Just Listening: An Introduction

Abstract The essays collected in this special issue all respond to a single question: how have the producers of Chinese literature, thought, art, science, and popular culture conceived of their relationship with the nonhuman beings—creatures organic and inorganic, animal or technological—that surround us as humans? While ranging across time periods and training their sights on vastly different objects, these essays manifest a particular interest in examining how voice (together with its notable absence)—as it slips from phenomenon to figuration and back again—appears to set the boundary that both separates and enacts engagement between the human and nonhuman realms. This introduction brings these essays into conversation with each other to highlight some of the unforeseen patterns they manifest as a whole. Among these is the chronological: read in order, these essays hint at a growing awareness of humans’ incapacity to connect, whether with one another or with the nonhuman: an emerging sense that voice does not necessarily correspond to the subjectivity of those that emit or withhold it or that, even if it did, there would be no sure way for a hearer to establish that correspondence, let alone respond with meaningful and appropriate actions or words.