University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
Writing Pirates: Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China
In Writing Pirates, Yuanfei Wang connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called "Japanese pirates" raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories, and fiction of the period jointly narrate pirates and China's Orient in maritime Asia. Wang shows that the late Ming discourses of pirates and the sea were fluid, ambivalent, and dialogical; they simultaneously entailed imperialistic and personal narratives of the "other": foreigners, renegades, migrants, and marginalized authors. At the center of the discourses, early modern concepts of empire, race, and authenticity were intensively negotiated. Connecting late Ming literature to the global maritime world, Writing Pirates expands current discussions of Chinese diaspora and debates on Sinophone language and identity.
Figure 1. The late Ming artist Chen Hongshou’s 陳洪綬 (1598–1652) delineation of the bandit hero Zhang Shun, from his collection ‘The Water Margin’ Playing Titles 水滸葉子 (c.a. 1630). The inscription reads: “White Streak in the Wave Zhang Shun, born in the Xunyang River, died in the Qiantang River” 浪裏白跳張順,生潯陽死錢塘. See Chen Hongshou 陳洪綬, Shuihu yezi 水滸葉子 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1979).
Figure 2. Chen Hongshou’s portrayal of the Chinese pirate Li Jun. The inscription reads: “River-Stirring Dragon Li Jun, living by the sea, followed by his people” 混江龍李俊,居海濱,有民人. See Chen Hongshou, Shuihu yezi.
x
This site requires cookies to function correctly.