Description
Book SynopsisIncludes the essays that focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicise an economy of translation. This work contends that 'national histories' and 'world history' must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among various languages and cultures in modern times.
Trade Review“This impressive volume expands the metaphor of translation to encompass a broad spread of transcultural negotiations, thereby opening new possibilities for approaching the language and practices of East Asian modernities. The volume presents exemplary models for demonstrating the historicity of how concepts travel and become caught up within localized sign systems.”—Ann Anagnost, author of
National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China“This volume brilliantly translates ‘translation’ by theorizing it and demonstrating the contingency, historicity and political inflections of the practices that have constituted it. Specific attention to a series of examples from China and the diverse encounters with European knowledges show that the Universal is always particular.”—Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley
Table of ContentsIntroduction/ Lydia H. Liu 1
The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign 13
Part I. Early Encounters: The Question of (In)commensurability 45
Part II. Colonial Circulations: From International Law to the Global Market 127
Part III. Science, Medicine, and Cultural Pathologies 239
Part IV. Language and the Production of Universal Knowledge 331
Glossary 399
Bibliography 411
Index 445
Contributors 457
