Staging the World

Karl Rebecca E. Karl

Description

In Staging the World Rebecca E. Karl rethinks the production of nationalist discourse in China during the late Qing period, between China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the proclamation of the Republic in 1911. She argues that at this historical moment a growing Chinese identification with what we now call the Third World first made the modern world visible as a totality and that the key components of Chinese nationalist discourse developed in reference to this worldview.The emergence of Chinese nationalism during this period is often portrayed as following from China's position vis-a-vis Japan and the West. Karl has mined the archives of the late Qing period to discern the foci of Chinese intellectuals from 1895 to 1911 to assert that even though the China/Japan/West triangle was crucial, it alone is an incomplete-and therefore flawed-model of the development of nationalism in China. Although the perceptions and concerns of these thinkers form the basis of Staging the World, Karl begins by examining a 1904 Shanghai production of an opera about a fictional partition of Poland and its modern reincarnation as an ethno-nation. By focusing on the type of dialogue this opera generated in China, Karl elucidates concepts such as race, colonization, globalization, and history. From there, she discusses how Chinese conceptions of nationalism were affected by the "discovery" of Hawai'i as a center of the Pacific, the Philippine revolution against the United States, and the relationship between nationality and ethnicity made apparent by the Boer War in South Africa.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Nationalism
• History of Asia
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383529
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

STAGING THE WORLD

    -       :

Culture, Politics, and Society

Editors: Rey Chow, H. D. Harootunian,

and Masao Miyoshi

        .    

STAGING THE WORLD

Chinese Nationalism at the Turn

of the Twentieth Century

                   Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For my parents, Dolores M. and Frederick R. Karl

     

Preface & Acknowledgments

    . Introduction: Shifting Perspectives on Modern Chinese Nationalism

. Staging the World

     . Deterritorializing Politics: The Pacific and Hawaii as Chinese National Space

. Recognizing Colonialism: The Philippines and Revolution

. Promoting the Ethnos: The Boer War and Discourses of the People

      . Performing on the World Stage in Asia

. Re-creating China’s World

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ix

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

















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                   

In , while I was teaching in Hunan Province, I met a group of Filipino communists, who had fled the Philippines in the late s after their plot to assassinate then-president Ferdinand Marcos had been discovered. They had looked upon their giant neighbor, the People’s Republic of China, as a natural ally and historical model. Arriving in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution, they were met in Beijing by Mao Zedong, welcomed as fraternal revolutionary allies, and provided political refuge, housing, and employment in Changsha. There, for two decades they raised their families while struggling to retain a sense of solidarity and revolutionary optimism. By the time I met them, many of those sentiments—in relation to China at least—had dissipated and been replaced by frequent despair. Despite what he saw as China’s hopeless situation, Fernando, as I knew him, remained absolutely committed to his hopes for a better future for the Philippines, and when Corazon Aquino’s ‘‘people’s power’’ movement toppled Marcos, Fernando decided it was a propitious time to return to his homeland to put his hopes into action. One cold night in February , Fernando left Changsha, with a send-off party attended by his friends, albeit pointedly avoided by representatives of the province and city who, in a different era, had been his enthusiastic hosts. Less sanguine about Aquino’s new regime, most of the other exiles remained in China. Several months later, at a dif- ferent gathering, I learned that Fernando had been executed by Aquino’s army, and that his wife and children were in hiding in the south. In some retrospective way, the initial motivation for this study emerged from my encounters with Fernando and his fellow Filipino revolutionaries, for this study traces the historical conditions that made a revolutionary dialogue on and in the world possible and significant in China. However, the book concerns itself with the initial moment of this possibility, at the turn of the twentieth century. The world around which this dialogue was