CHR Book Launch: Peiyu Yang, "Triangular Translation: Gender and the Making of the Postcolonial World Between China, Europe, and the Middle East 1880-1940"
Thursday, October 24, 2024 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Hybrid (Horizon Hall 6325 and zoom)
Please join us for a CHR Book Launch, co-sponsored by the Department of Modern & Classical Languages and the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies.
Author Peiyu Yang will be in conversation with Michael Gibbs Hill to introduce her new book, Triangular Translation: Gender and the Making of the Postcolonial World Between China, Europe, and the Middle East 1880-1940.
*The zoom link for this hybrid event will be sent via CHR newsletter- if you do not subscribe, please request in advance by emailing chr@gmu.edu*
When did cultures in the Global South first begin to represent themselves in solidarity with one another?
While empires had competed and measured themselves against each other for centuries, it was not until the late nineteenth century that cultures touched by colonial-era imperialism began to image another kind of worldwide network. Cultural exchange could thus become a part of a translational movement of struggle and liberation. This new study examines a form of triangular transition: Arabic translations of European texts studying China or translated from Chinese. In particular, Yang follows the proliferation of translations springing up in Egypt in the Nahda period of cultural renaissance, 1880-1940. This was a period both of flourishing cultural production and of anti-colonial uprising. Nahdawi intellectuals increasingly turned their attention to Chinese culture and its own anti-colonial struggles, and because of this a translational anti-colonial imaginary can be traced back to representations of China found in Nahdawi discourse during these years.
Peiyu Yang is an instructional assistant professor of Arabic and the co-coordinator of Arabic Studies program at George Mason University. Her research focuses on the migration of texts between the Arab and Sinophone world, Chinese-Arab comparison, translation studies, Global South studies and gender studies. (Her monograph, Triangular Translation: Gender, Politics, and the Making of the Postcolonial World between China, Europe, and the Middle East, 1880-1940 (2024, Legenda Press), investigates how intellectuals during the Nahda (the period known as the Arab cultural renaissance)turned their attention to Chinese culture and its own anti-colonial struggle, constitutional revolution, and women’s rights.)
Michael Gibbs Hill is a Professor of Chinese Studies at the department of Modern Languages and Literatures at William & Mary. Prof Hill’s research and teaching interests include the literary and intellectual history of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of translation, and cultural relations between China and the Middle East. He also contributes regularly as a translator. Prior to his arrival at William & Mary, Prof. Hill served as director of the Center for Asian Studies at the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina.
George Mason's AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies had the pleasure of hosting Professor Hill during the Center’s Islam in China conference organized in 2019. Recording available here.
*The zoom link for this hybrid event will be sent via CHR newsletter- if you do not subscribe, please request in advance by emailing chr@gmu.edu*
