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Staging the World : Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Author : Rebecca Karl

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Staging the World is a stimulating work of intellectual history. Based on a rich array of primary
sources published between 1895 and 1911, Rebecca Karl’s book examines the formation of
Chinese nationalism as an elite orientation during a time period she calls, China s most expansive
and internationalist moment. Many other works on the history of nationalism in China focus on
its imaginative and temporal aspects, and are informed by the work of such theorists as
Chatterjee and Anderson. By contrast, Karl conceives of Chinese nationalism not solely as a
discourse that comes to China from the West or Japan, but rather in relation to real processes as
well as perceptions of globalization and inequality. By examining how elites observed and
identified with the non-Euro-American and Japanese world, Karl effectively links the emergence
of nationalism in China to the dynamics of global capitalist spatial relations.

The book is divided into three parts. The introduction and conclusion deal with theoretical
issues; Karl highlights the importance of conceptualizing Chinese nationalism from a global
perspective and being attentive to Chinese intellectuals views of other countries dominated by
imperialism. Theoretically, she is responding to Prasenjit Duara who, she believes, unabashedly
conflates the state with the nation. Separating statism and nationalism as distinct processes, she
argues, allows her to discover repressed aspects of nationalism that are not assimilated into Euro-
American perspectives or rooted in reified local-place identifications and notions of timeless
traditional, dynastic, bounded national space . In each of the six historical chapters she looks at
late Qing intellectual support for various nations on the periphery of the capitalist world-system.
The second chapter, which has the same title as the book, consists of an interpretation of Wang
Xiaonong s Beijing opera, Guazhong lanyin, which deals with the crisis of the Polish nation. In
an appendix Karl supplies the reader with a translation of the first and only existing part of the
play.The rest of the chapters discuss, respectively, Chinese views about Hawaii, the Philippine
uprising against the United States (1898), the Boer War, late Qing pan-Asianism, and Turkish
and Egyptian revolutions (1908-1910).

Recent reviews of the book indicate that the field is ready for new approaches to the study of
Chinese nationalism. Aside from noting her at times inscrutable prose, which Karl herself
acknowledges (p. xi), reviewers appreciate the book for being, startlingly different from
anything that has been written, and unnervingly convincing .The book was also praised as,
thoughtful, meticulously researched, and based on hitherto unused primary sources

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