France/China: Intercultural Imaginings

China has long been an object of fascination for the French, who celebrated their annee de la Chine in 2004. Symptomatic of that fascination are the movements into China made by groups as diverse as the Jesuits, who arrived in L'Empire du Milieu in the late seventeenth century, and the Tel Quel intellectuals, whose will to political pilgrimage took them to the People's Republic in 1974. Symptomatic, too, are the narrative and visual representations of China offered by such as Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, Paul Claudel, Michel Leiris, Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Malraux, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Marc Riboud. In this penetrating study, Alex Hughes explores models of intercultural encounter between France and China elaborated in the modern French cultural arena. Locating forms of bodily experience as critical to that encounter, she reflects on its forms and foundations.