Signifiers in Motion: The Transmutation of Chinese Texts in Early Modern East Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

When imperial Chinese texts traveled across cultural, institutional, and geographic borders, they underwent complex processes of adaptation, commentary, and translation. This panel examines the palimpsestic reception of traveling Chinese texts in settings as diverse as the Manchu court, Chosŏn Korea, and Edo-Meiji Japan. Each case demonstrates the malleability of the process of signification in early modern East Asia, and the ways in which the reinscription of meaning provides a way of interrogating, reifying, or deconstructing the continuity and coherence of the Chinese cultural tradition. By traversing geographical and cultural boundaries, the texts in question participate in the ever-shifting power dynamics of the local order—a nexus of issues including the competition over interpretive authority, shuffling of monetary and symbolic capital, and redefinition of the criteria used to delineate the foreign.

Ariel Fox looks at a southern drama that was rewritten for performance in the Manchu court in order to explore how late Ming cultural forms were reconstituted in the Qing political imaginary. Xiaoqiao Ling discusses a late Chosŏn play’s enactment of a cosmopolitan version of Confucian orthodoxy by turning Chinese texts into ingenious pastiche. Nanxiu Qian analyzes issues of cultural continuity in the early modern Japanese reconfiguration of Chinese ideals of “exemplary” womanhood. Finally, William Hedberg explores the “quasi-ethnographic” reception of a subversive Chinese novel in Meiji Japan—an interpretation used to reconceptualize Sino-Japanese cultural relations. The four papers demonstrate the ways in which volatile tensions between form and meaning transformed ethical-aesthetic and socio-political discourses in the early modern Sinosphere.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• William Hedberg, Arizona State University

Chair

• Nanxiu Qian, Rice University

Individual Presentations

• Staging Heavenly Peace: Taiping qian in the Manchu Court - Ariel Fox, University of Chicago

• This Cosmopolitan Culture of Ours: A Chosŏn Scholar’s Dramatic Imagineering - Xiaoqiao Ling, Arizona State University

• “Exemplary Women” (Lienü) versus “Worthy Ladies” (Xianyuan): Two Traditions of Writing Women’s History in Tokugawa- and Meiji-Japan - Nanxiu Qian, Rice University

• Translation, Transculturation, and Armchair Anthropology: The Qing Decline As Explained Through Chinese Fiction - William Hedberg, Arizona State University