{"id":1652,"date":"2013-02-20T10:30:58","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T02:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1652"},"modified":"2013-02-18T17:29:36","modified_gmt":"2013-02-18T09:29:36","slug":"chinese-literature-dissertation-reviews-richard-jean-sos-coolie-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1652","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Richard Jean So’s Coolie Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\u201cCoolie <\/a>Dissertation Reviews <\/a>has posted Nan Z. Da<\/a>‘s review of Richard Jean So<\/a>‘s Coolie Democracy<\/a>: US\u2013China Political and Literary Exchange, 1925\u20131955<\/em><\/em>. Here\u2019s how it begins:<\/p>\n

Literary-critical study of China-US relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is experiencing an exciting emergence, and Richard Jean So\u2019s dissertation, Coolie Democracy<\/em>, finds itself at the vanguard of this development in the field. This project combines language expertise with transnational methodologies that emerged from Americanists\u2019 de-centering of the United States to forward a self-consciously comparative study of alternative forms of the democratic discourse from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the macro-level, Richard So makes a literary-historical argument and a political-theoretical argument. He looks at an \u201cin-between\u201d time in American literary history and the history of US-China relations from 1900-1950, a period that current scholarship strings along a series of flashpoints: anti-Chinese sentiments and policies in the late 1800s; the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943; the concurrent formation of Chinese-American immigrant communities and identities; and the official \u201cbreak\u201d between China and the United States over Communism and political allegiances on the eve of World War II. So recovers a forgotten segment in this period. So reconstructs, through meticulous and creative research, a series of unlikely Chinese-American exchanges and intellectual circles. These exchanges and collaborations coincided with the rise of the Leftist cultural front in the US, a movement So investigates for its transnational figures and their complicated translingual activities in China. This was a moment during which American and Chinese authors actively and directly engaged with each other to think out in literature the possibility of a politically united \u201cChinese America.\u201d This by-and-large discursive \u201cChinese America\u201d would be built upon a shared concept of \u201cnatural democracy\u201d that comes organically of the texts of both nations, a concept that called upon the figure of the coolie to serve as an example of such democratic principles in praxis and as a cipher of mutual resistance against capitalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dissertation Reviews has posted Nan Z. Da‘s review of Richard Jean So‘s Coolie Democracy: US\u2013China Political and Literary Exchange, 1925\u20131955. Here\u2019s how it begins: Literary-critical study of China-US relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is experiencing an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[623,3,16],"tags":[956,953,955,954],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-qE","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1588,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1588","url_meta":{"origin":1652,"position":0},"title":"Dissertation Reviews: The Crowd in Early Twentieth-Century China","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"January 25, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Dissertation Reviewshas posted Roy Chan's review of Tie Xiao's In the Name of the Masses: Conceptualizations and Representations of the Crowd in Early Twentieth-Century China. 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Its luxurious petals have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Dissertation Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Dissertation Reviews","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=623"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2586,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2586","url_meta":{"origin":1652,"position":3},"title":"Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Sent-down Youth Literature in Post-Mao China","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"April 17, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Dissertation Reviews has posted Zhu Yanhong's review of Wang Yanjie's dissertation,\u00a0The \u201cSent-Down\u201d Vision: Poetics and Politics of Zhiqing Literature in Post-Mao China. Here\u2019s how it begins: Zhiqing \u77e5\u9752 writers are often considered by literary critics as a generation who express a profound sense of nostalgia in their writing. 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Here\u2019s how it begins: Lucas Klein\u2019s dissertation, Foreign Echoes and Discerning the Soil: Dual Translation, Historiography, and World Literature in Chinese Poetry, is notable both\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Dissertation Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Dissertation Reviews","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=623"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1866,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=1866","url_meta":{"origin":1652,"position":5},"title":"Chinese Literature Dissertation Reviews: Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation in the Works of Yu Dafu","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"April 23, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Dissertation Reviews has posted Luo Liang's review of Valerie Levan's dissertation, Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation in the Works of Yu Dafu (1896-1945). 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