Harvard University Press Blog

On Literary Chronology

This month brings the publication of A New Literary History of Modern China, a volume that amasses 161 essays by 143 authors under the editorship of David Der-wei Wang. Intended for readers interested in understanding modern China through its literary and cultural dynamics, the book follows the similarly conceived New History of French Literature, New History of German Literature, and New Literary History of America. Below, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters considers the organizational principle linking all four.

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It might be worthwhile to talk about the Chinese literary history in terms of the series of literary histories that began with Denis Hollier’s New History of French Literature in 1989, because, although the volume devoted to the literatures of those who speak and write Chinese is the first book in the series to be devoted to a non-European tongue, the set-up and the goals of all the books in the series have some things in common. First, they are literary histories organized chronologically.

When we decided to organize the French literary history chronologically, I confess we were risking appearing to be too cute, looking like we were playing around. As the originator of the form we used for that book and for this one and the German and American volumes, Denis Hollier, wrote in the manifesto document to launch the French book, dates had “become the symbol of useless knowledge.” The time we began that book was the heyday of Deconstruction, literary theory, French and American feminisms, the birthing-time for Cultural Studies, ideologiekritik, so the recourse to dates offered us an organizing device that constituted “the least ideological way to reintroduce an historical dimension into the study of French literature. Dates [would be used] with some irony, a mostly rhetorical device which could encourage each contributor to focus on detail and give sharpness and specificity to each article. The devise [was] intended to work against pedestrian historicism.”

But, really, why dates? At this moment, so distant from the time of the original decision, I am tempted to say that our winking and smirking about dates concealed from us, all of us roughly from the class of 1968, that the date 1968 meant a great deal to this generation of researchers, just as September 11, 2011, means much to a later cohort. Dates, originally bits of useless knowledge, come to mean something. They can become what Walter Benjamin had called “focal points,” in his early essay “The Life of Students,” where he calls them “burning points” (Brennpunkt), something that concentrates events in a “kairos” or “monad,” thus shattering the historical continuum and the bare inventory of atomic facts, interpreting the past from out of the highest energy of the present, as Nietzsche puts it. In French literary history, just as in Chinese literary history, “assigning dates is far more problematic” the further back you go, as John Benton explains in “Entering the Date,” his contribution to A New History of French Literature. And as contributor Sandy Petry writes of the year 1789 in the same volume, “As the fall of the Bastille is a reality that became a representation,” so the falling of the Twin Towers has become a representation. The long-term impact of the name of the year “1968” was more decisive in our choice of dates as our organizing device than we could fathom. No one in China doubts the significance of dates, especially those of “May 4th,” or “1949,” or “June 4th.”

We use the dates not to assert continuity of French, German, American, or Chinese literary history, but to scramble it up. It is clear now, nearly thirty years after the appearance of the NHFL, that France is so unified a country that our deconstruction of it could not break it into pieces. It is the case that, on the contrary, the Chinese people, although they have lived for millennia held together and apart by the tribute system, have never had the sort of unity the French have had. Few peoples in the world have except primitive tribes. The effort to unify sinophone culture is a new thing, the very thing that is the subject of this book, that you can witness in the actions of the people who inhabit this book and engage in every sort of struggle to modernize China.

So, the dates that this book makes you aware of are important because, as Cognitive Science professor Edwin Hutchins writes in his book Cognition in the Wild, “the identification of a landmark is a highly interactive process.” That sounds abstract, but it is the opposite of abstract. Think of the effect of bases on ballplayers. And identifying landmarks is a process that the readers of the book are invited to participate in. Readers of previous books in this series have found that, because of the way the books are constructed, they become involved in them. Aiming to read one or two essays, they have gotten caught up in an ongoing flow from which they find it difficult to extricate themselves.

As Arthur J. Rosenthal, then the Director of HUP, said at the outset of this adventure, these books are not reference books. They’re not to be used like Google and Wikipedia, extracting free-floating facts, like stopping for a burger at the McDonald’s drive-by window. To put it differently, the readers of this book are not invited to be gravediggers exhuming a bit of knowledge, a bone here, a skull there, as in Hamlet. Rather they are invited to consume food to live in the present. Communion is the goal, not communication. This is the difference between the atomism Bertrand Russell celebrated and the holism that Henri Bergson promoted.

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin sought to immerse his readers in the felt life of nineteenth-century Paris just at the time the Eiffel Tower was being raised, stunning many and horrifying many others. This way of writing cultural history is what Benjamin called “historical materialism.” How does that history work? It sidesteps the mere communication of information. He explained: “To put to work an experience with history—a history that is originary for every present—is the task of historical materialism. The latter is directed toward a consciousness of the present—which explodes the continuum of history.” This is the operation of “kairos,” as opposed to chronos, history a la Nietzsche, Bataille, and Hollier. Such history writing is directed to people who live in the present, provoking in the readers an experience in the fullest sense, what he called “Erfahrung.” When this history works, the past explodes into the present. The alternative form of history writing delivers up a continuum in a neat inventory, history reified. What the new history hopes to precipitate is an experience in which the pulse of the past is felt in the present.

The Idea of the Muslim World

President Trump’s weekend address in Saudi Arabia, a centerpiece of his first foreign trip since taking office, was billed as an address to the “Muslim world,” much in the same way as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Though Trump’s focus on the threat of Iran undercut the notion of Muslim singularity, the speech was both presented and received in the context of an imagined global Muslim unity. In The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cemil Aydin asks how, despite “the obvious naïveté of categorizing one and a half billion people” as a single community, this idea’s become so entrenched. “How did we arrive at this point,” writes Aydin, “where a fantastical entity could be so present, so prevalent in political thinking? Why do so many Muslim and non-Muslim political leaders, intellectuals, and religious figures comfortably base many of their arguments and decisions on the idea of the Muslim world without reflecting on the accuracy of the generalization that this term signifies?” In the excerpt below, Aydin begins to trace the emergence of this imagined global unity during the peak of European hegemony in the late nineteenth century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.

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The idea of the Muslim world is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumptions of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of rights and fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, giving rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.

It is thanks to this elaboration of both Muslim difference and Muslim unity that contemporary writing, scholarly and otherwise, tends to emphasize Muslim exceptionalism. The assumption is that Muslims, due to their piety and the nature of their faith, naturally resist the liberal international order of independent, pluralistic nation-states. Muslims’ attitudes toward politics are presumed different from those of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, whose societies need not be explained by reference to faith tradition or civilizational identity. However, this theory of Muslim exceptionalism is unsupported and unsubstantiated. The Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, British-ruled Indian Muslims, Afghanistan, the Saudi Kingdom, Pakistan, postcolonial Egypt, and Iran under the shah ardently supported the imperial and later nationalist world orders. The seeming importance of Islam in the contemporary politics of Muslim-majority societies derives not from theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety but from the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness and from the particular intellectual and political strategies of Muslim resistance to this racialized identity.

The geography and technology of empire were essential to these processes of racialization and resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century. New transportation and communication technologies such as steamships and the telegraph fostered unprecedented levels of connection among Muslims, naturalizing the geopolitical concept of the Muslim world in Europe and its colonies. The networks enabled by these technologies were the medium of pan-Islamic thought born of confrontation with imperial racism.

Imperial racism, but not empire itself. Muslim leaders and thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not, for the most part, anti-imperialists. Instead they sought fair treatment from the four major European empires: British, Dutch, French, and Russian. These were cosmopolitan arrangements, home to wide-ranging ethnic and religious groups. But racialized legal categorizations shared across European empires, the empowerment strategies of colonized Muslim subjects, and tactics employed in imperial rivalries confirmed rather than challenged Muslim difference, ensuring that Muslims would be a separate class within the imperial whole. The British ruled almost half of the world’s Muslims and therefore played an especially important role in guiding the development of pan-Islamic thought. British fears of rebellion and policies of oppression engendered specifically Muslim responses. At the same time, Muslims understood that their vast numbers and the reality of their overwhelming loyalty to the empire all owed them real clout.

Recognition for Translators

Since 1986, the French-American Foundation has awarded annual translation prizes for the best translation from French to English in fiction and nonfiction. We’re extremely pleased to see the translators of three HUP projects among the five nonfiction finalists for the 2017 prize: Nicholas Elliott, for his translation of Michel Winock’s Flaubert; Catherine Porter, for her translation of Élizabeth Roudinesco’s Freud: In His Time and Ours; and Jane Marie Todd, for her translation of Olivier Wieviorka’s The French Resistance.

The Foundation conducted interviews with each of the finalists about the path that brought them to translation, their process for translating, and the life of the translator. Elliott, who shared the 2013 Translation Prize with Alison Dundy for their work on another HUP book, Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert’s The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, spoke of the “lonely business” of translation:

The translator works alone and must aim to be invisible. Some of the books I translated have received long, glowing reviews that omit to mention the translation. I have come to accept that for a translator, particularly a translator of non-fiction, not being mentioned is equivalent to a good review. Most readers would prefer to pretend there is no translator between them and the author.

And of how translating Winock’s biography deepened his sense of Flaubert’s greatness:

His sentences can be difficult, his word choice occasionally obscure to the modern reader, but once I made my way through the thicket, often by consulting a nineteenth-century dictionary, I always found him astonishingly precise. I understood the famous stories about Flaubert agonizing for days over a single word and was thankful to him for the effort—I never had to guess at his meaning, which is the worst situation for a translator to find himself in when translating a dead or otherwise uncommunicative author.

Porter offered advice to aspiring translators:

Revise! And then do it again, and again, and again… Another piece of advice I’ve found myself giving to undergraduates who think they may be interested in translating fiction or nonfiction professionally is to read the New York Times and Le Monde (or comparable target and source language newspapers) every day. This usually surprises them, but I try to convince them that it’s important for translators to be informed about a wide variety of topics and to be familiar with the terms in which they’re discussed in both languages. 

And Todd, who was a co-winner of the 2010 Translation Prize for bringing Dominique Charpin’s Reading and Writing in Babylon into English, described the fun and the challenge of translating wordplay:

There were a few plays on words, usually taken from pro-German or anti-German propaganda: for example, members of the Resistance said of Radio-Paris, the collaborationist station, “Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris ment, Radio-Paris est allemand,” playing on the verb for lying, mentir, and the word for German, allemand. I translated it as “Radio-Paris lies, Radio-Paris deceives, Radio-Paris is Germendacious.” On the pro-German side, it was said of those who listened to Charles de Gaulle’s broadcasts from England, “Le dingaullisme s’attrape, surtout, par les organes auditifs.” Dingaullisme is a portmanteau word, a combination of dingue, meaning “crazy,” and gaullisme, “Gaullism,” as in “de Gaulle.” I translated it as, “Dengaulle Fever is caught primarily through the auditory organs,” and was happy to learn that one of the symptoms of Dengue Fever is insanity.

This year’s winners will be announced  at an Awards Ceremony on June 8th. Our congratulations to Elliott, Porter, Todd, and the other translators and publishers recognized as finalists.

The Origins of the American Antiquities Act

Citing “abuses of power by previous administrations,” President Trump last week signed an order directing the Interior Department to review national monuments created under the American Antiquities Act since 1996. The “Presidential Order on the Review of Designations Under the Antiquities Act” calls for the Secretary of the Interior to consider the appropriate classification of landmarks, structures, and objects, the process by which designations were made, the effects of designations, the concerns of State, tribal, and local government affected by designations, and “the requirements and original objectives of the Act.” Those original objectives were recently outlined by historian Samuel Redman in Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, which traces how museums in the United States collected, researched, and exhibited human remains, starting around the time of the Civil War and stretching deep into the twentieth century. In the adapted excerpt below, Redman describes how the lawless looting of human remains led to the passage of the American Antiquities Act in 1906, an act that transformed the practice of archaeology in North America and had broad implications for environmental and historical preservation in the American West.

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Well before the end of the nineteenth century, serious researchers had come to a collective understanding: significant discoveries of human remains were managed poorly on a national scale. In 1887, Washington Matthews of the U.S. Army took over an expedition for the legendary anthropologist and adventurer Frank Hamilton Cushing after Cushing fell ill. Matthews was horrified to observe the state of important human remains littered throughout the American West. One account notes, “[Matthews] found that no attention had been paid to the collection or preservation of human bones, which were extremely fragile, crumbling to dust upon a touch, and which had been thrown about and trampled under foot by curious visitors, so that but little remained of value from the work which had been previously done.” Matthews took for granted the importance of certain remains, knowing even better than most anthropologists of his era the intellectual desires for skeletons—especially those of American Indians—for comparative anatomy or racial science. Since the majority of Anglo-Americans accepted the idea that the American Indian was, in fact, vanishing, it is unsurprising that Matthews was horrified to find naturally decaying skeletons—bones upended and exposed by looters—left to dust outside the protection of museum walls.

Other scientists, too, had grown concerned about looting from historic sites around the country, specifically those in the American West. Rediscovering striking archaeological sites in the American Southwest caused a stir both in the academic community and with writers who wrote for popular audiences. The territory of the United States, many were starting to realize, had a deep and rich history extending centuries before European contact. New discoveries in the American West suddenly seemed important to the growing investigation into ancient history in the Americas.

By the middle of the 1890s, newspaper editorials started to echo professional calls for the preservation of antiquities. An editorial appearing in the New York Herald in 1896 argued that “ignorant relic hunters” were clearly to blame for the destruction of antiquities and that only congressional action could save rapidly vanishing sites. The article urgently informed readers, “All these invaluable possessions are fast disappearing, simply for lack of proper legislation to protect them.” As proof, a growing tourist market had created a demand for ancient artifacts and works of art, which were easily bought and sold throughout the American West. If the government failed to act, the editorial warned, American heritage, in the form of “our heirlooms from the American aborigines,” would be unstudied and forever lost.

The mission of collecting human remains both synchronized with and actually advanced the arguments of those who were lobbying for the American Antiquities Act. Advocates in favor of legislating burial mounds, cliff dwellings, and other discoveries believed to possess historical significance on public lands represented museums in New York and Washington, DC, as well as anthropologists writing from the field. The chorus was strong enough to push Congress to finally pass the American Antiquities Act of 1906, which ultimately was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt.

More than a generation before the passing of the American Antiquities Act, looters, amateur archaeologists, and tourists started ravaging sites of ancient human occupation in the American Southwest. The market for antiquities formed a series of steady streams for museums in the United States. Artifacts in private collections were frequently donated to museums (later generations often failed to possess the esoteric drive for collecting mummies or skulls for display above the fireplace). With the rediscovery of Mesa Verde—a vast and complex series of stone structures in Colorado—the Wetherill brothers marked the most prominent of a series of finds in the late nineteenth-century American West. Major discoveries at spectacular places like Mesa Verde, which soon became a national park, became examples that punctuated the countless other smaller incidents of the removal and sale of artifacts—including human remains—occurring at the same time in the United States.