Thinking

A vibrant, insightiful introduction to the celebrated Chinese novel 

Journey to the West (西遊記), the dazzling Chinese novel beloved by young and old, has enjoyed five hundred years of renown, spawning endless adaptation in texts, images, operas, video games, and even multiple Netflix series. Surprisingly, there has never been a specialized monograph nor introduction in English dedicated to the novel itself, until now. With infectious enthusiasm and lucid erudition, Andrew Hui introduces for the first time the immense delights and profound wisdom of this 16th century novel. 

At the center of the story is the irascibly charismatic Monkey, or Sun Wukong. Through his heaven-storming, shape-shifting, move fast and break things velocity, this trickster figure par excellence is the very embodiment of our “monkey-mind”: our ceaseless craving for the dopamine fix, a certain deep-seated yearning for new adventures, the visceral urge to smash stale social conventions. 

A succinct primer, The Marvelous Universe of Journey to the West opens up the incandescent world of the novel for a new generation of readers. Drawing on recent movements in literary studies—ecocritism, gender and sexuality, food studies, animal-human interspecies interaction, the bureaucratic turn—Hui explains the book’s allegory of spiritual enlightenment, regime of sexual abstinence, its comic satire, its profound truths about human sexuality and perfectibility. A story about the dispossessed, marginalized, and demonized, Journey to the West exemplifies a sort of plurilingual, multicultural cosmopolitanism that is deeply resonate with our fractured, global world today. 

Why do we look at works of art? Why do we look at animals?

This book projects investigates the origins and functions of two institutions—the museum and the zoo. At heart it is an inquiry into Foucault’s claim of “hetereotopias:” places where everything is collected, the “general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravage.” For Foucault, zoos and museums are uniquely inventions of modernity. I put this claim under critical examination: certainly people collected things and wanted to encapsulate everything in one place in antiquity and kings and popes had menageries of animals before the nineteenth-century. Yet the zoo and museum, no doubt, are entangled in nineteenth-century European expansion: Empire, Enlightenment, and epistemology. As material embodiment of the encyclopedia, they collect, classify and display the exotic and the familiar to the public. 

I argue that, in modernity, the secular museum ultimately displaces the medieval cathedral as a repository of cultural values. The art museum represents the triumph of aesthetics over theology in European philosophy. In modernity, public zoo is the modern Noah’s ark—it becomes the trophy warehouse where we assert our triumph over nature. At the same time, the zoo expresses our repressed yearning for our animality, our primal creaturely life. Animal enclosures become the “safe spaces” for us to meditate on human agency in the age of the Anthropocene. In sum, the book demonstrates how museums and zoos are the memory palaces that manifest our deepest impulses as humans caught between the web of culture and nature.