Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains

Description

In the eighteenth century, multiple migratory groups with competing political ambitions converged on the Mekong plains. In the frontier region, literati‐officials of a territorially expanding Vietnamese state crossed paths with a network of diasporic Chinese Ming loyalists closely affiliated with the coastal trading network. Drawing on vernacular Vietnamese and classical Chinese sources, Claudine Ang identifies the different ways two leading statesmen of the time employed literature to transform the frontier region. In their rival cultural projects, we see the clash between the aspirations of Vietnamese and Chinese migrants. Ang shows how a bawdy play, in which a lascivious monk turns his charms on an unsuspecting nun, acted as a vehicle for differentiating Vietnamese lowlanders from their neighbors, and she uncovers in a suite of landscape poems coded messages aimed at founding a new Ming loyalist stronghold on the Mekong delta. Through its close reading of satirical drama and landscape poetry, Poetic Transformations captures a historical moment of overlapping visions, frustrated schemes, and contested desires on the Mekong plains. Poetic Transformations: Eighteenth-Century Cultural Projects on the Mekong Plains Contents List of Maps Acknowledgments Note on Translation Introduction: Cultural Projects on the Southern Vietnamese Frontier PART I. DRAMA ON THE FRONTIER 1. Frontier Humor and the Inadequacies of Orthodoxy 2. The Classical in the Vernacular 3. The Illness of Human Emotions PART II. LYRICS AND LANDSCAPES 4. Writing Landscapes into Civilization: Ming Loyalist Ambitions on the Mekong Plains 5. Epistolary Expositions: Geopolitical Realities on the Delta 6. A Vietnamese Reimagining of a Chinese Enclave Epilogue: Deaths of Authors, Lives of Texts Appendix: Translation of Nguyen Cu Trinh’s Sãi Vãi (A Monk and a Nun), 1750 Works Cited Index Harvard East Asian Monographs