Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China

Prasenjit Duara

ISBN 10: 0226167224 / ISBN 13: 9780226167220

Published by University of Chicago Press, 1995

About this Item

Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", displays light shelfwear, with price sticker to lower inside corner of rear cover. Binding is sound. Interior is clean and bright. x/275 pages. "Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted a linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts.The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels. In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present. Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress or stalled progress toward modernity.".

Seller Inventory # ABE-1608250592198

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226167224
• ISBN 13: 9780226167220
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted a linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts.

The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels. In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present. Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress—or stalled progress—toward modernity.

About the Author

Prasenjit Duara is chair of the department of history at the University of chicago. He is the author of Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 and Sovereignty and Authentcity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern.