This chapter gives a chronological sketch of China’s past as a real and imagined part of a cultur... more This chapter gives a chronological sketch of China’s past as a real and imagined part of a culturally larger history. It addresses the significance of the historiographic paradigms of colonization and Sinicization, highlighting the literary genres and frontier contexts that complicate linear narratives of empire and literary practice. The final section on the “Polyscriptic Northwest” introduces the diversity of literatures in foreign scripts and languages that flourished alongside Literary Chinese texts in eastern Central Asia (China’s Northwest). Throughout the first millennium ce, mass migration across the politically polycentric Northwest led to different practices of acculturation. This included the adoption of non-Chinese and Chinese writing for religious and secular purposes. Given the traditional prestige of writing in China as a signifier of civilization (wen), this encounter with foreign (non-Sinographic) scripts, and not simply foreign languages, marks a watershed; hence t...
This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China’s connected past, rather than ... more This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China’s connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the ColdWar, China’s Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West’s Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China’s short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.
Modern critics generally locate the beginning of the Chinese aesthetic tradition in the Con- fuci... more Modern critics generally locate the beginning of the Chinese aesthetic tradition in the Con- fucian commentarial repression of the ‘‘love and marriage’’ poems of the Book of Songs. This article argues that these commentators were actually using the Songs to engage with Han dynasty debates about desire, and in doing so formulated a new, gendered way of presenting poems as parables.
Savage Exchange explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) a... more Savage Exchange explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance (“Silk Road”) markets. Tamara T. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets. To promote a radically quantitative approach to the market, some thinkers developed innovative forms of fiction and genre. In opposition, traditionalists reasserted the authority of classical texts and advocated a return to the historical, ethics-centered, marriage-based, agricultural economy that these texts described. The discussion of frontiers and markets thus became part of a larger debate over the relationship between the world and the written word. These Han debates helped to shape the ways in which we now define and appreciate early Chinese literature and produced the foundational texts of Chinese economic thought. Each chapter in the book examines a key genre or symbolic practice (philosophy, fu-rhapsody, historiography, money, kinship) through which different groups sought to reshape the political economy. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, Chin elaborates a new literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought.
This chapter gives a chronological sketch of China’s past as a real and imagined part of a cultur... more This chapter gives a chronological sketch of China’s past as a real and imagined part of a culturally larger history. It addresses the significance of the historiographic paradigms of colonization and Sinicization, highlighting the literary genres and frontier contexts that complicate linear narratives of empire and literary practice. The final section on the “Polyscriptic Northwest” introduces the diversity of literatures in foreign scripts and languages that flourished alongside Literary Chinese texts in eastern Central Asia (China’s Northwest). Throughout the first millennium ce, mass migration across the politically polycentric Northwest led to different practices of acculturation. This included the adoption of non-Chinese and Chinese writing for religious and secular purposes. Given the traditional prestige of writing in China as a signifier of civilization (wen), this encounter with foreign (non-Sinographic) scripts, and not simply foreign languages, marks a watershed; hence t...
This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China’s connected past, rather than ... more This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China’s connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the ColdWar, China’s Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West’s Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China’s short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.
Modern critics generally locate the beginning of the Chinese aesthetic tradition in the Con- fuci... more Modern critics generally locate the beginning of the Chinese aesthetic tradition in the Con- fucian commentarial repression of the ‘‘love and marriage’’ poems of the Book of Songs. This article argues that these commentators were actually using the Songs to engage with Han dynasty debates about desire, and in doing so formulated a new, gendered way of presenting poems as parables.
Savage Exchange explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) a... more Savage Exchange explores the politics of representation during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) at a pivotal moment when China was asserting imperialist power on the Eurasian continent and expanding its local and long-distance (“Silk Road”) markets. Tamara T. Chin explains why rival political groups introduced new literary forms with which to represent these expanded markets. To promote a radically quantitative approach to the market, some thinkers developed innovative forms of fiction and genre. In opposition, traditionalists reasserted the authority of classical texts and advocated a return to the historical, ethics-centered, marriage-based, agricultural economy that these texts described. The discussion of frontiers and markets thus became part of a larger debate over the relationship between the world and the written word. These Han debates helped to shape the ways in which we now define and appreciate early Chinese literature and produced the foundational texts of Chinese economic thought. Each chapter in the book examines a key genre or symbolic practice (philosophy, fu-rhapsody, historiography, money, kinship) through which different groups sought to reshape the political economy. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, Chin elaborates a new literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought.
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Papers by Tamara Chin
Books by Tamara Chin
16pp Review by Lothar von Falkenhausen in Journal of Chinese Studies:
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/journal/articles/v61p325.pdf
Table of contents: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674417199&content=toc
16pp Review by Lothar von Falkenhausen in Journal of Chinese Studies:
http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/journal/articles/v61p325.pdf
Table of contents: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674417199&content=toc