Rethinking Comparison: The Case of China in Early Modern Cultural Studies

The claim that a China special issue of JEMCS is long overdue seems beyond dispute. The contested status of "early modernity" as a period designation beyond the Eurosphere notwithstanding, a journal whose geographical scope encompasses "the early modern world" can scarce afford to overlook the cultural production of a region whose achievements and stature, with respect to literature and the arts as well as commercialization, standard of living, and other economic measures, were broadly commensurate with those of Europe from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Academic departments and professional conferences in the humanities persist, by and large, in segregating the study of these regions. Yet there is scant reason, beyond the questionable comforts of specialization, for individual scholars to follow suit, let alone cutting-edge interdisciplinary journals. Given the growing currency of transcultural and post-national paradigms in humanistic scholarship across the disciplines, it would seem ever more essential, at this moment, to leverage the increasing visibility of extra-European sites of commensurability and simultaneity in our period in order to think beyond the boundaries of familiar national-historical silos and beyond even the more capacious perimeters of European colonial expansion.

Considerably more vexing than the question of whether or not to commission a China issue for a journal like JEMCS is the question of how to go about it. Given that China studies specialists among the journal's readership are probably few, a conjunctural "China and" approach is clearly called for. Yet the gesture of admitting the conjunction in such a context settles less than it might seem. The most obvious reading of "China and"—and the one with which preliminary editorial discussions concerning this special issue began—takes the "and" as a conduit or channel for the transmission, in this direction or that, of luxury trade goods, technologies, deities, decorative styles, manufacturing techniques, philosophies, representations, and the like. Of such transmissions there were, of course, many across multiple crisscrossing vectors during our period. There is by now a considerable body of scholarship that admirably documents and theorizes processes of proselytization, imagination, appropriation, transformation, and incorporation. Taken together, these studies convincingly corroborate the proposition that every cultural community embodies the essential paradox of being both always already inescapably hybrid and, at the same time, fiercely and perversely insistent on its own distinctiveness with respect to its often-scorned partners in hybridization.

As generative as this connectivity paradigm has proven in recent decades—and as indispensable in complicating the assumptions of autochthonous evolution to which nation-bound disciplinary traditions remain, by virtue of long habit and institutional constraint, all too susceptible—it remains a limited and limiting one in its own historical contingency. An artifact of late twentieth-century attentiveness to the history of European empires and their postcolonial legacies, it originally signaled a rejection of the binaristic, contrastive comparative civilizations model of East– West studies largely inspired by Max Weber and consolidated in the first half of the twentieth century by Yale philosopher F.S.C. Northrop, among others. This earlier emphasis on foundational differences of the "East is East" variety emerged in the nineteenth century, in turn, as a byproduct of an instrumental amnesia that enabled the emergence of self-conscious narratives of European exceptionalism. Through the bracketing of inconvenient claims, repeated frequently throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by European missionaries, philosophers, travelers, and literati, that China's claims to civilizational laurels equaled or surpassed Europe's on the world stage. As has often been remarked, Goethe inaugurated the age of "Weltliteratur" with an observation to Eckermann in 1827 concerning a Chinese novel that bore striking resemblances to Pamela. For the 190 years since, though, what we might term commensurative—as opposed to contrastive or connective—readings of Chinese and European literature and art of the early modern period have been decidedly unfashionable, if not unthinkable, in Western scholarship.

The purpose of this special issue, simply put, is to rehabilitate the commensurative approach to early modern transcultural studies: to experiment, in other words, with reading China's conjunctive "and" as evoking, first and foremost, neither a connective conduit nor...