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Author: Shuchen Xiang
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691242720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism, Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that “Chinese” identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy—described as “harmony”—with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one’s position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today’s multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.
Author: Shuchen Xiang
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691242720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book
Book Description
A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism, Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that “Chinese” identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy—described as “harmony”—with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one’s position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today’s multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.
Author: Nicolai Volland
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544758
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315
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Book Description
Socialist Cosmopolitanism offers an innovative interpretation of literary works from the Mao era that reads Chinese socialist literature as world literature. As Nicolai Volland demonstrates, after 1949 China engaged with the world beyond its borders in a variety of ways and on many levels—politically, economically, and culturally. Far from rejecting the worldliness of earlier eras, the young People's Republic developed its own cosmopolitanism. Rather than a radical break with the past, Chinese socialist literature should be seen as an integral and important chapter in China's long search to find a place within world literature. Socialist Cosmopolitanism revisits a range of genres, from poetry and land reform novels to science fiction and children's literature, and shows how Chinese writers and readers alike saw their own literary production as part of a much larger literary universe. This literary space, reaching from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Pyongyang, from Warsaw to Moscow to Hanoi, allowed authors and texts to travel, reinventing the meaning of world literature. Chinese socialist literature was not driven solely by politics but by an ambitious—but ultimately doomed—attempt to redraw the literary world map.
Author: John T. Sidel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501755633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
In Republicanism, Communism, Islam, John T. Sidel provides an alternate vantage point for understanding the variegated forms and trajectories of revolution across the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, a perspective that is de-nationalized, internationalized, and transnationalized. Sidel positions this new vantage point against the conventional framing of revolutions in modern Southeast Asian history in terms of a nationalist template, on the one hand, and distinctive local cultures and forms of consciousness, on the other. Sidel's comparative analysis shows how—in very different, decisive, and often surprising ways—the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions were informed, enabled, and impelled by diverse cosmopolitan connections and international conjunctures. Sidel addresses the role of Freemasonry in the making of the Philippine revolution, the importance of Communism and Islam in Indonesia's Revolusi, and the influence that shifting political currents in China and anticolonial movements in Africa had on Vietnamese revolutionaries. Through this assessment, Republicanism, Communism, and Islam tracks how these forces, rather than nationalism per se, shaped the forms of these revolutions, the ways in which they unfolded, and the legacies which they left in their wakes.
Author: Minghui Hu
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621967115
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
At the height of the Cultural Revolution and the Cold War in 1971, the historian Joseph Levenson made the astute observation that China used to be cosmopolitan on account of Confucianism. At that time, the notion of China, much less Confucianism, as somehow being cosmopolitan may have surprised many of his readers, especially because so many conventional ideas about China-ranging from its "kith and kin" social structure to its purportedly eternal and monolithic state structure-seem to reflect a society that was the very antithesis of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, even now, or perhaps even more so now on account of growing Chinese nationalism, Han chauvinism, and global fears of a rising China, the idea of Chinese cosmopolitanism may strike many as ill conceived.Levenson, as with so much of his scholarship, was clearly on to something important. In fact, in the current academic climate it seems almost irresponsible not to address this. This book is therefore a much-needed pioneering attempt to explore the implications and possibilities of Levenson's potent observation regarding China in relation to the growing scholarship on cosmopolitanism around the world. It is an important intervention in both the current scholarship on modern China and the scholarship on cosmopolitanism in its global articulations.
Author: Kwok Bun Chan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113420311X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
Drawing upon wide-ranging case study material, the book explores the ever-changing personal and cultural identity of Chinese migrants and the diverse cosmopolitan communities they create. The various models of newly-forged communities are examined with the added dimension of personal identity and the individual's place in society. With particular emphasis on the changing face of Chinese ethnicity in a range of established places of convergence, Chan draws on extensive experience and knowledge in the field to bring the reader a fresh, fascinating and ultimately very human analysis of migration, culture, identity and the self.
Author: Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067403306X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.
Author: Xiaoqun Xu
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739189158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Individualism in Modern China explores Chinese intellectual life and cultural practices in the New Culture era of modern China by examining an influential newspaper supplement published in Beijing during 1918–1928, as well as other contemporary sources. Xu highlights a key intellectual-moral paradox in Chinese discourses between cosmopolitanism as an idealistic aspiration and nationalism as a practical imperative, both in complex relationship to individualism, and in constant negotiations between Chinese tradition and Western culture in the making of Chinese modernity. These issues remain vitally relevant today.
Author: Qian Suoqiao
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004192131
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
This book is a cross-cultural critique on the problem of the liberal cosmopolitan in modern Chinese intellectuality in light of Lin Yutang’s literary and cultural practices across China and America. It points to the desirability of a middling Chinese modernity.
Author: Kwok Bun Chan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134203101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Drawing upon wide-ranging case study material, the book explores the ever-changing personal and cultural identity of Chinese migrants and the diverse cosmopolitan communities they create. The various models of newly-forged communities are examined with the added dimension of personal identity and the individual's place in society. With particular emphasis on the changing face of Chinese ethnicity in a range of established places of convergence, Chan draws on extensive experience and knowledge in the field to bring the reader a fresh, fascinating and ultimately very human analysis of migration, culture, identity and the self.
Author: Shuang Shen
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813546995
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Early twentieth-century China paired the local community to the worldùa place and time when English dominated urban-centered higher and secondary education and Chinese-edited English-language magazines surfaced as a new form of translingual practice. Cosmopolitan Publics focuses on China's "cosmopolitans" Western-educated intellectuals who returned to Shanghai in the late 1920s to publish in English and who, ultimately, became both cultural translators and citizens of the wider world. Shuang Shen highlights their work in publications such as The China Critic and T'ien Hsia, providing readers with a broader understanding of the role and function of cultural mixing, translation, and multilingualism in China's cultural modernity. Decades later, as nationalist biases and political restrictions emerged within China, the influence of the cosmopolitans was neglected and the significance of cosmopolitan practice was underplayed. Shen's encompassing study revisits and presents the experience of Chinese modernity as far more heterogeneous, emergent, and transnational than it has been characterized until now.
