Learning to Love: Intimacy and the Discourse of Development in China

Learning to Love explores the embodied, relational, affective, and sociopolitical project of learning to love at a popular "mind-body-spirit" bookstore and practice space in northeast China. It examines how new horizons of possibility are opened as people interact with one another and with a range of aesthetic objects, and how these exercises in physical, mental, and spiritual self-care allow participants to grapple with past social harms and forms of injustice, how historical systems of power continue in the present, and how they might be transformed in the future.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 31 July 2024
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

Learning to Love presents a diverse range of viewpoints on the embodied, relational, affective, and sociopolitical endeavor of "learning to love" at the New Life Center for Holistic Growth, a well-known "mind-body-spirit" bookstore and practice space in northeast China during the early 21st century. This intimate form of self-care coexists with the fast-paced, expanding capitalist society of contemporary China and has emerged as a comprehensible response to the demands of Chinese industrialized life in the early 21st century. The book begins with an examination of the complex ways newcomers to the center experienced a sense of being "off" in and with the world at multiple scales. Learning to Love then explores how new horizons of possibility are opened as people engage with one another and with a variety of aesthetic objects at New Life. Author Sonya Pritzker draws upon the core concepts of scalar intimacy—a participatory, discursive process in which individuals position themselves in relation to others as well as dominant ideologies, concepts, and ideals—and scalar inquiry—the process through which speakers interrogate these forms, their relationship with them, and their participation in reproducing them. In demonstrating the collaborative interrogation of culture, history, and memory, she examines how these exercises in physical, mental, and spiritual self-care allow participants to grapple with past social harms and forms of injustice, how historical systems of power continue in the present, and how they might be transformed in the future. By examining the interactions and relational experiences from New Life, Learning to Love offers a range of novel theoretical interventions into political subjectivity, temporality, and intergenerational trauma/healing.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472076864