The field of Chinese history has seen some efforts to modify the postcolonial perspective to adapt to the unusual situation of China which had a semi-colonial status from the nineteenth century until 1945, or we might say, imperialism without colonialism. Tani Barlow, the feminist historian of China who also edits the journal positions, where much of the writing inspired by postcolonialism and other critical theories appears, developed the notion of “colonial modernity under the sign of erasure.” 13 This is a deconstructive idea expressed in the icon of the signifier as struck out, as in [image]. She argues, in other words, that postwar Western, particularly US, scholarship of China and East Asia in general sought to preemptively deny the imperialist or semi-colonial conditions of pre-war China in order to deflect or forswear any possible connection between the imperialist past and the neo-imperialism of the US in the region during the Cold War and through the Vietnam War. Thus, she argues, it is impossible to think of modernity without colonialism especially in East Asia where this false assumption has guided much past scholarship. At the same time, Barlow finds postcolonial scholarship not quite adequate to grasp Chinese conditions where the semi-colonial condition did not reproduce the Manichaean opposition between colonizer and colonized but rather a great many variations. She also objects to the tendency of postcolonial scholarship to privilege the “native” speech and to the expectation of finding an emancipatory postcolonial lexicon applicable to all
The field of Chinese history has seen some efforts to modify the postcolonial perspective to adapt to the unusual situation of China which had a semi-colonial status from the nineteenth century until 1945, or we might say, imperialism without colonialism. Tani Barlow, the feminist historian of China who also edits the journal positions, where much of the writing inspired by postcolonialism and other critical theories appears, developed the notion of “colonial modernity under the sign of erasure.” 13 This is a deconstructive idea expressed in the icon of the signifier as struck out, as in [image]. She argues, in other words, that postwar Western, particularly US, scholarship of China and East Asia in general sought to preemptively deny the imperialist or semi-colonial conditions of pre-war China in order to deflect or forswear any possible connection between the imperialist past and the neo-imperialism of the US in the region during the Cold War and through the Vietnam War. Thus, she argues, it is impossible to think of modernity without colonialism especially in East Asia where this false assumption has guided much past scholarship. At the same time, Barlow finds postcolonial scholarship not quite adequate to grasp Chinese conditions where the semi-colonial condition did not reproduce the Manichaean opposition between colonizer and colonized but rather a great many variations. She also objects to the tendency of postcolonial scholarship to privilege the “native” speech and to the expectation of finding an emancipatory postcolonial lexicon applicable to all
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