19th Century Modernity in a Comparative Context: Arab Nahda and Chinese Fuxing
Panel 228, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 18 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
How did Nahdawis and Chinese intellectuals define their experiences with modernity in conversation with each other and with the European imagination? The Chinese concept of Fuxing (revival) is introduced to the Arab reader in an article in the 1925 issue of al-Hilal, entitled "nah?at a?-??n: dif?' a?-??n 'anh?" (The Chinese Awakening: China In Defense of Its Awakening), which discusses elements of the anti-colonial struggle and the replacement of Classical Chinese by Vernacular Written Chinese in many domains of writing. While the current understanding of the Nahda is confined to the Middle Eastern region, Nahdawis used the word Nahda to describe the Chinese Fuxing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This panel will connect the Arab Nahda with the Chinese Fuxing for a cross-cultural reading of the Arab Nahda and to move Nahda studies beyond Middle Eastern regional boundaries.
The Arab Nahda and Chinese Fuxing share striking parallels in their discourses throughout the long nineteenth century. Both witnessed and responded to rapid infrastructural development, engaged in discourses on nation and civilization, and offered diverse and even contradictory ideas/criteria of being "modern" men and women. They are also associated with a rapid increase in literary production, especially the emergence of new literary forms. Through translation, creative writing, and journalism, Arab Nahdawis and Chinese intellectuals each created a new writing style, a lean, powerful prose language in Arabic and Chinese, respectively. Nahdawis and Chinese intellectuals both had a genuine interest in the fate of the al-sharq (East), "translating" each other's modernity experiences from European sources but also adding on their own perspectives. Despite these commonalities, the Arab Nahda and Chinese Fuxing ended in different trajectories and have been studied separately, each as a sub-field of Area Studies.
This panel will examine the connections and disjunctures between the Arab Nahda and Chinese Fuxing from the perspectives of different disciplines and methodologies. In order to explore new avenues for study of both movements in a comparative context, these four papers will analyze topics including nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese writings on Egyptian infrastructure projects, Nahdawi perceptions of China and the Chinese, and parallels and differences between Arabic and Chinese Script Romanization movements. Bridging literary studies, translation studies, history, and sociolinguistics, these four papers explore the question of the comparative shaping of modernity in an increasingly global context.
The “famous woman” biography became a popular genre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. These biographies were for most part directly translated from European sources, but in one particular case, these European sources were paired with Nahadawi writings about a non-European other using a practice that I am here defining as “triangular translation.” While biographies of renowned Western women such as Queen Victoria and Catherine the Great offered a clear image of ideal womanhood, the biographies of the Empress Dowager of China Cixi provided a confusing and internally contradictory depiction of one of the most powerful women in the East. In effective control of late Qing China from 1862 to 1908, the Empress Dowager Cixi has been the heroine of many eroticizing fantasies in European-language Orientalist writings, in which she was often referred to as the “dragon lady” and the “monster.” Arabic biographies of the Empress Dowager Cixi were published in the 1900 issues of widely circulated journals like al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf. Entitled sul??naat a?-??n wa mash?kiluh? (The Sultana of China and Her Problems) and ’imbur???raa a?-??n (The Empress of China), these biographies sought to go beyond “Orientalism by proxy” and provide an Arabic perspective of the female ruler of China.
This paper will examine these two Arabic biographies of Cixi and propose the concept of “triangular translation” as a way to interpret how Nahdawis wrote about a Chinese figure by relying on but also adding to translated European sources. One example of such “triangular translation” is the usage of orientalist descriptions of Cixi, such as calling her a wrestler or a monster, quoted directly from European language journals. However, the authors also added contradictory accounts such as comparable her favorably to European Monarchs as counter examples. I argue that this “triangular translation” strategy constructed confusion about the Empress Dowager’s gender, personality, and identity. I will analyze how this confusion was produced by contradictory descriptions, quotes from European sources, and illustrations of her. Building on Marilyn Booth’s assumption that Nahdawi authors were writing the biographies of famous women as exemplars for female audience to imitate, I will investigate the function of the biographies of the Empress Dowager of China as an ambiguous female exemplar from the East.
Script Romanization movements in China and the Arab world from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century are studied separately in different traditions. Whereas the former is considered part of the Chinese Revolution, the latter is examined in line with the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East. These two movements also ended differently. While nowadays pinyin, the official scheme for the Chinese phonetic alphabet is widely used to facilitate the learning of Mandarin in China and beyond, Romanization of Arabic is banned as a cultural taboo in the Arab world. These differences, however, occult a phenomenon attested in both movements: the ideologization of script to become proxy for the struggle against the peripheralization of the Chinese and the Arabs in the modern world-system. In both settings, polemics broke out around similar lines of arguments. Campaigners of Romanization blamed their original script for causing backwardness of their nation, acclaimed the Latin script as a key to democracy, progress, and modernity, and called for national salvation and renaissance via Romanization. Their logic was based on a parallel hierarchical evaluation of both the scripts and the nations. In contrast, opponents of Romanization saw their script as a symbol of national spirit, history, and identity, arguing that its replacement with the Latin script is equivalent to national demise. This paper traces this proxification of script in different phases of the Romanization movement in China, from qieyin Character to guoyu Romanization to Latinized new writing and then to pinyin, and in the Romanization movement in the Arab world, from the article published in the Beirut newspaper La Syrie in 1922 to the proposal ?Abd al-?Az?z Fahm? submitted to the Cairo Language Academy in 1944. The paper shows how language and script were networked into a similar structure of meaning in Chinese and Arab society, shaped out of the common experience of peripheralization in the modern world-system. It argues for a revaluation of China-Arab relations in line with this common experience to go beyond mere partnership of pragmatic and strategic needs.
