Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations

Liu (ed.), Lynda H.

ISBN 10: 0822324245 / ISBN 13: 9780822324249

Published by Duke Univ. Press, 1990

About this Item

First softcover edition. Size: Octavo (standard book size). 458 pages. Text body is clean, and free from previous owner annotation, underlining and highlighting. Binding is tight, covers and spine fully intact. No foxing in this copy. All edges clean, neat and free of foxing. Quantity Available: 1. Shipped Weight: Under 1 kilogram. Category: Language & Linguistics; ISBN: 0822324245. ISBN/EAN: 9780822324249. All our pictures shown here are of the actual item, not stock photos. Inventory No: 30076. For further info on this title, click on the "Contact Seller" button within this listing. We will try to reply within 24 hours. Otherwise you can order right now (inclusive of shipping options) from the "Add to Basket" button to the right.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations
• Publisher: Duke Univ. Press
• Publication Date: 1990
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822324245
• ISBN 13: 9780822324249
• Binding: Softcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Dust Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Language & Linguistics

About this title

Synopsis

The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations—and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, contributors contend that “national histories” and “world history” must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among the various languages and cultures in modern times.

By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in its contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization.

The collection will engage students and scholars of global cultural processes, Chinese studies, world history, literary studies, history of science, and anthropology, as well as cultural and postcolonial studies.

 

Contributors. Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang

About the Author

Lydia H. Liu is Helmut F. Stern Professor of Chinese Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937.