Asian Voyages: Two Thousand Years of Constructing the Other (review)

In Asian Voyages O. R. Dathorne has undertaken an ambitious project: examining how European interaction with other cultures shaped the sense of identity of the cultures involved. Within this focus Dathorne is more concerned with perceptions and misconceptions of "otherness" than with the narration of actions and events that took place in the age of European expansion. The study deals with how cultures in China, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, and to a lesser extent those of the Americas, interacted not so much with agents of European expansion, but rather with their own "West." This created a sense of "otherness" that altered their own self-identity. Dathorne makes the point that the entities "China" and "Africa" did not exist until they were so named by Europeans. With European contact, other cultures' world views changed from being essentially self-centered and closed to placing themselves in wider geographical contexts unified by Western activity, and particularly by Western cultural labels. Dathorne asserts that only China had the cultural confidence and legacy of external contacts to resist Western definitions of identity and instead to implant its own definition of otherness upon the outside world.

This resilience and cultural assertiveness in the wake of European expansion draws Dathorne to examine in detail the Chinese attitude to outsiders. In the preface he recalls Chinese teachers and classmates from his youth in Guyana and relates how his later experiences in England and then in the United States exposed him to different images of China and the Chinese. Now a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Dathorne approaches his subject primarily through analysis of images of other cultures found in Western and Chinese literature. As a historian of cultures found in the Asia-Pacific region, I found this approach at times illuminating, but also problematic because of the nature of the evidence used. Like all who seek a comparative perspective, Dathorne relies heavily on secondary sources for areas outside his specialist interest. For the Pacific Islands section in particular, he is clearly unfamiliar with the modern historiography within the field, much of which is focused on culture contact and perceptions of otherness and self. Given that this study dwells upon one result of culture contacts, it is both surprising and disappointing that Dathorne does not make more use of the numerous examples of cultural exchanges where we have detailed accounts of events and perceptions from both parties concerned.

Chapter 1, "The West and the Rest," contrasts China's experience of Western expansion with that of Africa and the Americas. While Europeans everywhere sought to name and label areas and peoples as marks of cultural domination, they did so in a variety of ways. Dathorne detects a distinction among destinations in European literature, in that Europeans "travel" to China, "explore" Africa, and "discover" the New World. To the author, "to travel" implies a substantial entity at the end of the journey, while "to explore" and "to discover" imply something less of the destination. It is a tantalizing thought, although little evidence is provided to support the idea. The chapter concludes by stating that the study will focus on China and the Pacific Islands as examples of the process whereby the other in European eyes established its own degree of otherness. These degrees are defined as "odder," "outer," and "utter," in ascending order of divergence from one's own cultural norms.

Chapters 2-8 discuss China's characterization of the outside world. Here the pattern is one of China as the perceiver rather than the perceived, right up until the recent past when the post-industrial West imposed its sense of otherness upon China. Before this, Chinese sources portray outsiders as inferior barbarians, defined by the degree of their departure from Han norms. The few premodern influences to intrude into China from the outside...