Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Comparative Literature at Stanford University
Conference co-organizer
Before coming to Stanford in 2009, Haiyan Lee taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Hong Kong, and held post-doctoral fellowships at Cornell University and Harvard University. Her first book, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950, is a critical genealogy of the idea of “love” (qing) in modern Chinese literary and cultural history. It was awarded the 2009 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies for the best English-language book on post-1900 China. It is the first recipient of this prize in the field of modern Chinese literature.
Her second book, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, examines how the figure of “the stranger”—foreigner, migrant, class enemy, woman, animal, ghost—in Chinese fiction, film, television, and exhibition culture tests the moral limits of a society known for the primacy of consanguinity and familiarity.
Her third book, A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination investigates Chinese visions of “justice” at the intersection of narrative, law, and ethics.
She is working on a new project on animism, cognition, and the Chinese environmental imagination.
Panel 4 | Global and Planetary Implications from China Studies
To Kill a Tiger: On Fearing Ferocious Animals in the Anthropocene
Abstract
Rewilding has in recent decades become a central plank of the modern conservation movement in recognition of apex predators’ status as keystone species of ecosystems. But besides ecological reasons, are there any affective, moral, and existential justifications for rewilding programs? Why do we want to reintroduce dangerous predators to our world and potentially put humans and their domesticated animals at risk?
In this paper, I explore the emotional and existential dimensions of our fascination with charismatic megafauna. I contrast the centrality of reverential fear in traditional and indigenous ways of living with wild nature with the sentimental love that drives animal advocacy and the modern environmental movement. I draw my primary sources from four locations: 1) the story of an American man who lived with grizzly bears in Alaska for over a decade before he was eaten by them (Grizzly Man); 2) the story of a warrior who beats a man-eating tiger to a pulp from a 14th-century Chinese novel (Water Margin); 3) The battle against a tiger scourge in rural Hunan in the 1950s; 4) the killing of a tiger by villagers defending their livestock in a 21st-century novel set in the Sundarbans (The Hungry Tide).
Guiding my engagement with these sources are the following questions: What should be the affective basis for an ethics of interspecies coexistence? Why is it important to protect dangerous predators not just out of love but also out of fear? In the last analysis, why is fear good—for them and for us?
