Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai

Introduction: Anglophone Periodicals as Cosmopolitan Publics

introduction Anglophone Periodicals as Cosmopolitan Publics Can English be regarded as a Chinese language? What does it mean for English to become a Chinese language? In fact, what is a Chinese language after all? Does “Chinese language” refer to the actual languages spoken by people of Chinese descent, which in many cases are likely to be regional dialects, or does it refer to Mandarin Chinese as the national language? There are many ways of answering these questions. What I intend to highlight by raising them is the tension between addressing China as a nation-state and the history that emerges when one focuses on a linguistic medium that is assumed to be un-Chinese.These difficulties are encountered not just by the contemporary scholar who studies the subject of English periodicals in Shanghai but also by the cosmopolitan subjects who are the main characters of this book—the Chinese intellectuals who had been educated in the West and returned to China in the late 1920s to publish these periodicals .The disjunction of their chosen linguistic medium with the subject of their concern and their immediate environment is intrinsic to the production of meaning in these periodicals, and this tension also inspired the editors’ imagination of the home and the world.The main task of this book is to reveal and examine the significance of their cultural productions by working through this tension. Conventional Asian studies have not paid enough attention to cultures produced in languages other than the national languages in Asia. Rey Chow, among others, has challenged the dominant status of Mandarin Chinese from a polemical perspective that brings her to examine the disciplinary ideology of area studies. She argues in Writing Diaspora and other works that the assumption that Mandarin Chinese is intrinsic to the notion of “Chineseness” is actually generated extrinsically through a particular kind of cross-cultural referencing that reinforces existing inequality between the East and the West.1 Yet Chinese studies have evolved a great deal in the past few years, with many new works recently published in the field that go beyond the conventional confines of area studies by engaging in diaspora studies and the circulation of 1 ideas, culture, and people pertaining to the Chinese context.2 The boundary between area studies and ethnic studies is also beginning to be loosened.This book follows this trend and offers a historical study of the usage of English in one particular setting—the periodical culture in semicolonial Shanghai. This focus immediately implies two new perspectives to Chinese modernity: one, it highlights a public sphere that has certain multilingual,translational,and transnational qualities; second, instead of emphasizing the nation as a homogenous entity,this book takes as its subject of analysis a smaller locale than the nation— the semicolonial city Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century.This choice does not mean that this urban locale was cut off from the rest of the country; on the contrary, by focusing on traveling individuals and interregional and interlingual circulation of public culture,this book emphasizes the need and difficulty of communicating within China and with places outside China and examines the making of Chinese culture at subnational and transnational scales.3 Shanghai was not the only city where there were English-language publications; however, Shanghai’s history as a place of diverse backgrounds and translational languages offers a unique vintage point from which to observe the making and unmaking of this cosmopolitan discourse. The travel of English is related to the history of colonialism. However, colonialism does not necessarily have a formulaic history or standard practice throughout the world. Although colonialism had intricate connections with the circulation and globalization of certain forms of knowledge and some languages, the actual usage of English, a colonial language, in some contexts could still vary depending on specific situations and histories. In conditions of more or less formal colonialism, such as India and certain parts of Africa, the history of Anglophone writing inevitably began with the institutionalization of colonial education. Take the Indian case as example. Gauri Viswanathan’s book Masks of Conquest opens with an examination of the Charter Act of 1813,which formally defined Englishness in terms of language and taste as the goal of colonial education.4 Gayatri Spivak’s article “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book” draws our attention to another set of issues with regard to Indian Anglophone literature—the fraught relationship between Anglophone writers and vernacular literary traditions.5 This...