Book review: Staging the World
Dec. 1st, 2010 15:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic 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.
Historiographical Engagement: Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Karl argues that the emergence of nationalism in late Qing China cannot be "decoupled," as it were, from the global understanding of "globality" in which it did emerge. In other words, nationalism is constituted globally, and the co-temporality of events outside a given country, in this case China, is not random or coincidental but deeply meaningful and relevant to events inside China. She also makes some arguments about Prasenjit Duara's characterization of nationalism in Rescuing History from the Nation that I'm not sure to what extent I agree with, particularly the contention that Duara conflates Hegelian time with nationalism, which Karl sees as a reaction to a set of globally modern relationships caused by capitalism. I think they're both right, and that Duara is less wrong than Karl has it.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the staging in Shanghai in 1904 of the noted Peking opera actor Wang Xiaonong's opera Guazhong lanyin, which told the story of the imaginary conquest of Poland by Turkey and in so doing commented trenchantly on China's current historical and global situation: both "Poland" and "Turkey" as portrayed in the play were possible to identify with the Chinese experience. In so doing, the play was a product and a producer of the discourse that placed China in the "world"--not as the "Central States" or as the "Middle Kingdom" but as one country among others--and which enabled the formation of Chinese nationalism.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Chinese intellectuals were able to conceptualize "the people" as the authority from which nationalism and the state derived their legitimacy by incorporating the experience of the overseas community of Chinese in Hawai'i under white American colonialism--not, note, that of the native Hawai'ians--into their understanding of the world. However, this concept of "the people" was from the beginning a concept that could not be trusted to act in its own best interests; that was for intellectuals.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples The revolutions in the Philippines at the end of the 19thC--the first against the colonial power of Spain, and the second against the recolonializing power of the United States--provided Chinese intellectuals, via a new idea of universalism, with a new rubric and significance in terms of nationalist action. This understanding ignored the divisions in Filipino society and displaced the intellectuals' activities onto "the people," thereby displacing actual common people from any legitimate political action.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The Boer War at the end of the 19thC (apparently, incredibly, the Boers were at one point held up as the conscience of British imperialism? that is all the indictment of it one ought to need) brought about a shift in the language Chinese intellectuals used to talk about nationalism and its contents, from a racialist discourse of Asian-ness or non-whiteness to an ethnos (minzu)-based discourse of nationalism rooted in the Han Chinese ethnos. Together with other simultaneous developments, this discourse shift made it possible to conceptualize as foundational the ideal of a Chinese nation--in which, crucially, social divisions were ignored or displaced.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples The radical conception of Asia which emerged among turn of the 20thC intellectuals in China was constituted as part of a dialectical relationship between Asia as part of the world and Asia as a place where global events took place enabled those intellectuals to temporarily stabilize a set of historically unstable terms, "Asia" itself foremost among them, which over the course of the 20thC were deployed with radically different understandings by various Asian actors. This formulation of Asia also narrowed the Chinese conception of their section of the global stage to Asia alone, at least for the time being.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples The Turkish revolution of 1908 was experienced by Chinese intellectuals as a set of "incoherent lessons" which were instrumentalized in the context of their already-decided conception of what needed to happen in China: in other words, an anti-Qing nationalist revolution. This instrumentalization is an apt example of the way that nationalism, when deployed within imperialist modernity, is easily used to disunify the world by splitting it into separate (and in the 20th and 21stC, increasingly microscopically defined) peoples. This disunification is historically contingent and perhaps reversible, but reversal is predicated on the recognition of it having happened in the first place.
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.
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.
Historiographical Engagement: Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Karl argues that the emergence of nationalism in late Qing China cannot be "decoupled," as it were, from the global understanding of "globality" in which it did emerge. In other words, nationalism is constituted globally, and the co-temporality of events outside a given country, in this case China, is not random or coincidental but deeply meaningful and relevant to events inside China. She also makes some arguments about Prasenjit Duara's characterization of nationalism in Rescuing History from the Nation that I'm not sure to what extent I agree with, particularly the contention that Duara conflates Hegelian time with nationalism, which Karl sees as a reaction to a set of globally modern relationships caused by capitalism. I think they're both right, and that Duara is less wrong than Karl has it.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the staging in Shanghai in 1904 of the noted Peking opera actor Wang Xiaonong's opera Guazhong lanyin, which told the story of the imaginary conquest of Poland by Turkey and in so doing commented trenchantly on China's current historical and global situation: both "Poland" and "Turkey" as portrayed in the play were possible to identify with the Chinese experience. In so doing, the play was a product and a producer of the discourse that placed China in the "world"--not as the "Central States" or as the "Middle Kingdom" but as one country among others--and which enabled the formation of Chinese nationalism.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Chinese intellectuals were able to conceptualize "the people" as the authority from which nationalism and the state derived their legitimacy by incorporating the experience of the overseas community of Chinese in Hawai'i under white American colonialism--not, note, that of the native Hawai'ians--into their understanding of the world. However, this concept of "the people" was from the beginning a concept that could not be trusted to act in its own best interests; that was for intellectuals.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples The revolutions in the Philippines at the end of the 19thC--the first against the colonial power of Spain, and the second against the recolonializing power of the United States--provided Chinese intellectuals, via a new idea of universalism, with a new rubric and significance in terms of nationalist action. This understanding ignored the divisions in Filipino society and displaced the intellectuals' activities onto "the people," thereby displacing actual common people from any legitimate political action.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The Boer War at the end of the 19thC (apparently, incredibly, the Boers were at one point held up as the conscience of British imperialism? that is all the indictment of it one ought to need) brought about a shift in the language Chinese intellectuals used to talk about nationalism and its contents, from a racialist discourse of Asian-ness or non-whiteness to an ethnos (minzu)-based discourse of nationalism rooted in the Han Chinese ethnos. Together with other simultaneous developments, this discourse shift made it possible to conceptualize as foundational the ideal of a Chinese nation--in which, crucially, social divisions were ignored or displaced.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples The radical conception of Asia which emerged among turn of the 20thC intellectuals in China was constituted as part of a dialectical relationship between Asia as part of the world and Asia as a place where global events took place enabled those intellectuals to temporarily stabilize a set of historically unstable terms, "Asia" itself foremost among them, which over the course of the 20thC were deployed with radically different understandings by various Asian actors. This formulation of Asia also narrowed the Chinese conception of their section of the global stage to Asia alone, at least for the time being.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples The Turkish revolution of 1908 was experienced by Chinese intellectuals as a set of "incoherent lessons" which were instrumentalized in the context of their already-decided conception of what needed to happen in China: in other words, an anti-Qing nationalist revolution. This instrumentalization is an apt example of the way that nationalism, when deployed within imperialist modernity, is easily used to disunify the world by splitting it into separate (and in the 20th and 21stC, increasingly microscopically defined) peoples. This disunification is historically contingent and perhaps reversible, but reversal is predicated on the recognition of it having happened in the first place.
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.