts and practices produce spaces in which new relations to the self, to others, and to power can be imagined. The presider will offer brief introductions and moderate discussion. Each paper will be allotted twelve minutes, leaving at least fifteen minutes for discussion.

Yiyi Luo’s paper, “Writing Songshan: Poetry, Transcendence, and Political Power in Tang China,” examines how Tang poets, especially Li Bai, write Songshan as a site where religious aspiration, literary imagination, and political proximity become inseparable. Long established as a Daoist sacred mountain, Songshan was not merely a place of retreat from the world. Its central location, dense religious communities, associations with transcendence, and closeness to Luoyang made it a space where the pursuit of liberation could intersect with courtly ambition. Reading poems on Songshan alongside the mountain’s earlier sacred history, the paper argues that Tang poetry presents transcendence not as a purely private or otherworldly ideal, but as something pursued within a charged landscape shaped by imperial ritual, hagiographic memory, local practitioners, and networks linking poets, religious communities, and the court. Liberation here is lived, desired, negotiated, and sometimes compromised.

Wanmeng Li’s paper, “Affect and Interoception in the Context of Daoist Inner Alchemical Literature,” turns to the interior body. The paper reinterpreting Su Shi’s neidan poetry through Affect Theory and Interoception and argues that he uses inner alchemical writing as a bodily technique for reshaping sensation and regulating affect. Looking closely at poems drawing on Daoist language and imagery, Li shows how vague visceral experience becomes visualized, spatialized, and aesthetically charged. The paper reveals an interoceptive literary discourse in which inner bodily processes become sites of cognitive restructuring and emotional survival. In the context of exile and deprivation, neidan poetry emerges as a form of affective alchemy, transforming physiological intensity into a self-sustaining mode of inner pleasure and resilience.

Xu Ma’s paper, “At Home, Out of the World: Women and Domestic Religious Spaces in Late Imperial Chinese Narrative,” focues on gendered interior space in Ming Qing literature. Drawing on biographical writings, biji, vernacular stories, drama, and fiction, the paper examines how women fashioned domestic religious spaces as sites of refuge, withdrawal, and alternative world- making at home. Through the paradox of “leaving home” while remaining at home, these narratives explore laywomen’s transformation of inner chambers into alternative monastic worlds. Ma argues that such self-fashioned boudoir temples did not merely reinforce the Confucian division between inner and outer space. They also enabled women to pursue redemption and enlightenment while renegotiating conjugal relations, personal agency, and gender hierarchy from within the structures that confined them.

Jessica Zu’s paper, “Practicing New Worlds: Daodejing in Grace Lee Boggs’ Processual Philosophy of Nondomination,” brings the panel into modern and contemporary thought by examining Grace Lee Boggs’s philosophical and activist practice. Focusing on Boggs’s Daodejing informed vision of relational nondomination, the paper analyzes how Chinese philosophical resources are reworked within Black freedom struggle, community activism, and ecological and social justice movements in the United States. Rather than treating emancipation as solely oppositional, Zu shows how Boggs and those influenced by her imagine liberation as an ongoing practice of rebuilding relations, transforming consciousness, and creating sustainable collective worlds. This paper broadens the panel’s archive and chronology while reinforcing its central claim: emancipatory narratives emerge through concrete practices of inhabiting, remaking, and thinking space differently.