The Politics of Writing Instruments: How Transnational Commodities Construct Chinese Nationalism, 1894-1938

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 7

Abstract

Scholars of nationalism have long emphasized the role of objects in sustaining nationalism. As the materialization of the imagined community, “national matters” render the nation concrete and tangible. These studies highlight the role of material objects as political resources that can ‘naturalize’ the existing political order. In this study, I aim to examine the relationship between nationalism and materiality from a reverse direction. Rather than asking how nationalism, as a well-established ideology, enlists material objects to legitimize itself, I aim to explore how material objects actively engage in the historical construction of nationalism. Drawing on the case of writing instruments in China in the first half of the twentieth century, this study demonstrates how transnational commodities—an instantiation of colonial power—contributed to the collapse of Sinocentrism, a premodern worldview that imagined China as the center of a universal civilization, and to the emergence of nationalism. As the distributional availability of objects changes during economic transformations, it creates opportunities to destabilize existing cultural norms and foster the emergence of nationalist ideology. This case demonstrates how commodities provide a productive analytical lens for linking economic transformation and the construction of nationalism.

Author

• Han Jiang, University of Notre Dame