The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?

As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding contemporary life. Despite - or perhaps because of - the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature's early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions - content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the form of four non-mutually exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity - including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping - we hope to provide the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1100064_code339517.pdf?abstractid=1100064&mirid=1

Identity as a Variable

As scholarly interest in the concept of identity continues to grow, social identities are proving to be crucially important for understanding contemporary life. Despite—or perhaps because of—the sprawl of different treatments of identity in the social sciences, the concept has remained too analytically loose to be as useful a tool as the literature’s early promise had suggested. We propose to solve this longstanding problem by developing the analytical rigor and methodological imagination that will make identity a more useful variable for the social sciences. This article offers more precision by defining collective identity as a social category that varies along two dimensions—content and contestation. Content describes the meaning of a collective identity. The content of social identities may take the form of four non-mutually-exclusive types: constitutive norms; social purposes; relational comparisons with other social categories; and cognitive models. Contestation refers to the degree of agreement within a group over the content of the shared category. Our conceptualization thus enables collective identities to be compared according to the agreement and disagreement about their meanings by the members of the group. The final section of the article looks at the methodology of identity scholarship. Addressing the wide array of methodological options on identity—including discourse analysis, surveys, and content analysis, as well as promising newer methods like experiments, agent-based modeling, and cognitive mapping—we hope to provide the kind of brush clearing that will enable the field to move forward methodologically as well.

/pdf/identity-as-a-variable-1coh9lv2tx.pdf

Each of these epigrams is from an exemplary work of primary research While not entirely exclusive—potential for overlap appears in the ideas of “mutual development” and “transfer” of culture—they each exemplify different research agendas that result in competing narratives of Chinese migration Sucheng Chan's work is part of a larger project of contemporary Asian American studies to incorporate Chinese as important actors in American history It emphasizes the adaptations of Chinese social organization in the United States, and explains them as necessary and unprecedented responses to unfamiliar challenges Although Chan pays more attention than many Asian American historians to Chinese nationalism, transnational families, and continued links to China, she does not follow the implications of these descriptions so far as to reformulate her narrative of migration as a monodirectional relocation followed by locally conditioned transformation (see also S Chan 1991, 63–66,96–97; 1990) In their most extremely America-centered versions, Asian American histories have treated these extra-American phenomena as little more than byproducts of exclusion and racism, and denounced the idea of the temporary Chinese sojourner as an orientalist construction (A Chan 1981)

Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949

Semicolonialism, as jurgen osterhammel noted, is a label that has been generally applied to China “without much regard for its potential theoretical implications” (Osterhammel 1986, 296). The partial character of semicolonialism—as incomplete colonialism—poses the question of what difference it made that throughout the modern period China never in fact became a subject nation, but retained sovereignty over nearly all of its territory and was recognized as a sovereign nation by international law. The writings of twentieth-century Chinese nationalists and a recent profusion of theorizing about colonialism and “colonial modernity” in China, by emphasizing colonialism (Barlow 1997), have perhaps obscured rather than clarified the answer to this question. Moreover, semicolonialism in China, as a gradual accretion of phenomena associated with imperialism, varied substantially over time. Its significance for understanding nineteenth-century China, when the foreign presence within China was still quite limited, remains unclear. Several decades of research on imperialism in Shanghai have produced much debate, but no clear mapping of “where, when, how and to what effect did which extraneous forces impinge” on Chinese life (Osterhammel 1986, 295).

Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community

Introduction: Colonialism and China, Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman Part I: Colonial governance and questions of identity 1. 'Good work for China in every possible direction': the Foreign Inspectorate of the Chinese Maritime Customs, 1854-1950, Robert Bickers 2. Negotiating the Nation: German Colonialism and Chinese Nationalism in Qingdao, 1897-1914, Klaus Muhlhahn 3. Things Unheard of East or West: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Cultural Contamination in Early Chinese Exchanges, Bryna Goodman Part II: Colonial spaces and everyday social interactions 4. The Peak: Residential Segregation in Colonial Hong Kong, John M. Carroll 5. An Italian 'Neighbourhood' in Tianjin: Little Italy or Colonial Space? Maurizio Marinelli 6. The Colonial Space of Death: Shanghai cemetries, 1844-1946, Christian Henriot 7. French Medicine in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century China: Rejection or Compliance in Far South Treaty Ports, Concessions and Leased Territories, Florence Bretelle-Establet 8. Writing Home and China: Elisabeth Frey in Tianjin, 1913-1914, Yixu Lu and David S. G. Goodman Part III: Late colonialism and local consequences 9. Modernism and its Discontent in Shanghai: the Dubious Agency of the Semi-colonized in 1929, Yiyan Wang 10. Equality and the 'Unequal Treaties': Chinese emigres and British colonial routes to modernity, John Fitzgerald 11. Hong Kong and the New Imperialism in East Asia, 1941-1966, Prasenjit Duara 12. The Hapless Imperialist? Portuguese Rule in 1960s Macau, Cathryn Clayton

Twentieth Century Colonialism and China : Localities, the everyday, and the world

or local-origin ties, ties that formed among people from the same native place who resided in a city away from their home. The second construction was based on the notion of belonging to a larger Chinese corporate body, defmed through reference to common cultural beliefs and practices, through common Han ethnicity, or through the developing idea of a Chinese nation-state. This article traces the interrelation between the two in sojourning communities in Shanghai in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because both the discourse of

The Locality as Microcosm of the Nation ?: Native Place Networks and Early Urban Nationalism in China

Introduction: Axes of Gender: Divisions of Labor and Spatial Separation Part I: Patterns of Mobility Chapter 1: Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China Chapter 2: The Virtue of Travel for Women in the Late Empire Chapter 3: Gender on Stage: Actresses in an Actors' World (1895-1930) Chapter 4: Women on the Move: Women's Kinship, Residence, and Networks in Rural Shandong Part II: Spatial Transformations Chapter 5: Between Nei and Wai: Chinese Women Students in Japan in the Early Twentieth Century Chapter 6: Playing with the Public: Late Qing Courtesans and Their Opera Singer Lovers Chapter 7: Unofficial History and Gender Boundary Crossing in the Early Chinese Republic: Shen Peizhen and Xiaofengxian Chapter 8: Gender and Maoist Urban Reorganization Chapter 9: He Yi's The Postman: The Workspace of a New Age Maoist Part III: Boundaries Chapter 10: Women's Work and the Economics of Respectability Chapter 11: The Vocational Woman and the Elusiveness of "Personhood" in Early Republican China Chapter 12: Women's Work and Boundary Transgression in Wang Dulu's Popular Novels Chapter 13: Virtue at Work: Rural Shaanxi Women Remember the 1950s

Gender in motion : divisions of labor and cultural change in late imperial and modern China

This article examines a controversy that took place in Shanghai print culture in 1922 concerning the suicide of an individual identified, according to categories promoted by the early Republican press, as a “new woman.” This was the suicide of Xi Shangzhen, who hanged herself in the office of her employer, Tang Jiezhi, a wellknown May Fourth activist in business and journalistic circles. In the widening public culture of the early Republican era, particularly in Shanghai, the preeminent location of the commercial press, press-driven “public opinion” became an important arbiter of both interest and value. The interest of public opinion was inflamed, unsurprisingly, by the commercial profitability and literary appeal of poignant spectacle as well as the news value of what was novel. By following the print traces of one notorious suicide, it is possible to map the interplay among diverse dynamic elements in the efflorescent bourgeois press that characterized the era. As readers perused the news

Bryna Goodman

Papers

Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community

Twentieth Century Colonialism and China : Localities, the everyday, and the world

The Locality as Microcosm of the Nation ?: Native Place Networks and Early Urban Nationalism in China

Gender in motion : divisions of labor and cultural change in late imperial and modern China

The New Woman Commits Suicide: The Press, Cultural Memory, and the New Republic