Tokens of exchange : the problem of translation in global circulations

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Title:

Tokens of exchange : the problem of translation in global circulations

Author:

Liu, Lydia He.

ISBN:

9780822324249

9780822324010

Publication Information:

Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1999.

Physical Description:

456 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Series:

Post-contemporary interventions.

Series Title:

Post-contemporary interventions.

Contents:

Introduction / Lydia H. Liu -- The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign / Lydia H. Liu -- Pt. I. Early Encounters: The Question of (In)commensurability. Translating the Untranslatable: From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds / Roger Hart. Demystifying Qi: The Politics of Cultural Translation and Interpretation in the Early Jesuit Mission to China / Qiong Zhang. Always Multiple Translation, Or, How the Chinese Language Lost Its Grammar / Haun Saussy -- Pt. II. Colonial Circulations: From International Law to the Global Market. Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century / Lydia H. Liu. Japan's Engagement with International Terms / Alexis Dudden. Looting Beijing: 1860, 1900 / James Hevia. The Gramophone in China / Andrew F. Jones -- Pt. III. Science, Medicine, and Cultural Pathologies. Handmaids to the Gospel: Lam Qua's Medical Portraiture / Larissa N. Heinrich.

Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing'ai in Republican China (1912-1949) / Tze-Lan Deborah Sang. Translating Psychiatry and Mental Health in Twentieth-Century China / Nancy N. Chen -- Pt. IV. Language and the Production of Universal Knowledge. The Bathos of a Universalism: I. A. Richards and His Basic English / Q. S. Tong. Chinese "Revolution" in the Syntax of World Revolution / Jianhua Chen. The Question of Culture in Global English-Language Teaching: A Postcolonial Perspective / Wan Shun Eva Lam.

Subject Term:

Translating and interpreting -- Social aspects.

Translating and interpreting -- China.

Intercultural communication.

Added Author:

Liu, Lydia He.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168025582178	418.02 L783T 1999	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations--and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, contributors contend that "national histories" and "world history" must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times.
By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in its contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization.
The collection will engage students and scholars of global cultural processes, Chinese studies, world history, literary studies, history of science, and anthropology, as well as cultural and postcolonial studies.

Contributors . Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang