Reading: A Conference Article

Mary Lyon, educator. Founder of Mount Holyoke in Massachussetts. AKA 梨痕女士. Since Mary remained single her whole life, I wonder if queer history buffs claim her. But in China, she was once promulgated as a mother figure.

Judge, Joan. "Mediated Imaginings: Biographies of Western Women and their Japanese Sources in Late Qing China." In Qian, Nanxiu, Fong, Grace and Richard J. Smith, editors. Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008.

I suppose that its characteristic of conference volume articles that they have the flavor of simple lab reports, with a structure something like this: Topic A is of interest. Set S of texts is related to topic A. Set S, described. Conclusion.

In this short paper, Prof. Judge states very simply that biographies of Western women such as Joan of Arc and Mary Lyon were popular in very early 20th-century China, and not coincidentally these biographies were mostly translated and adapted from Japanese accounts. There is a simplicity and elegance to the report that makes it a joy to read, footnotes and all. But the young and unsure scholar sits back in the end and says to herself at once two opinions: 1. "So, that's enough for an article. Yay! I can write tons of articles." and 2. "That's enough for an article? Isn't it a bit thin? And why is any of this information important? How does it inform the larger story of China? Why would anyone give anyone a grant to study something like this?"

I suppose it is another characteristic of conference reports that the questions attitude no. 2 brings up are not addressed -- Judge was fashioning a report to other professionals, and simply stuck to the story. Stating what's at stake is the job of the volume's editors in their introduction to the whole volume. On p. 17 of their introduction, the editors here re-use Judge's term "mediation" to describe the fact that biographies of Western women were written up in Japan and taken over to China afterward, changing along the way. This shows us "complex processes of mediation and accommodation." Reading as if I were a grant-giver, though, I'm still not satisfied as to what the point of all this is. Note that I'm not saying there is no point: I'm saying no point is being overtly and clearly made. A.'s requirement of "clear and present relevance" is not being met.

I suppose that I am reading too harshly. For a conference volume, one must read as a fellow professional, with a strong sense of the states involved already established. Still, it strikes me as dangerous to assume this of the reader. Isn't it all too easy to become disengaged with the basic motives for doing historical research? To spend your grant counting names, matching kanji with hiregana, and identifying some text's source in another, earlier text? I get a kind of Borges-ian sense of joy, but also malaise, at the thought of publication histories, translation analysis, pinpointing of influence, and other stories that can go on forever and ever without ever asking, "why"?

So let's make something up. Let's conjecture that the fact that Joan of Arc and Mary Lyon had cultural currency in 1900s China was important? How so? Well, younger men and women read these biographies and were changed by them -- Judge mentions Qiu Jin at one point, who obviously saw herself as a Joan of Arc figure at times. So the importance seems to be in the fact that the image, once there in the cultural politics, propogates along and causes changes to the identity formation of readers. But this part of the story is entirely neglected in this particular report. I suspect, further, that it is a part of the story that is much more difficult to tell. Easier to just consider that one text is a translation of another text, with some differences.

A few additional notes, in bibliographic form:

Judge, Joan. "Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." in Fong, Grace S., Qian, Nanxiu and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, editors. Beyond Tradition & Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004. On female exemplars. Perhaps this is the larger, more expansive article that I wanted the one I just read to be.

Judge, Print and Politics. biographies of Western men don't change Chinese men's identities as much as women's biographies do.

Davis, p. 148. "women worthies" in the West. In Scott, Joan, ed. Feminism and History. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hu, Ying. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.
, pp. 6-8. Why do they always criticize potential late Imperial exemplars?

Qian Nanxiu, 2001 (Chinese article.) and Qian Nianxiu in 2004, pp. 60-101. 外國烈女傳. This one didn't come from Japan, but also didn't have as much influence.

Pollard 1994. Chinese of those days mainly translated from Japanese, sometimes English and rarely French.

Judge in Fogel, 2001. Translating Japanese textbooks.

Songwei Yang'er. Mme Roland, from Japanese journal to Liang Qichao's biography.

女子新讀本, 1904,1905. Yang definitely uses Zhao's translation of Japanese sources. notes 21, 23 gives transliterations of many women's names. Also a song and two articles in 女學報. [What's at stake in a publication history?]

中國新女界雜誌 and other journals exhibit the influence of Nemoto Shō's text. Notes 31 and 32 have more transcriptions of names.

Joan of Arc. Cf. Hua Mulan, fame and use of this character. Seen as nationalist, not a saint. Chinese readers dismiss the "voices" (and one author condemns the gender inversion).

Mary Lyon. Overlook that she is single; make her into a nurturing mother.

Judge, Joan. The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008.