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In this well-researched study on the subject of sympathy, modernity, and Chinese pain, Eric Hayot attempts to locate China's place in the history of sympathy and suffering through a detailed examination of "Chinese pain" as a condition conceived by the West. Hayot's argument is based on the premise that the "relationship between sympathy and humanity makes a difference to the history of Western thought," and he thus attempts to trace and recognize the range of ways in which a Western perspective that was oriented around China helped to establish the centrality of the West to the history it writes (p. 8). This is what the author has termed as an "ecliptic" relationship between China and the West (pp. 11-12). In putting forward this framework, Hayot has deployed a novel approach to take up the challenge of using this relationship in an effort to engage with the wider debates on and about Asian modernity or modernities.
Given the innovativeness of Hayot's framework, his work fits into the scholarship of an already well-established field of comparative literary studies that has attempted to understand and locate China's relationship to the West. Moreover, it endeavours to engage with the broader scholarship that has sought to examine and capture the importance of emotions, the body, punishments, and medicine as examples of the ways in which pain is represented, understood, and refracted. In this regard, the introduction sets out how the concept of pain in itself cannot be reduced to the language that is used to describe it or how one thinks about the dynamic relationships between pain, language, and Chineseness.
Chapter 2 demonstrates how the evocation of sympathetic pain in relation to the image of a Chinese person is captured through a dynamic interaction between English writing and Chinese images (p. 84). Through an examination of George Henry Mason's two illustrative books, The Costume of China (1800) and The Punishments of China (1801), this chapter seeks to establish the performative and epistemological...