Session Abstract

This panel is about western knowledge in China and knowledge about China in the West. Each author takes a specific cultural artifact as an entry point, using technological history, transnational history, and material culture studies to examine western conceptions about China, and the unpredictable results when people began to act on those conceptions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, westerners defined their cultures as modern and then sought to preach, export, and imprint ‘modernity’ on the rest of the world. Modernity was not clearly defined, but it included mechanical forms of cultural reproduction, industrial production, and an attitude of cosmopolitan sophistication. Key assumptions of the ‘modern’ worldview were the belief that history is progressive, and that other cultures were not modern, and therefore backward. The West could then define itself by what it was not, or thought it was not. China served westerners as a fragmented looking glass composed of random bits of knowledge, romantic delusions, patronizing misconceptions, and unexamined projections. The resultant flattering-but-distorted self-image was, all too frequently, the basis for unwarranted self-assurance and an incitement to take decisive action.

In “Incompatible with Modernity: The Chinese Typewriter in the Western Imagination,” Professor Thomas S. Mullaney (Stanford) follows the QWERTY typewriter in its circulation around the globe, its transmogrification to accommodate non-Roman Alphabet scripts, and its encounter with the one language that remained frustratingly resistant: Chinese. As Mullaney shows, this failure was attributed, not to the machine, but to Chinese itself, marked thereafter as incompatible with modernity.  Annelise Heinz (Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford) takes up the subject of the mahjong craze of the 1920s, and the ironies of its popularity in a moment of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian fervor. "Mahjong Masquerade: Race, Gender, and Class in 1920s American Popular Culture" also explores the various cultural manifestations of the mahjong mania in U.S. culture, from ‘yellowface’ racial performance to class and gender disruption. "A 'Devil Ship' Bedeviled: The Iconography and Reality of the Opium War's SS Nemesis" deconstructs and demythologizes the first iron war steamer. Mary Greenfield (Ph.D. Candidate, Yale) traces the ship’s construction, financing, staffing and Opium War maneuvers, finding much more technological, racial, and social complexity than its hagiographic historiography might suggest. Professor James Hevia (University of Chicago, most recently author of English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China), will act as chair and provide comment.

The panel will be of interest to scholars in fields including U.S. Pacific expansion, China, Asian American studies, U.S.-Asia transnational history, and technological and cultural history.