E-Books →Homesickness Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China

Rojas focuses on a condition he calls "homesickness"―referring to a discomfort caused not by a longing for home but by an excessive proximity to it. The product of a dialectics of internal alienation and self-differentiation, this inverse homesickness marks a movement away from the "home," conceived as spaces associated with the nation, the family, and the individual body. The result is a productive dynamism that gives rise to the possibility of long-term health. Without sickness, in other words, there could be no health.
Through a set of detailed analyses of works from China, Greater China, and the global Chinese diaspora―ranging from late-imperial figures such as Liu E and Zeng Pu to contemporary figures such as Yan Lianke and Tsai Ming-liang―Rojas asserts that the very possibility of health is predicated on this condition of homesickness.