Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic data: Spence, Jonathan D. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996.

Main argument: The so-called Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64 in eastern and southern China was one of the largest wars of the 19thC and one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, costing in the final total at least 20 million lives. Before its bloody final defeat, however, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom promulgated a fascinating, revealed version of Christianity as well as offering a vigorous challenge to many of the gender, social, and political norms of traditional China as embodied by the ruling Qing dynasty, and arguably acted on many of the same dissatisfactions that eventually brought about that dynasty's downfall, in which the near-bankruptcy the Qing court incurred defeating the Taiping played at least some part, at a lengthy delay.

Historiographical engagement: As well as reading the secondary scholarship on the Taiping, Spence also engages with the body of primary, documentary evidence on the Taiping that remains, and in particular with the body of religious scriptures published in Nanjing during its years as the Heavenly Capital and with documents by and relating to Hong Xiuquan himself.

Critical assessment: This book reads like a living, breathing illustration of some of the points that Dipesh Chakrabarty makes about the limits of modern historiographical discourse, or more precisely, like an illustration of how a gifted historian can thoroughly circumvent them using a fairly basic set of narrative strategies--in this case, telling the narrative entirely in the present tense (what in Latin is generally referred to as the historical present). Spence is a master of narrative, and of his sources, and he brings the fascinating, strange, and marvelous (in the medieval sense) story of Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping kingdom to boggling life. It's a prodigious narrative of a little-known historical incident, and well worth the read.

My only major complaint is again, I think, how closely Spence holds the cards of his historiographical purpose to his chest--I think that he is interested primarily in Hong Xiuquan's version of Christianity and its interplay with the times and the circumstances surrounding Hong, and secondarily with the astonishingly bloody cost of that vision, and why it appealed to so many people. As Spence writes,

As the epigraph to this book suggests, in the words of Keats, which themselves build on those of the Book of Revelation, Hong was one of those people who believe it is their mission to make all things "new, for the surprise of the sky-children." It is a central agony of history that those who embark on such missions so rarely care to calculate the cost. (xxvii)

But this gets little explicit play in the text, and the ending is, in some sense, rather abrupt, though in others it's a foregone conclusion from page one. As vivid and masterful a storyteller as Spence is, I can't help but feel that his books would be even stronger, from an academic perspective, with a little more explicit discussion of his arguments.

Further reading: Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement; Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810

Meta notes: Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Bibliographic data: Spence, Jonathan D. The Death of Woman Wang. New York: Penguin Books, 1978.

Main argument: Spence's concern in this short, classic book is to illuminate the experience of life in rural China across the Ming/Qing transition of the 17thC, focussing explicitly on a highly local, obscure area that had nothing to recommend it beyond its poverty and the disasters its denizens endured without rebelling, so as to provide a corrective to the generalizing, national perspective of previous histories of rural China at the time.

Historiographical engagement: Spence relies primarily on three primary or nearly primary sources: the 1673 Local History of T'an-cheng (I believe this is a gazette), the memoir-cum-manual written in the 1690s by Huang Liu-hung, who was posted to the county in the 1670s; and the stories of the writer P'u Sung-ling, who lived one county north of T'an-cheng and was writing primarily in the 1670s.

Critical assessment: This is a famous book outside of academia, and deservedly so; it's said that Spence originally wanted to be a novelist, and this book certainly represents an early flowering of his literary talent. This may sound like a backhanded insult, but I don't think there's any inherent conflict between beautiful writing and rigorous scholarship; my one quibble with Spence, always, is how close he plays his authorial cards to his textual vest, so to speak. He says explicitly in the preface that he wants to illuminate life in rural China, and he succeeds brilliantly at that goal, but it's never mentioned again after the first time and he relies always on the readers to bring a large chunk of their own perspective and interpretation to his text. I think that the marriage of Spence's unquestionable style and his willingness to leave so much of the interpretation to his readers is what makes him so popular outside the academy as well as in it, and in this respect this book is typical Spence.

Having read most of my way through R. Bin Wong's China Transformed, what struck me in Spence's narrative were the details of administrative and urban security procedures that, in another context, would seem frankly modern or even, in an sff novel, dystopian. This book certainly provides a handy corrective to an economic historian like Wong or Andre Gunder-Frank, both of whom cover continents and centuries and who tend to underplay any and all human conflict, particularly in China, both as a consequence of their arguments and of their professional training. The casual violence and avarice that was apparently a fact of life in rural China isn't unusual historically speaking, but it is necessary to bear in mind.

Further reading: Spence's other books.

Meta notes: How much do I hate the Wade-Giles transcription system? So, so much. I can't even guess what sounds are being represented half the time, and what the heck is with all the strange punctuation breaking up the syllables? Pinyin forever!

At the end of October I went to hear Prof. Alex Cook of the History Department give a talk on "Chinese Uhuru: A Maoist Reading of the Congo Crisis."

The fact that I didn't immediately understand to which Congo crisis the title was referring, I suppose, shows my youth as much as anything else--it's not even called the Congo anymore, anyway, and until I was 12 it was Zaire--but apparently the Congo Crisis was the Spanish Civil War of its day; Che Guevara even led a squad of guerilla forces through the jungle for a while. Prof. Cook situated the Chinese interpretation of the crisis, which was touched off in 1960 almost as soon as independence was declared. In the context of the widening Sino-Soviet split, in which China essentially threw in its lot with the "Third World" and embraced the epithet of underdevelopment, the Congo Crisis seemed like a tailor-made opportunity to show the world that the Maoist conception of world revolution by peasant insurgency had legs. Certainly the 1965 play "War Drums on the Equator," performed in Beijing by an entirely Chinese cast and crew, simultaneously offered the Chinese perspective on the Sino-Soviet split (i.e. Cold War superpower hegemony was leading to a new and more dangerous imperialism) and articulated a rhetoric of true friendship and true freedom between oppressed subalterns founded on mutual interest, under the recognition that "The sun has already risen in the east" and that, while Maoism offered the true path to uhuru or freedom, it was only obtainable by a long and protracted guerilla struggle. At the same time, elements of the play look forward to the Cultural Revolution which was looming on the horizon of 1966.

It was a compelling talk, and I'll be very interested to read Cook's book when it comes out--as of now it has a working title of "Three Worlds Apart," we're told. Doing history of non-Western places that isn't all about their interactions with the West is definitely something that needs to happen more often, and I wasn't really surprised to be reminded, in its foregrounding of a popular play in China by way of introduction of a subaltern-subaltern discourse, of Rebecca Karl's Staging the World.

Bibliographic Data: Karl, Rebecca E. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Main Argument: This book traces the development, in turn of the 20thC China, of a set of conceptual understandings that came to constitute the discourse termed "nationalism" and from which a potentially revolutionary, in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word, understanding of China and its place in the world was temporarily articulated. For a time, Chinese intellectuals of the nationalist bent framed themselves in terms of their place in an alternate, non-Euro-American conception of a world order based on shared characteristics (i.e. not being white) and shared colonial oppression. NB: Karl's transcription system is…idiosyncratic at best, so I'm sorry if that causes confusion; I can't tell what she actually means in Pinyin most of the time.

( You say you want a revolution/Well, you know we all wanna change the world )

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Karl argues in her conclusion that modern diachronic history of nationalism is usually only written in relationship with either itself or the West, which is an invidious truth; she also notes that what she characterizes as a vision of modernity predicated on the recognition f global unevenness, rather than the supposed Western narrative of capitalist linearity, has repeatedly re-emerged and been submerged in China in the 20thC. It seems to me that the idea of "unevenness" is predicated on a Marxian critique of capital that is rooted in the prior existence of capital, so I don't really find Karl's argument inherently convincing on those grounds, though her book shows that alternate visions are possible, if always fragile, because emerging in an environment that is overdetermined in the exact opposite direction.

Critical assessment: This is overall a very good book, but it's marred for me by several persistent blindspots. For one thing, I wish Karl would tone down some of her jargon, a lot of which she simply doesn't need to make her arguments--there's no need to speak of "globality" when "the global" will do just as well. For another, like all world systems theorists, she just can't let go of capital, or really come to grips with the fact that capitalism as we know it today is historically contingent rather than inevitable. I also find it weird, in a book so concerned with non-Euro-American experiences of colonialism, that she writes "Hawaii" rather than "Hawai'i" (and it's not like this is unknown in academic circles; the University of Hawi'i Press writes "Hawai'i"). She's also bought into what I like to call the myth of globalization, namely the idea that "globalization" is something new and different on the world historical scene, which…it's just not. Certainly global economic connections are much, much broader and deeper than they have ever been, particularly in the form of global financial institutions and norms, but it's a laughable fallacy to think that a at least semi-globally integrated economy has not been with us throughout history: it has. Those connections thin and shallow over time according to historical events, but they remain, and I can't help but feel that if Karl had read Andre Gunder Frank or Janet Abu-Lughod, her book wouldn't be marred by that flaw.

Still, she says a lot of smart things, many also fairly provocative, and if she can't quite grasp the ways in which modernity structures her own understanding of "history" (paging Dipesh Chakrabarty), the book provides an excellent microscopic narrative of how nationalism emerges out of modernity.

Further reading: Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation; Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity; Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution; Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush; Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., The Neglected Tradition
 
Meta notes: I think the only book that ever fully satisfies my preferences from a formatting and copy-editing standpoint will be my own.

Bibliographic Data: Hevia, James L. English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. [Globally either by Duke or by Hong Kong University Press.]

Main Argument: Hevia's animating position in this complex and excellent book is that "imperialism was always more than guns and goods; it was also a cultural process involving resistance to and accommodation of forces or entities attempting to achieve hegemonic control over specific geographic spaces" (3). In English Lessons he documents the intertwined colonialist violences of arms and of language that, in conjunction with the resistance and participation of Chinese populations, deterritorialized and reterritorialized spaces geographic, linguistic, cultural and social in China over the long 19th century: "a pedagogical project was undertaken, that was itself a form of colonization" (13): the Western colonial powers sought to teach the Qing, and later the Chinese, how to behave "properly" in the international sphere of their own devising. Hevia's "fundamental objective is to reopen the study of Euroamerican imperialism in East Asia and to clarify the nature of colonialism in nineteenth-century China" (14-15). Along the way, Hevia demonstrates how these imperialisms operated equally in the colony and in the imperial metropole, rendering familiar things equally strange in both places, and locates China within these "globalizing forces" (27).

( The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach. )

Critical assessment: I think this might be the best book we've read so far in this class. Certainly for my money it presents the best balance of actual descriptions of historical processes in concert with what those processes meant. I particularly like that Hevia prioritizes the actual violence the Western colonial pedagogy in Qing China entailed; for Lydia Liu, by contrast, the violence of language is primary, which I appreciate but which I think is fundamentally putting the cart before the horse. Hevia tosses off more brilliant insights per chapter than other writers manage in an entire book, and there are multiple concepts in here--particularly his extended discussion at the end of "the return of the repressed" and the role of the 19thC empires in the rise of the tropes of global conspiracy and global power in the late 19th and 20thC. There's an entire book waiting to be written on the evolution of this concept from Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu to superhero comics to James Bond--the empire is the conspiracy, and its the linkage of colonial peripheries with imperial centers via the empire itself that gives rise to the specter of global conspiracies and global organizations fighting them. That's a digression, but it's testament to how fascinating Hevia's idea is. I also think he does a better job than some of not giving the Qing short shrift as agents in their own right, though the focus of the book remains on the discourse the British told to themselves. Anyway. Brilliant, fascinating, well-written and also a beautifully designed book.

Further reading: Brian Farwell, Queen Victoria's Little Wars, Mr. Kipling's Army, Armies of the Raj; Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours, Jonathan Spence, To Change China, The Gate of Heavenly Peace

Meta notes: I admire the way Hevia views both tangible objects of material culture (dogs, loot, buildings, land) and intangible objects--rituals, media, advertisements, photographs, economies--as equally imbued with meaning and equally open to being de- and re- territorialized and contextualized; it gives his narrative a real heft that the more rarified discourse of someone like Lydia Liu necessarily lacks, though Liu outstrips him in some respects. The two books remain complementary and necessary, but I'm more personally attracted to Hevia's style than to Liu's.

Henceforth I'm going to borrow Prof. Alexander Cook's recommended format for notes on books in preparation for qualifying exams for these posts.

Bibliographic Data: Spence, Jonathan D. The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998.

Main Argument:
Examining the attitudes "Western" observers have brought to the discussion of "China" from the time of Marco Polo until the late C20th reveals that "one of the proofs of China's strength is its capacity to stimulate and to focus creative energies at specific movements in time" (xvii). At the same time, the attitudes with which the people in question have made these observations--which may or may not have any basis either in experience or in reality--have as much to say about how the West has constructed itself at the given moment in question as about China at that same moment.

Historiographical Engagement:
Too many to list (48 writers in all), but especially Marco Polo, Baron de Montesquieu, Italo Calvino, Karl Wittfogel. On the ideas front, covertly both with Orientalism and with systems theory, though also openly with most of the broad movements in Western intellectual life since the C13th.

Critical assessment:
It's a neat meta-textual trick that Spence plays in that the reader's--the observer observing the observers--own historical-ethical framework ultimately determines her evaluation of the sources Spence marshals in the text; he's remarkably good at presenting both very little value judgments, as well as being remarkably light on the actual history of China during the periods in question, except at the end when the observers he considers actually start considering actual Chinese history and Spence has to provide enough context to make sense of their observations for the reader. The fundamental question of why the idea of "China" has continued to exert such a pull on Western minds remains unanswered, which is both kind of begging the query and also a whole other book in itself. It's typical Spence in that the reader's preliminary answer to that question ultimately comes down to perception, and his interest in the "way that layers of reality intersect and overlap" shines through in his presentation of the material (xviii). I'm also left questioning, in an epistemological sense, the possibility of ever definitively knowing anything, and by extension whether historiography can ever actually grasp the reality it purports to report on--does the ear that hears both what it wants and what it is expecting leave any room to hear things it is is not expecting? As historians, can or should we eradicate our own intrinsic beliefs and biases entirely? I don't think so; I think we ought to acknowledge our viewpoints and passions so as to better account for them in our histories, rather than pretending futilely that they don't exist and running the risk of reducing our work to what Graham Peck called "a practical joke" (203).

My other critical note here is that Spence collapses a meaningful distinction between pre- and post-Renaissance Western civilization for the sake of readability: i.e., it was during the Renaissance and especially during the Protestant Reformation and the long C17th that the West began to know itself as "the West"; before that people talked about "Christendom," and the medieval worldview of the observers of the first few chapters could, I think, be more clearly delineated--I've read A World Lit Only By Fire and Rivers of Gold, which teach how to discern and think of it, but I would like Spence's take on it here explicitly as well. Prester John even makes an appearance, and it's hard to find a more fitting emblem of the medieval era than that. (So does Sherlock Holmes later, hah.)

Further reading:
Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism; Victor Segalen, Rene Liys; Anchee Min, Pearl of China; Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China; André Malraux, Man's Fate; John Adams, Nixon in China; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (reread).

Meta notes:
I have a lot of thoughts about writing alternate histories secondary to this book that are out of the ambit of this blog. However, I think in one sense these observers observed can provide an object lesson, either in what not to bring to the history of Asia (i.e. Orientalism, racism, meta-narratives of civilizational "progress") or in how to bear our own experiences and beliefs in mind when writing history (Karl Wittfogel is my new hero). The other thing is not to make Ezra Pound's mistake, and to be content--as Spence manifestly is--to "leave a blank for something he did not understand, or disagreed with" and not to insist "on inserting his own words" (172).