Abstract Area studies, as institutionalized in Western academia, has historically operated through a logic of binary opposition, producing knowledge frameworks oriented toward governance, control, and strategic management of designated regions. Within this paradigm, knowledge about China has often rendered it as an externalized and alien object — one with which Western publics are discouraged from identifying or affiliating. At the same time, segments of Chinese scholarship have been shaped by a Cold War epistemology that privileges a “China and the world” model over a “China of the world” approach, presuming a fixed and impermeable boundary between China and the rest of the globe. These conceptual divides have been further intensified by recent trade disputes and the proliferation of polarized media discourses surrounding Chinese and American peoples, cultures, and societies. Against this backdrop, the eight articles in this special section — contributed by scholars based in both the United States and China — examine the world relations embedded in Chinese literary texts from antiquity to the contemporary period. Collectively, they foreground literature as a site of transregional entanglement and relational world-making, revealing a dynamic global system of connections in which China has long been embedded. By rethinking China not as a bounded entity but as constitutive of multiple world formations, this special section seeks to unsettle inherited epistemic borders and to renew intellectual and cultural bonds capable of moving beyond the divisions and fragmentations of the present.
Abstract Translation is often thought to be a one-way operation of transfer of content whereby information that exists in language A is reproduced using the words of language B. But that account is too simple. The way that a text of language A is recreated in language B may reverberate within language A and change the meaning of that text for its original public. Framing and genre, while not properly part of a text, nonetheless decide a great deal about how the text is understood, and translators often get to decide framing and genre. The example analyzed here is Confucius Sinarum philosophus, a Latin translation of three of the Four Books, published in Paris in 1687. The translated work's content interacts with the framing and occasion of the translation: The translators wished to offer the Analects as a gift to the French king but, to do so, had to mute Confucius's criticism of autocratic rulers. They thereby obscured a characteristic — indeed, essential — feature of Chinese political discourse: the remonstrance.
Abstract Although the term world literature was certainly in circulation earlier, the locus classicus of the emergence of the concept of world literature (or Weltliteratur) is often found in Johann Peter Eckermann's conversations with Goethe. Eckermann records that Goethe had been reading “a Chinese novel,” leading Goethe to assert “that poetry is the common property of all mankind,” adding: “National literature no longer has much to say; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must work to hasten its arrival.” This article juxtaposes that scene from 1827 with a rather different text, a 2017 rap song by the Chengdu-based ensemble Higher Brothers. Their “Made in China,” featuring elements of nationalistic pride and swagger, put Chinese rap music on the map. Yet the paradox of the powerfully nationalistic-chauvinistic sentiments emerging alongside an Atlanta-based hip-hop style and other transnational features reveals the complexities of what “made in China” could mean in relation to such obviously global flows. Indeed, this postmodern permutation of world literature in rap music reflects the larger realities of globalization 2.0, thus figuring forth a pop-cultural image of the world system today.
