Hill, Emily M.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

130 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale  Social History, vol. XXXVII, no 73 (mai-May 2004)deal of evidence for it. His reading of the sources uncovers at the same time aninvolved, active, and significant place for American fathers in the middle-classhome. He does a remarkably sensitive job of translating their words and worlds inthe antebellum period across the threshold between family life and the world of menbeyond the home.Robert RutherdaleAlgoma University CollegeRebecca E. Karl  Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of theTwentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 314.Staging the World explores the intellectual context of the Chinese anti-dynastic rad-icalism that brought millennia of rule by emperors abruptly to an end in 1911. Insimplified accounts, the revolutionaries who established the Republic of China wereimpelled by Social Darwinist fears that the Manchu monarchy was unfit to ensuresurvival of the nation. Rebecca Karls persuasive analysis, in contrast, identifies theradical anti-Manchuism of the turn of the twentieth century as part of an emergingresistance to the ideological hegemony of Euro-American imperialism in Asia andAfrica.According to simplified accounts found in both Chinese and Western historiogra-phy, Chinas intellectuals a century ago had been forced out of isolation by Westernimperialist attacks and emerged blinking to discover a world outside their ancientEmpire. They then reluctantly recognized the necessity of modernizing along West-ern lines and were inspired in their anti-monarchism by the French Revolution andthe model of a strong republic established in the United States. Karl makes a crucialcontribution to recovering the aims of Chinese radicals by revealing their sophisti-cated and detailed knowledge of current world affairs. She describes members ofChinas educated elite as such avid readers of world news that the recent history offar-flung places such as the Philippines, Poland, Turkey, and the African Transvaalprovided them with analytic terms such as to Poland (meaning to dismember anddestroy a state) with which to diagnose their own situation. Chinese radicals thusidentified Chinas Manchu monarchy, established by an ethnically distinct group ofconquerors during the seventeenth century, as a colonial power congruent with Brit-ish power in India and the United States in the Philippines.Karls central focus is on how Chinese nationalism was constructed by observersof international affairs. She demonstrates the astuteness of Chinese radical intellec-tuals who were becoming keenly aware of the power of colonialist regimes to definethe targets of their violence as primitive others. Emerging sentiments of anti-stat-ism in the news-reading radical group led to analytic links between Euro-Americanimperialism and Chinas dynastic regime, despite the fact that Chinas monarchy wasitself the victim of Euro-American scorn. Karl makes the important argument that theintellectual leaders of Chinas early-twentieth-century revolutionary movementclearly distinguished nation and state in their analyses. She argues that resistanceHistoire sociale  Social History, vol. XXXVII, no 73 (mai-May 2004)Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 131to state hegemony was central to their construction of the nation. On this point Karlopposes what she considers to be a distorting conflation of statism and nationalism inChinese intellectual history by many other authors, some of whom have tracedChinas recent repressive statism back to the origins of Chinese nationalism.Karls contention that early Chinese nationalism has been misinterpreted by lead-ing scholars will make her book compelling reading for specialists in Chinese his-tory and related fields. Readers will find much to ponder in her ambitious book,which actually contains enough substantive material to fill two or three separatemonographs. Although they might question some of Karls claims, it would be sur-prising if a project of such scope did not seem to rest on thin ice in a few spots.It is striking that the book does not refer to Reuters, active in East Asia since 1872.Nowhere does the book identify the news agencies through which reports on eventssuch as the Boer War, the crushed Philippine revolution, and the successes of theYoung Turks reached Chinese readers. Had any Chinese correspondents been postedto Africa and Turkey a century ago? How the predominantly Euro-American profes-sional journalism of the era shaped Chinese observers understanding of the worlddeserves a least a mention. Sustained attention to how the news reached China, how-ever, would require a separate book, and will perhaps be written by another author,inspired by the vistas Karl reveals.Another shortcoming of Staging the World is that it downplays Chinese admira-tion of models of modernist power, most notably Japan, that were frequently dis-cussed in the news a century ago. Most of the chapters are case studies of howChinese readers interpreted news from particular places in the world where eventswere unfolding to reveal possible parallels and perils for China. There is no directreference to how news about Japans changing role on the world stage shaped Chi-nese radicals generalizations about politics and historical forces. This is a strikingomission given the extent to which the radicals own sojourns and contacts in Japan,together with their access to news of the world through Japanese sources, shaped theintellectual milieu that Karl explores.In her recovery of the nationalist and anarchist positions taken by Chinese com-mentators on international affairs around the turn of the twentieth century, Karlbrings to light the liberating potential of early Chinese nationalism, but she seems toidealize the Chinese radicals. She acknowledges that the efforts of the Chinese intel-lectual elite to resist the dominant modernizationist discourse of the time wereincomplete. She also notes that the radicals views were text-based and elitist onthe topic of a potential pan-Asian identity (p. 175). But she does not address the pos-sibility that Chinese news-readers were always as fascinated by power as they wereby movements of anti-colonial resistance. Perhaps they were as concerned aboutproving that the Chinese were not a primitive race as with conceptual solidarity withcolonized peoples. In her exploration of a complex and contradictory discourse onChina in the world, Karl has separated out (to use a term she is fond of) an anti-hegemonic strain. By doing so, she gives the impression that Chinese radicals a cen-tury ago were not just modernists, but actually precocious postmodernists.The books highlight is Karls talent as a translator. In the course of her discus-sion, she skilfully translates numerous passages from her sources. As an appendix,132 Histoire sociale / Social HistoryHistoire sociale  Social History, vol. XXXVII, no 73 (mai-May 2004)she provides a flawlessly flowing translation of the surviving first part of a politicalactivists engaging and intriguing play, performed in Shanghai in 1904. But there isa sharp contrast between Karls skill as a translator and the awkwardness of her ownprose style. The translated passages are lively oases separated by arid stretcheswhere a readers energy flags in the course of convoluted sentences extending topoints far over the horizon. While Karl provides evocative access to the voices andconcerns of Chinese writers a century ago, she also obstructs that access with herponderously abstract meta-translation of the writers larger discourse.Perhaps Karls writing is not clear because she is trying too hard to be theoretical.Part of the problem is that she reads postmodern sophistication into the minimallytheoretical musings of Chinese authors of a century ago. An example of this is herdiscussion of Tang Tiaodings commentary of 1903 on recent events in the Philip-pines (pp. 105113). In a single paragraph of five sentences, Karl confidently claimsthat Tang was perhaps on one level elaborating a model, while at a differentlevel, Tang also powerfully suggested and felt ... history could be secured on aglobal stage. Karl continues with the contention that the point for Tang ... was notso much to counterpose a real history against a white-manufactured fiction, andshe concludes with the statement that Tang seemed to wish to destabilize the seem-ing structural certainty of the world system itself (p. 109). Karls reading is fasci-nating, and her translation makes clear that Tang Tiaoding was brilliant and well-informed. Nonetheless, she runs a risk in her attempt to read another writers mind.Karls own response to these criticisms might be similar to her recent reference ina book review to the aversion to theory of the majority of Western historians ofChina (The China Journal, no. 49, p. 185). The response to her own book is likelyto disprove that off-hand remark. Many Western-based specialists are actuallyeager to read books placing Chinese history in abstract frameworks and will perusethis one with patience and appreciation. Moreover, Karls first book has the poten-tial to direct the attention of non-specialists to China. Although Staging the Worlddoes not seem likely to influence current fashionings of theoretical positions by theworlds intellectual vanguard, it is nonetheless a promising rehearsal of future workon a wider stage.Emily M. HillQueen’s UniversityStephen Knight  Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 2003. Pp. xxi, 247.I must confess to approaching this book with the suspicion that it was a simplereshuffling of materials previously published by Stephen Knight in several venues,most notably his Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford:Blackwell, 1994). I am pleased to say that I was not completely correct in thisassumption, since there is a certain amount of new material and many new ideas;nonetheless, the debt to the 1994 book is particularly clear. Knight tries to distance

Rebecca E. Karl — Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Rebecca E. Karl — Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)