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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Liu, Lydia H. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Main Argument: The mutual encounters between the British and Qing Empires produced a regime of sovereign thinking that in the 19thC ordered how citizens and subjects around the globe thought of and fought over sovereignty, culture, language, linguistics, and law. This sovereign thinking is necessarily hetero-cultural and translingual, and it requires mobility of signs and signifiers across space and time. Translation is no more a neutral activity than a translated text is neutral ground.
Historiographical Engagement: Foucault, Charles Sanders Pierce, Georges Bataille, Saussure, Ma Jianzhong and William Dwight Whitney (primary sources), Henry Wheaton and international law.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples
Sovereignty and sovereign thinking, a legacy of modern empires, is integral to modern conceptions of identity through identity's relation to sovereign rights; the configuration of sovereignty in the modern period, however, is inexplicably bound up with the "semiotic turn" of international politics in the C19th, in which nations that recognized each other as nations according to the emerging code of international law came together to set international conventions for the meanings of certain signs and symbols. These regimes are best grasped through the notion of the super-sign, which transcends languages while at the same time ordering languages and effacing the traces of itself; it is a "heterocultural signifying chain that crisscrosses the semantic fields of two or more languages simultaneously and makes an impact on the meaning of recognizable verbal units" (13). The super-sign is a metonym grown monstrous, and animate. Moreover, it frequently figures deictic, non-reciprocal modes of "communication," which encode the violence of coloniality whether overtly or not (as in Robinson Crusoe encountering Friday). Simultaneously, the European understanding of international law was reconfigured to retroactively disinclude non-European nations, which could rejoin pending European nations' "recognition" of their sovereignty and law. And these are all related.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples
In which the long, only-troubled-at-the-end-by-neurotic-British-imperialists history of the character 夷 yi is reviewed--yi was formally banned from being used to refer to the British (and by the most-favored-nation clause to all Westerners) by the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, the end result of a process in which the super-sign yi/barbarian was formed and by which the British became convinced that yi meant "barbarian" and was thus an inherent insult and injury and a form of disrespect for all Britons, Britain, and Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria, By Grace of God Queen of Britain, etc, etc, etc. This was part of a deliberate strategy of stripping the Central States of their sovereignty and imposing (semi-)coloniality on them, refusing to recognize Qing conceptions of equality and reciprocal recognition of sovereignty.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples
The Qing history of co-opting the Confucian discourse of yi to buttress their ideology as rightful rulers of the Central States after their conquest of the Ming, wherein yi did not mean 'barbarian' but 'outside the Central States.' Segue into the fact that other, aspiring colonial powers called China what they wanted--China, Sina, Shina--but not its official name, Da Qing Guo, and not Zhongguo, the commonly used name meaning "the Central States"--and appropriating the power of naming, and the right to do that naming, is of course part of the imperial-colonial project. Simultaneously, even after the treaty-banning of yi Westerners and particularly the British continued to take serious and often violent umbrage at being called "fan gui" or "gui zi" (foreign devils) by Chinese people, insisting that they be recognized as fellow human beings who were (more) civilized and not understanding that they were so named for the violence they had done to the Central States' territory, people, and sovereignty.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples
This chapter explores the process by which the translation of international law into Chinese--presumably a transparent and neutral process--in fact enfolded the Chinese language(s) and the Qing state into an emerging global regime of coloniality. This process involved making and then enforcing several assumptions, notably the idea of translatability, both between English and Chinese and between positivist international law and the Qing legal framework, and the mutual intelligibility of the same, and the idea that the global legal framework Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law purported to describe already existed when in fact the process of translating it into languages around the world was crucial to the process of instantiating that framework, and then making it normative. Translators are liars and betrayers no matter their intentions, and no translation is equivalent to its source text. Furthermore, the neologisms coined for the Chinese translation of Wheaton's book call into question, via the operation of various super-signs, the very moral and ethical framework of such concepts as human rights.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples
This chapter explores the clash of empires as embodied in the sovereigns of Great Britain and of Great Qing, namely, Queen-Empress Victoria and Dowager Empress Cixi, both of whom ruled their respective empires concurrently and who embodied their empire's very different conceptions of sovereignty in their female bodies. Crucially, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early American feminists drew on these gendered visions of sovereignty--a sovereignty which placed Victoria at the head of a racialized empire--in their construction of an emancipated female subject, thus imbricating (white) women's rights in the context of the oppression of peoples of color. Furthermore, there are intriguing hints in accounts of Cixi that she conceptualized sovereignty as inherently masculine and herself as in some sense agendered or androgynous (for which cf. Queen Elizabeth I of England); thus, attempts by female missionaries in China to relate to the empress as a woman may have been relating only to their own fantasies of Cixi as a woman, rather than to how the "Old Buddha" saw hirself. Still, the efforts of immigrant-patriots like Ku Hungming to defend Cixi and the Qing state against the encroachments of the western Powers were predicated on a vision of Cixi as Mother of the Nation. (Given that Cixi most likely poisoned her nephew the Guangxu emperor, whom she insisted call her "father," this is not without a certain overdetermined irony.)
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples
Hey, you want to know another social science that was constituted on racist assumptions? Linguistics! No sooner did people in the 19thC discover the Indo-European language family (which does exist and in and of itself means nothing more than what it says on the tin, namely that languages in the family are related to each other and can be traced back to a reconstructed ur-language, Indo-European) than they twisted it into a racist narrative of superior "Aryans" sweeping down from central Asia IN CHARIOTS and overrunning primitive European inhabitants in their path, and by the way, this means that colonialism in India is a reunification of a sundered family! With white people at the top, naturally.
…That was a rant, wasn't it? Anyway. Liu's focus in this chapter is on how the artificial linguistic construction of (Latinate) "grammar" was used to stigmatize Chinese as a "primitive" language incapable of "advanced" syntax and thus putting speakers of it at a cognitive disadvantage w/r/t people who spoke "advanced" languages (I'm not even going to rehash the specifics of these ideas). Against this hypothesis (and with only limited success, rather like Ku Hungming) the linguist and grammarian Ma Jianzhong penned his landmark grammar of classical Chinese, which argued that Chinese did in fact have a grammar like other languages. The problem that has bedeviled Chinese-language grammarians to this day, however, lies in the supersign verbum/? Because Chinese is comprised of written characters whose pronunciation changes based on place (and the characters moreover are used in other languages, including other Chineses), the opposite of verbum cannot be the Chinese word as it is spoken (ci), but because a character in and of itself is not a Chinese word (it could just as easily be Japanese, or Korean, or Vietnamese), the supersign cannot be verbum/zi--the supersign, like light being both a particle and a wave, is naturally intedeterminate: zi/verbum/ci.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples
In an age of democracy (or its semblance) our imaginations as modern sovereign subjects remain haunted by empty thrones and absent emperors, shaped by a legacy of coloniality that operated via a regime of sovereign thinking on both colonizers and on colonized, transforming both into a mutually intelligible, mutually implicated global order.
Critical assessment:
Wow, this book. Lydia Liu clearly operates at about three levels above the rest of us in terms of her thinking, which, it's good to have people up there on the heights, but it takes a lot of brain-work to be able to grasp the messages they send down. What I wish she had brought up more explicitly--well, okay, one of many things--is the Qing construction of empire and sovereignty vis-a-vis the modern imperial-national British/European one. It's crystal-clear to me, as a classicist turned modern historian, that the Qing were advocating and instantiating a classical version of the same, broadly comparable to other ancient polyethnic empires such as Rome (and inasmuch as its conception of the state was classical, related too to states that were not empires, such as Yamato in the Nara and Heian periods). And maybe it's just me, but I think there's at least as much value in looking at those two empires side-by-side as in going back and reading the Manchu versions of the Qing court documents. Also, as a consequence of Liu's rarified thinking, the very real violence that the violence of language, treaty, translation prefigured or authorized or augured tends to be lost in her accounts, and despite her meticulous documentation of farragoes of racist "scholarship," she goes easy on physical details of that too. This is a consequence of her focus, I think, but I always prefer to have people be reminded of the realities of the past, as they were, to the extent that we can know them. Her chapters could be more strongly integrated, but there definitely is a thread that connects them, and they're brilliant in and of themselves. Regardless, an excellent book.
Further reading:
Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Ian Christopher Fletcher et al., eds., Women's Suffrage in the British Empire; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City; J.Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams; Bernardo Bertolucci, The Last Emperor
Meta notes:
There is nothing that cannot be subordinated, no neutral ground on which to fight; we have already all been colonized, and even a comparative approach toward what was before modernity's advent is inevitably structured by modernity. The best we can do, like Ma Jianzhong, is to make these structures visible, and so problematize them openly.
Main Argument: The mutual encounters between the British and Qing Empires produced a regime of sovereign thinking that in the 19thC ordered how citizens and subjects around the globe thought of and fought over sovereignty, culture, language, linguistics, and law. This sovereign thinking is necessarily hetero-cultural and translingual, and it requires mobility of signs and signifiers across space and time. Translation is no more a neutral activity than a translated text is neutral ground.
Historiographical Engagement: Foucault, Charles Sanders Pierce, Georges Bataille, Saussure, Ma Jianzhong and William Dwight Whitney (primary sources), Henry Wheaton and international law.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples
Sovereignty and sovereign thinking, a legacy of modern empires, is integral to modern conceptions of identity through identity's relation to sovereign rights; the configuration of sovereignty in the modern period, however, is inexplicably bound up with the "semiotic turn" of international politics in the C19th, in which nations that recognized each other as nations according to the emerging code of international law came together to set international conventions for the meanings of certain signs and symbols. These regimes are best grasped through the notion of the super-sign, which transcends languages while at the same time ordering languages and effacing the traces of itself; it is a "heterocultural signifying chain that crisscrosses the semantic fields of two or more languages simultaneously and makes an impact on the meaning of recognizable verbal units" (13). The super-sign is a metonym grown monstrous, and animate. Moreover, it frequently figures deictic, non-reciprocal modes of "communication," which encode the violence of coloniality whether overtly or not (as in Robinson Crusoe encountering Friday). Simultaneously, the European understanding of international law was reconfigured to retroactively disinclude non-European nations, which could rejoin pending European nations' "recognition" of their sovereignty and law. And these are all related.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples
In which the long, only-troubled-at-the-end-by-neurotic-British-imperialists history of the character 夷 yi is reviewed--yi was formally banned from being used to refer to the British (and by the most-favored-nation clause to all Westerners) by the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, the end result of a process in which the super-sign yi/barbarian was formed and by which the British became convinced that yi meant "barbarian" and was thus an inherent insult and injury and a form of disrespect for all Britons, Britain, and Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria, By Grace of God Queen of Britain, etc, etc, etc. This was part of a deliberate strategy of stripping the Central States of their sovereignty and imposing (semi-)coloniality on them, refusing to recognize Qing conceptions of equality and reciprocal recognition of sovereignty.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples
The Qing history of co-opting the Confucian discourse of yi to buttress their ideology as rightful rulers of the Central States after their conquest of the Ming, wherein yi did not mean 'barbarian' but 'outside the Central States.' Segue into the fact that other, aspiring colonial powers called China what they wanted--China, Sina, Shina--but not its official name, Da Qing Guo, and not Zhongguo, the commonly used name meaning "the Central States"--and appropriating the power of naming, and the right to do that naming, is of course part of the imperial-colonial project. Simultaneously, even after the treaty-banning of yi Westerners and particularly the British continued to take serious and often violent umbrage at being called "fan gui" or "gui zi" (foreign devils) by Chinese people, insisting that they be recognized as fellow human beings who were (more) civilized and not understanding that they were so named for the violence they had done to the Central States' territory, people, and sovereignty.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples
This chapter explores the process by which the translation of international law into Chinese--presumably a transparent and neutral process--in fact enfolded the Chinese language(s) and the Qing state into an emerging global regime of coloniality. This process involved making and then enforcing several assumptions, notably the idea of translatability, both between English and Chinese and between positivist international law and the Qing legal framework, and the mutual intelligibility of the same, and the idea that the global legal framework Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law purported to describe already existed when in fact the process of translating it into languages around the world was crucial to the process of instantiating that framework, and then making it normative. Translators are liars and betrayers no matter their intentions, and no translation is equivalent to its source text. Furthermore, the neologisms coined for the Chinese translation of Wheaton's book call into question, via the operation of various super-signs, the very moral and ethical framework of such concepts as human rights.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples
This chapter explores the clash of empires as embodied in the sovereigns of Great Britain and of Great Qing, namely, Queen-Empress Victoria and Dowager Empress Cixi, both of whom ruled their respective empires concurrently and who embodied their empire's very different conceptions of sovereignty in their female bodies. Crucially, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other early American feminists drew on these gendered visions of sovereignty--a sovereignty which placed Victoria at the head of a racialized empire--in their construction of an emancipated female subject, thus imbricating (white) women's rights in the context of the oppression of peoples of color. Furthermore, there are intriguing hints in accounts of Cixi that she conceptualized sovereignty as inherently masculine and herself as in some sense agendered or androgynous (for which cf. Queen Elizabeth I of England); thus, attempts by female missionaries in China to relate to the empress as a woman may have been relating only to their own fantasies of Cixi as a woman, rather than to how the "Old Buddha" saw hirself. Still, the efforts of immigrant-patriots like Ku Hungming to defend Cixi and the Qing state against the encroachments of the western Powers were predicated on a vision of Cixi as Mother of the Nation. (Given that Cixi most likely poisoned her nephew the Guangxu emperor, whom she insisted call her "father," this is not without a certain overdetermined irony.)
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples
Hey, you want to know another social science that was constituted on racist assumptions? Linguistics! No sooner did people in the 19thC discover the Indo-European language family (which does exist and in and of itself means nothing more than what it says on the tin, namely that languages in the family are related to each other and can be traced back to a reconstructed ur-language, Indo-European) than they twisted it into a racist narrative of superior "Aryans" sweeping down from central Asia IN CHARIOTS and overrunning primitive European inhabitants in their path, and by the way, this means that colonialism in India is a reunification of a sundered family! With white people at the top, naturally.
…That was a rant, wasn't it? Anyway. Liu's focus in this chapter is on how the artificial linguistic construction of (Latinate) "grammar" was used to stigmatize Chinese as a "primitive" language incapable of "advanced" syntax and thus putting speakers of it at a cognitive disadvantage w/r/t people who spoke "advanced" languages (I'm not even going to rehash the specifics of these ideas). Against this hypothesis (and with only limited success, rather like Ku Hungming) the linguist and grammarian Ma Jianzhong penned his landmark grammar of classical Chinese, which argued that Chinese did in fact have a grammar like other languages. The problem that has bedeviled Chinese-language grammarians to this day, however, lies in the supersign verbum/? Because Chinese is comprised of written characters whose pronunciation changes based on place (and the characters moreover are used in other languages, including other Chineses), the opposite of verbum cannot be the Chinese word as it is spoken (ci), but because a character in and of itself is not a Chinese word (it could just as easily be Japanese, or Korean, or Vietnamese), the supersign cannot be verbum/zi--the supersign, like light being both a particle and a wave, is naturally intedeterminate: zi/verbum/ci.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples
In an age of democracy (or its semblance) our imaginations as modern sovereign subjects remain haunted by empty thrones and absent emperors, shaped by a legacy of coloniality that operated via a regime of sovereign thinking on both colonizers and on colonized, transforming both into a mutually intelligible, mutually implicated global order.
Critical assessment:
Wow, this book. Lydia Liu clearly operates at about three levels above the rest of us in terms of her thinking, which, it's good to have people up there on the heights, but it takes a lot of brain-work to be able to grasp the messages they send down. What I wish she had brought up more explicitly--well, okay, one of many things--is the Qing construction of empire and sovereignty vis-a-vis the modern imperial-national British/European one. It's crystal-clear to me, as a classicist turned modern historian, that the Qing were advocating and instantiating a classical version of the same, broadly comparable to other ancient polyethnic empires such as Rome (and inasmuch as its conception of the state was classical, related too to states that were not empires, such as Yamato in the Nara and Heian periods). And maybe it's just me, but I think there's at least as much value in looking at those two empires side-by-side as in going back and reading the Manchu versions of the Qing court documents. Also, as a consequence of Liu's rarified thinking, the very real violence that the violence of language, treaty, translation prefigured or authorized or augured tends to be lost in her accounts, and despite her meticulous documentation of farragoes of racist "scholarship," she goes easy on physical details of that too. This is a consequence of her focus, I think, but I always prefer to have people be reminded of the realities of the past, as they were, to the extent that we can know them. Her chapters could be more strongly integrated, but there definitely is a thread that connects them, and they're brilliant in and of themselves. Regardless, an excellent book.
Further reading:
Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice; Ian Christopher Fletcher et al., eds., Women's Suffrage in the British Empire; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Der Ling, Two Years in the Forbidden City; J.Y. Wong, Deadly Dreams; Bernardo Bertolucci, The Last Emperor
Meta notes:
There is nothing that cannot be subordinated, no neutral ground on which to fight; we have already all been colonized, and even a comparative approach toward what was before modernity's advent is inevitably structured by modernity. The best we can do, like Ma Jianzhong, is to make these structures visible, and so problematize them openly.