In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Karen Thornber about her article “Decentering the ‘West’ and ‘China’ in China–West Comparison,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the inherent pitfalls of the project of literary comparison, and how these pitfalls can be avoided; what it means to “decenter” the “West” and “China,” and how the process of decentering relates to the process of centering; whether the process of decentering involves the recognition of alternative imperial (or nation-based) centers and in a sense a re-establishing of the paradigm of centering; how the focus on decentering relates to the center-periphery paradigm in the production and dissemination of national literatures; how the transnational approach affects our consideration of problems such as discrimination, healthcare, ecological degradation, and climate change; and how the political nature of the opposition of China and the West affects the study of literature. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
Decentering the “West” and “China” in China–West Comparison
Karen Thornber
As the organizers of the series “China and the West: Methodologies for Comparison” have rightly noted, there is abundant scholarship comparing the cultures of “China” and the “West,” or more specifically Han Chinese cultural production and that of Russia and certain Western European nations. A common approach to China–West comparison is examining cases of cross-cultural engagement, in the form of textual reception, translation, transculturation, travel logs, cultural assimilation, and related dynamics. One of the pitfalls of such comparison is that it frequently takes Western cultural production as the norm, the standard against which most everything else is measured. As Shu-mei Shih persuasively argues, “When we put two texts or entities side by side, we tend to privilege one over the other. The grounds are never level. . . . It is the more powerful entity that implicitly serves as . . . the presumed, usually Eurocentric, standard.”[1] And as R. Radhakrishnan likewise declares, “Comparisons are never neutral: they are inevitably tendentious, didactic, competitive, and prescriptive.”[2] To be sure, Radhakrishnan cautions that centrisms can and do go in many directions; he speaks of “awareness of centrism, whether Euro-, logo-, Afro-, Sino-, Indo-, gyno-, or andro-.”[3] But in comparative literature, as practiced in the United States and Europe, and even sometimes in China and other parts of the “non-West,” the presumed standard is all too frequently Euro-American.[4]
Radhakrishnan does not completely dismiss comparison. He concludes the essay “Why Compare?” by arguing that comparisons “should function as precarious and exciting experiments where every normative ‘Self’ is willing to be rendered vulnerable by the gaze of the ‘Other’ within the coordinates of a level playing field.”[5] Susan Stanford Friedman picks up on this challenge in “Why Not Compare?,” which argues strongly for comparison. She urges scholars to aim for modes of comparison “that work with the contradictions inherent in comparison, that expand the voices put in play, that creatively open up dialogue and new frameworks for reading and acting in the world . . . [moving] past centrisms and instrumentalisms of all kinds.”[6] For her part, in “Comparison as Relation,” Shih argues for “bringing into relation terms that have traditionally been pushed apart from each other due to certain interests, such as the European exceptionalism that undergirds Eurocentrism.”[7] While in this essay Shih focuses on the “interconnectedness along the postslavery plantation arc in world history,” she also asserts that “the potential topics are as numerous as the infinite web of world relations within which the text is caught.”[8]
Having been trained in both modern and classical Western literatures, Western comparative literature, and the literatures and cultures of East Asia, and having taught and published on an even broader range of narratives, including those of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, as well as Asia–Africa connections, I prioritize precisely this—expanding the voices put into play and creating new frameworks for reading and acting in the world, especially as these relate to connecting the study of literature to ameliorating global challenges. Much of my scholarship and teaching on China and East Asia during the past twenty years has actively decentered China in Asian studies and decentered the West within comparative literature to engage more productively with urgent matters of global concern. Here are some highlights.
Until the early years of the twenty-first century, comparative scholarship on East Asian literatures tended to focus on classical Japanese and Korean reception of classical Chinese literature, and comparative scholarship on modern Chinese literature tended to focus on its connections with Chinese classical literature or, more commonly, on China–West comparison (e.g., how modern Chinese writers engaged with various Western literatures, literary movements, and theories of literature). In contrast, my first book, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature, moves beyond East–West binaries to examine a broader array of cultural connections.[9] By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of semicolonial Chinese, colonial Korean, and colonial Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia.[10] The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact spaces: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. Empire of Texts in Motion explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, Chinese and other twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.
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1. Shu-mei Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” in Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, ed. Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013), p. 79.
2. R. Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” in Felski and Friedman, Comparison, p. 16.
3. Ibid., p. 25.
4. Most departments of comparative literature in North America and Europe are overwhelmingly oriented toward Europe, especially in the training of their faculty members. More departments are including non-Western literatures in their curricula, but non-Western literatures are taught far more frequently by experts in Western literatures than the reverse.
5. Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?,” p. 33.
6. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Why Not Compare?,” in Felski and Friedman, Comparison, p. 43.
7. Shih, “Comparison as Relation,” p. 79.
8. Ibid., pp. 80, 96.
9. See Karen Laura Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard Univ. Press, 2009).
10. Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. It never formally colonized China, but it subjected the mainland to severe cultural, economic, political, and military pressure from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Japan seized Manchuria (northeast China) in 1931, and in 1932 proclaimed it the nominally independent state of Manchukuo. But in fact Manchukuo was Japan’s puppet state, an informal, de facto colony. Mariko Asano Tamanoi, “Introduction,” in Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 2005), pp. 1–24.
