Book review: English Lessons
Oct. 31st, 2010 22:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic 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).
Historiographical Engagement: Against John Fairbank's arguments for a fundamentally passive view of Asia (and to an extent against Edward Said's implicit espousal of the same); for a corrected vision of John Cohen's "China-centered history" which does not reify a tendentious China-West binary.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The emphasis on China's status as "semicolonial" and on the "China-West" binary in historiography, Hevia argues, tends to flatten the similarities as well as the differences between the Chinese and other experiences of Western imperialism, as well as to preclude the possibility of examining both "China" and "the West" in wider contexts. Furthermore, the conjunction of these imperialist processes with new communications and media technologies formed the ground for the emergence of truly modern empires, and colonies. These technologies of communication and information were part and parcel of the "new imperialism" and its mechanisms and justifications for control. As Hevia points out, no colonialism was ever total, and the processes of information-gathering that were used against colonial populations were brought home and turned against imperial citizens as well: it's all one, and if unevenness is part and parcel of these processes, all in all these things demonstrate the fact that all identities then and henceforth are necessarily patchwork.
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The regime of treaties in the 19thC and indeed of "international law" itself is, Hevia insists, unthinkable without war--the supposed global norms of international law were imposed by Euroamerican colonial powers on other regions and countries in Asia, Africa and Australia at gunpoint, frequently after brutal, destructive conflicts. In China the intertwined regimes of opium, war, and treaties had the cumulative effects of destroying old networks of power and trade and drawing vast swathes of the country into international linkages of the same, "a London-centered transregional economy that linked Great Britain, India, and the China coast" (51). The destabilizing effect these developments had is difficult to overstate, but they were matched by deterritorializing developments in translation and military technologies and the performance of sovereignty. Hevia has a lot of really fascinating things to say about masculinity, sovereignty and hysteria (he and Lydia Liu have a lot of deep commonalities). He also demonstrates that the practice of loot (the word itself comes into English from either Hindi or Sanskrit) was decidedly imperial in nature, and that this practice was instrumental to the denouement of the Second Opium War and the public nature of the looting of the Summer Palace and the dispersement of that loot abroad followed by its destruction--all part of teaching the Qing government how to behave, and the lesson having been administered, of further instructing them how to receive the foreign victors in "perfect equality."
(The farcical nature of all of this seems to have occurred to none of the parties concerned.)
Part 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Having won the right by arms to establish legations in Beijing, thereby placing the Qing state on "perfectly equal footing" with the Western powers, the British and their allies assumed that the Qing would freely learn international statecraft by foreign example. At the same time, the operations of the British "archive state" were extended to China, informationalizing China and its people in such a way that data about them could be abstracted, grasped, and manipulated whether in London or in Beijing, thereby reterritorializing China and the Qing again as an object of knowledge, things that were known rather than that produced knowledge--the crucial conceit of the archive state being that there is no difference between the realities on the ground, so to speak (and note the military metaphor) and the data the archive state collects. Coupled with the rise of social Darwinsim and pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference, the operations of the archive state over the next 40 years had the effect of calling into question the very premise of the pedagogical project by Othering the Chinese as a whole as well as the Qing. At the same time, however, the Qing undertook systematic efforts to mimic the British, not in their interactions with the colonial powers as the British hoped, but in their colonial relations with their peripheral subject and client states, deploying the regimes of knowledge of the archive state as well as Great Game tactics there.
Part 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The events of the so-called Boxer Rebellion of 1899 and 1900, though largely forgotten outside China, are crucial both to the history of China and the world in that they simultaneously revealed the limits of the colonial pedagogical project and of Qing rulership, both of which were essentially ended by the punitive treaties imposed after the Western suppression of the rebellion (which was effected by widespread massacres and looting in and around Beijing). One reason for the Rebellion's significance is the widespread media coverage of its events in real time; the other is the fact that the colonial powers declared a very real warfare on the symbols of Qing sovereignty and authority, which reached its climax in the desacralization of the Qing dynasty both during the Emperor and Dowager Empress' absence from the Forbidden City, in which Euroamericans trooped through the imperial apartments and had their pictures taken in the imperial thrones, and in the treaties themselves, which radically reconstituted audience protocols to set members of the foreign diplomatic corps above many in the imperial hierarchy. (In part this reflected the reterritorialization of the pageantry of British imperial monarchy, which had been reconstituted as an Orientalized hybrid over the long reign of Victoria, particularly after her assumption of the title of Empress of India in 1876.) The piece de resistance of the colonial powers' effort to erase their own agency in the Rebellion (as that which the Boxers were rebelling against) was the systematic construction of narratives of "missionary martyrs," particularly women, who were slain by the Boxers, thus violently constituting China as part of Christendom and the foreigners as completely innocent victims of incomprehensible "barbaric" violence.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples The effects of the Qing state's relations with North Atlantic nation-states, and the practice of the Great Game itself, did not die with the 19thC; each were transmuted respectively in the 20th into the adversarial relationship of China with the great powers and the Cold War. Similarly, even as global Euroamerican empires sputtered and died the linkages they had forged were laid bare in popular media such as movies, novels, and comic books, that played on the new global interconnectedness--"new" referring to the speed and thickness of potential interactions, not the interactions themselves--by scaring imperial audiences with the specter of such terrifying hybrids as Fu Manchu, all Western knowledge and Eastern cunning. To his credit, Hevia calls out Samuel Huntingdon and those China watchers whose worldviews remain mired in notions of Chinese inscrutability, expansionism, and anti-foreignness, all false notions first circulated in the 19thC; only when Westerners overcome their willful ignorance of their history in China, Hevia suggests, and acknowledge the forces of modernity which equally motivate contemporary China and Chinese, will relations truly be able to be truly equal. All of us must acknowledge and construct our shared history as such.
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.
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).
Historiographical Engagement: Against John Fairbank's arguments for a fundamentally passive view of Asia (and to an extent against Edward Said's implicit espousal of the same); for a corrected vision of John Cohen's "China-centered history" which does not reify a tendentious China-West binary.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The emphasis on China's status as "semicolonial" and on the "China-West" binary in historiography, Hevia argues, tends to flatten the similarities as well as the differences between the Chinese and other experiences of Western imperialism, as well as to preclude the possibility of examining both "China" and "the West" in wider contexts. Furthermore, the conjunction of these imperialist processes with new communications and media technologies formed the ground for the emergence of truly modern empires, and colonies. These technologies of communication and information were part and parcel of the "new imperialism" and its mechanisms and justifications for control. As Hevia points out, no colonialism was ever total, and the processes of information-gathering that were used against colonial populations were brought home and turned against imperial citizens as well: it's all one, and if unevenness is part and parcel of these processes, all in all these things demonstrate the fact that all identities then and henceforth are necessarily patchwork.
Part 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The regime of treaties in the 19thC and indeed of "international law" itself is, Hevia insists, unthinkable without war--the supposed global norms of international law were imposed by Euroamerican colonial powers on other regions and countries in Asia, Africa and Australia at gunpoint, frequently after brutal, destructive conflicts. In China the intertwined regimes of opium, war, and treaties had the cumulative effects of destroying old networks of power and trade and drawing vast swathes of the country into international linkages of the same, "a London-centered transregional economy that linked Great Britain, India, and the China coast" (51). The destabilizing effect these developments had is difficult to overstate, but they were matched by deterritorializing developments in translation and military technologies and the performance of sovereignty. Hevia has a lot of really fascinating things to say about masculinity, sovereignty and hysteria (he and Lydia Liu have a lot of deep commonalities). He also demonstrates that the practice of loot (the word itself comes into English from either Hindi or Sanskrit) was decidedly imperial in nature, and that this practice was instrumental to the denouement of the Second Opium War and the public nature of the looting of the Summer Palace and the dispersement of that loot abroad followed by its destruction--all part of teaching the Qing government how to behave, and the lesson having been administered, of further instructing them how to receive the foreign victors in "perfect equality."
(The farcical nature of all of this seems to have occurred to none of the parties concerned.)
Part 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Having won the right by arms to establish legations in Beijing, thereby placing the Qing state on "perfectly equal footing" with the Western powers, the British and their allies assumed that the Qing would freely learn international statecraft by foreign example. At the same time, the operations of the British "archive state" were extended to China, informationalizing China and its people in such a way that data about them could be abstracted, grasped, and manipulated whether in London or in Beijing, thereby reterritorializing China and the Qing again as an object of knowledge, things that were known rather than that produced knowledge--the crucial conceit of the archive state being that there is no difference between the realities on the ground, so to speak (and note the military metaphor) and the data the archive state collects. Coupled with the rise of social Darwinsim and pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference, the operations of the archive state over the next 40 years had the effect of calling into question the very premise of the pedagogical project by Othering the Chinese as a whole as well as the Qing. At the same time, however, the Qing undertook systematic efforts to mimic the British, not in their interactions with the colonial powers as the British hoped, but in their colonial relations with their peripheral subject and client states, deploying the regimes of knowledge of the archive state as well as Great Game tactics there.
Part 3: Argument, Sources, Examples The events of the so-called Boxer Rebellion of 1899 and 1900, though largely forgotten outside China, are crucial both to the history of China and the world in that they simultaneously revealed the limits of the colonial pedagogical project and of Qing rulership, both of which were essentially ended by the punitive treaties imposed after the Western suppression of the rebellion (which was effected by widespread massacres and looting in and around Beijing). One reason for the Rebellion's significance is the widespread media coverage of its events in real time; the other is the fact that the colonial powers declared a very real warfare on the symbols of Qing sovereignty and authority, which reached its climax in the desacralization of the Qing dynasty both during the Emperor and Dowager Empress' absence from the Forbidden City, in which Euroamericans trooped through the imperial apartments and had their pictures taken in the imperial thrones, and in the treaties themselves, which radically reconstituted audience protocols to set members of the foreign diplomatic corps above many in the imperial hierarchy. (In part this reflected the reterritorialization of the pageantry of British imperial monarchy, which had been reconstituted as an Orientalized hybrid over the long reign of Victoria, particularly after her assumption of the title of Empress of India in 1876.) The piece de resistance of the colonial powers' effort to erase their own agency in the Rebellion (as that which the Boxers were rebelling against) was the systematic construction of narratives of "missionary martyrs," particularly women, who were slain by the Boxers, thus violently constituting China as part of Christendom and the foreigners as completely innocent victims of incomprehensible "barbaric" violence.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples The effects of the Qing state's relations with North Atlantic nation-states, and the practice of the Great Game itself, did not die with the 19thC; each were transmuted respectively in the 20th into the adversarial relationship of China with the great powers and the Cold War. Similarly, even as global Euroamerican empires sputtered and died the linkages they had forged were laid bare in popular media such as movies, novels, and comic books, that played on the new global interconnectedness--"new" referring to the speed and thickness of potential interactions, not the interactions themselves--by scaring imperial audiences with the specter of such terrifying hybrids as Fu Manchu, all Western knowledge and Eastern cunning. To his credit, Hevia calls out Samuel Huntingdon and those China watchers whose worldviews remain mired in notions of Chinese inscrutability, expansionism, and anti-foreignness, all false notions first circulated in the 19thC; only when Westerners overcome their willful ignorance of their history in China, Hevia suggests, and acknowledge the forces of modernity which equally motivate contemporary China and Chinese, will relations truly be able to be truly equal. All of us must acknowledge and construct our shared history as such.
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.