Decolonization and the History of Science in East Asia
Lead Convenor: Mary Brazelton
This session builds on previous discussions of Asia as method and rethinking traditional divisions of time and space to ask: to what extent does the framework and vocabulary of decolonisation apply to the study of places and peoples identified with East Asia? How might we reckon with the imperial enterprises of China and Japan, as well as their resistance to subjugation by western peoples, in the modern period? A major point from our last session was the way in which European colonial legacies might inform definitions of science in important and long-obscured ways, and how this might inform our thinking about pre-colonial archives in the history of science. How should scholars parse the complex and 'hyper-imperial' nature of modern East Asian history when it comes to science studies? And how might the geopolitical events of the twentieth century have shaped the formation of Asian studies as a field - in the Anglophone and Western worlds, but also in China, Japan, and Korea - when it came to the formulation of questions about the history of science?
For this session, we are again reading one case study, which provides a starting point for discussing methodological readings. Many of these focus on Chinese cases and settings, but our hope is that discussion will be wide-ranging. Before the session, please prepare one question about the readings or topic that you'd like to discuss.
Case Study:
Shellen Xiao Wu, "Geography and the Reshaping of the Modern Chinese Empire," in Jeremy Adelman, ed., Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge, 2019.
Methodological readings:
Leigh Jenco, 'Teaching Chinese Political Thought is hard - is decolonising the curriculum the solution?'
Zhang Butian, "Translating History of Science Books into Chinese: Why? Which Ones? How?" Isis 109, no. 4 (Dec 2018): 782-88.
Lin Wen-yuan and John Law, 'A correlative STS: Lessons from a Chinese medical practice,' Social Studies of Science 44, no. 6 (Dec 2014): 801-24. We've also included the recent follow-up by Tereza Stöckelová and Jaroslav Klepal, "Chinese Medicine on the Move into Central Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on Correlativity and Decentering STS," East Asian Science, Technology and Society (2018) 12 (1): 57-79
Other readings of interest:
Ben Elman, 'China and the World History of Science, 1450-1770,' Education About Asia 12, no. 1 (2007): 40-44.
Fabio Lanza, "'America's Asia?' Revolution, Scholarship, and Asian Studies." In Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration, ed. Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski (Singapore: NUS, 2016).
Peter Perdue, "Writing the National History of Conquest," China Marches West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005); also "Erasing the Empire, Re-racing the Nation: Racialism and Culturalism in Imperial China," in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, Peter Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: SAR, 2007).