Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University
Born in Beijing, China, Tie Xiao took his BA at Peking University before coming to the United States for doctoral studies. He received his PhD from University of Chicago and held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research explores the nexus of psycho-scientific, literary, and popular imaginations about the configuration of the mind, channels of communication, and fantasies of intimate bonding in modern China.
Trained as a literary scholar, he specializes in modern Chinese literature and its engagement with scientific, philosophical, and political contexts. His scholarly monograph, Revolutionary Waves: The Crowd in Modern China, (Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2017), analyzes the centrality of the crowd in the Chinese cultural and political imagination and its global resonances by delving into a wide range of fiction, philosophy, poetry, and psychological studies. Bringing together literary studies, intellectual history, critical theory, and the history of human sciences, this interdisciplinary work highlights unexplored interactions among emerging social-scientific forms of knowledge, new aesthetic modes of representation, and changing political imperatives. The book was translated into Chinese by the author himself.
Tie is also an award-winning writer and translator. He has published two novels and a number of short stories in Chinese. His debut novel won the Bing Xin Literature Prize, and his short stories have been nominated for the Lu Xun Literary Prize and the Yu Dafu Literary Prize. He translated Raymond Carver’s Cathedral and Alice Munro’s fiction as well as a variety of studies on Chinese art history by Wu Hung.
Panel 3| Science, Industry, and the Logics of Reform
Valences of Xinli: Hypnotism in Modern China
Abstract
Largely forgotten in the studies of modern Chinese intellectual history, hypnotism (催眠术 cuimian shu), when it does come to scholars’ attention, is usually written off as a “pseudo”-scientific hoax or a retrogressive throwback to shamanistic mediumism and occultism.
This anachronistic characterization overlooks the fact that widespread engagement with hypnotism in early twentieth-century China emerged in a scientific and intellectual context where the very boundaries of plausibility and implausibility, the normal and the pathological, and proper practice and fringe aberration, were being disputed.
My talk traces the variegated pathways along which the imported knowledge of hypnosis acquired meaning in modern China and explores the longings and anxieties that the hypnotic thinking mobilized.
Intrinsically bound up with the socio-political discourse of xinli 心力 (mind-force), the heightened enthusiasm for hypnotism, I argue, provides us a focal point to explore the wider nexus of psycho-scientific, literary, and popular discussions about configurations of the mind, channels of communication, and fantasies of intimate bonding.
