Lydia H. Liu

Tokens of exchange : the problem of translation in global circulations

The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations—and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, contributors contend that “national histories” and “world history” must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times. By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in its contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization. The collection will engage students and scholars of global cultural processes, Chinese studies, world history, literary studies, history of science, and anthropology, as well as cultural and postcolonial studies. Contributors . Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang

Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot

Virginia Woolf once made a remarkable observation about Daniel Defoes novel Robinson Crusoe. Call it intuition or uncanny lucidity. Under her eyes, an insignificant detail, which has largely escaped the attention of Defoes critics, emerges out of obscurity and becomes luminous all of a sudden. The illumination radiates from a plain earthenware pot that practically dominates the physical environment of Crusoes world. Although Defoes reader will remember that this pot is but one of many survival tools that Crusoe has invented during his solitary existence on the island, Woolf insists on seeing more. In her reading, the object acquires an enigmatic symbolism:

Shadows of Universalism: The Untold Story of Human Rights around 1948

International politics has taught us to regard all claims of universal truths with suspicion. This skepticism need not imply an automatic endorsement of cultural relativism, although it has the tendency of going in that direction—often with predictable outcomes—as evidenced by many of the debates on human rights since War World II and, most notably, by the Asian values debate since the 1990s. To the extent these discussions allow themselves to be shaped by the interminable play of contraries, it seems that universalism cannot but structure—and simultaneously be structured by—its opposites, be it cultural relativism, particularism, or any such terms. One is tempted to say that this is true of almost all arguments of universalism, and we can hardly adopt a stance against them without taking refuge under one of their contraries. Or can we? Even if there is no escaping the logic, the impasse should not deter us from raising a different set of questions. For example, what’s at stake when somebody decides to take up a cause for—or against—the universality of human rights? This question is bound to take us to the politics of universalism—a universalism of human rights—which turns out to be more difficult toInternational politics has taught us to regard all claims of universal truths with suspicion. This skepticism need not imply an automatic endorsement of cultural relativism, although it has the tendency of going in that direction—often with predictable outcomes—as evidenced by many of the debates on human rights since War World II and, most notably, by the Asian values debate since the 1990s. To the extent these discussions allow themselves to be shaped by the interminable play of contraries, it seems that universalism cannot but structure—and simultaneously be structured by—its opposites, be it cultural relativism, particularism, or any such terms. One is tempted to say that this is true of almost all arguments of universalism, and we can hardly adopt a stance against them without taking refuge under one of their contraries. Or can we? Even if there is no escaping the logic, the impasse should not deter us from raising a different set of questions. For example, what’s at stake when somebody decides to take up a cause for—or against—the universality of human rights? This question is bound to take us to the politics of universalism—a universalism of human rights—which turns out to be more difficult to

The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory

Chance put the text of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” at the disposal of Jacques Lacan and his psychoanalytic work, and this work has since made numerous surprising moves and detours through poststructuralist literary criticism. These moves and detours are guarding an open secret as to how Lacan discovered Poe’s story for psychoanalysis. The secret—hiding in plain sight, as it were— has inadvertently barred us from knowing more. That is to say, something will remain unseen and unheard until we are prepared to reflect on what we know about Lacan through American literary criticism and, more importantly, what we do not know about American cybernetics in France or in the U.S. for that matter. Barred from that knowledge, have we been asking the right sort of questions about Lacan’s analytical rigor with respect to the symbolic order? For instance, why did his teaching seem so abstruse? Did he get his math right?2

The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference, and Competing Universals

The article seeks to develop a new angel for translation studies by rethinking its relationship to the political. It begins with the question “Can the eventfulness of translation itself be thought?” Since neither the familiar model of communication (translatable and untranslatable) nor the biblical model of the Tower of Babel (the promise or withdrawal of meaning) can help us work out a suitable answer to that question, the author proposes an alternative method that incorporates the notions of temporality, difference, and competing universals in the reframing of translation. This method requires close attention to the multiple temporalities of translation in concrete analyses of translingual practices, or what the author calls “differentially distributed discursive practices across languages.” The author’s textual analysis focuses on a few pivotal moments of translation in global history—chosen for their world transforming influences or actual and potential global impact—to demonstrate what is meant by the “eventfulness of translation.” These include, for example, the nineteenth-century Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law or Wanguo gongfa, the post-World War II multilingual fashioning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a focus on P. C. Chang’s unique contribution, and the Afro-Asian writers’ translation project during the Cold War.

iSpace: Printed English after Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida

516 1. James Joyce, FinnegansWake (1939; London, 1975), p. 124; hereafter abbreviated FW. 2. Donald F. Theall, for instance, discusses in great detail how Joyce anticipated the age of the microcomputer and its relationshipwith telecommunication in Beyond theWord: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication (Toronto, 1995). See also Louis Armand,Technē: James Joyce, Hypertext, and Technology (Prague, 2003); Darren Tofts andMurray McKeich,Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (North Ryde, NSW, 1998); and Thomas Jackson Rice, Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity (Urbana, Ill., 1997). iSpace: Printed English after Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida

The Ghost of Arthur H. Smith in the Mirror of Cultural Translation

Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1890) remained the most widely read American book on China until Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). Smith’s collection of pungent and humorous essays, originally written for white expatriates in Asia, was accepted by Americans at home as a wise and authentic handbook. The book was soon translated into Japanese (1896), classical Chinese (1903), and at least three more times into Chinese since 1990. The characteristics Smith identified reflect his conception of the American Way of Life, racial hierarchy, the idea of progress, and the middle-class values with which he was brought up. He used race and “national character” to explain Chinese food, dress, body care, music, art, language, and architecture, as well as politics and religion. Lu Xun, the preeminent Chinese cultural critic of the early twentieth century, pondered why his country had been defeated and came to believe that the character of his countrymen was the key to their future survival. Smith’s criticisms were valuable for this task of introspection but Lu Xun took him to task for misunderstanding the concept of “face” because he did not grasp it in the social context of unequal power. The ghost of Arthur Smith thus haunts both Chinese and Americans.

The Pictorial Uncanny

Abstract This essay seeks to reopen the space of interpretation between psychoanalysis and the current studies of image, media, and machine. W. J. T. Mitchell’s important work on animated picture in the book What Do Pictures Want? puts a fresh demand on theorists to contemplate the pictorial uncanny. It also means that Freud’s speculations about the uncanny and his rejection of Ernst Jentsch’s stance on the same must be re‐evaluated with respect to the place of automata in psychoanalytical studies. Mitchell has been critical of some of the central Freudian assumptions about the human psyche and, in particular, how images and texts address our visual and cognitive perception. At the same time, Mitchell often alludes to the uncanny and related psychoanalytical concepts and seems to find them indispensable to his analysis of animated picture. Are such ambivalences indicative of the fundamental difficulty of doing without Freudian insights? This essay probes Mitchell’s relationship with psychoanalysis by making a double interpretative move surrounding Freud’s classic essay ‘Das “Unheimliche”’. It begins with the following questions: in what sense can the Freudian uncanny be said to frame Mitchell’s engagement with the psychic powers of image, object, and media? Will Mitchell’s work on media and animated picture help reveal some aspects of Freud’s original insights that would have escaped our attention? The essay concludes by reflecting on the current developments in biocybernetics and neuroscientific experiments to explain why the pictorial uncanny must be thought in our time.

Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity--China, 1900-1937

Preface 1. Introduction: the problem of language in cross-cultural studies Part I. Between the Nation and the Individual: 2. Translating national character Lu Xun and Arthur Smith 3. The discourse of individualism Part II. Translingual modes of representation: 4. Homo Economicus and the question of novelistic realism 5. Narratives of desire: negotiating the real and the fantastic 6. The deixis of writing in the first person Part III. National Building and Culture Building: 7. Literary criticism as a discourse of legitimation 8. The making of the Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature 9. Rethinking culture and national essence Appendixes Notes Index.