teaching

Book boxes

Posted on by devinfitz@gmail.com

Unsurprisingly, when talking about pre-modern East Asian book bindings, covers, slip-cases, and storage, there’s a dizzying amount of material. Regrettably, compared to other areas of research, these external aspects of the Chinese book are understudied. This is probably due in part to the primary goal of Chinese bibliography (版本學), which was to identify and date editions. The edition lived inside of the covers. Everything outside, while clearly important to owners, has mattered less to scholars.

Given that there’s so much to say on this topic, I’ll begin by focusing on boxes, usually called xiang 箱 and he 盒 in Chinese. These differ from tao/hantao 套/函套, which are usually called slip-cases in English. (Most rare Chinese books have some form of slipcase, and since they’re so common, I need to think of better ways for presenting them). Below, is a small gallery of some nice examples of boxes. As time allows, I’ll add more, as well as some thoughts (I have pictures of a number of them somewhere!).

Things You Can Do with Woodblocks (2)

Posted on by devinfitz@gmail.com

You don’t often get the chance to work with woodblocks, but last week, as I was planning a class trip to the UCLA special collections to look at Manchu materials, Heather Briston, the wonderful University Archivist, and Octavio Olvera, Visual Arts Specialist, put four boxes of woodblocks onto my request. (A sign of a great librarian! I’ve been meaning to call them up, but couldn’t find them. They must have telepathically sensed my intentions.)

I’ve been thinking about blocks, and their absence in research on Chinese books, quite a bit since last year. At the Chinese books workshop I organized, Li Ren-yuan 李仁淵, at Academia Sinica, recommended  that we take a look at Kaneko Takaaki’s superb Study of Early Modern Woodblocks 近世出版の板木研究. Kaneko and a team at Ritsumei have been cataloging and processing woodblocks for several years now. Their work is some of the finest research on bibliography for xylographic books that I’ve ever read (I will probably summarize it later). They’ve also built a fantastic database. I’m convinced that without a careful study of the form and variety of Chinese woodblocks, we’ll never be able to properly understand East Asian books. Unfortunately, they’re quite hard to track down.

So, when Heather appeared with these boxes, preparing for the special collections visit suddenly became less important. Here they were, in inky gloriousness, almost uncatalogued, and with delightful images (all of my photographs have been reversed to make the text legible):

Continue reading “Things You Can Do with Woodblocks (2)”

How to Know What You Don’t Know

Posted on by devinfitz@gmail.com

In the wake of the fantastic Bibliography Among the Disciplines conference, I’ve decided to consolidate some of my thoughts on a recurring question people ask: “How can I incorporate more of (insert non-western/non-white region/place/thing here), which you study, into my teaching/work?” Here are some preliminary, slightly snarky responses.

  1. The first thing you should do is what you’re trained to do: read some books. Every East Asianist I know has read books in your field. I don’t care what your field is, they’ve probably read something in your area. I saw this quite a bit at the workshop on global book history organized by Rachel Stein, Ben Nourse and Hwisang Cho. Hwisang, from Xavier University, works on 17th century Korean epistolary culture. He was constantly throwing out references to writing and publishing practices in African American communities in the contemporary US, letter writing practices in pre-modern Yemen, and listening seriously to every perspective people brought to the table. Be like Hwisang.
  2. Another way to put point 1 is to remember that Hwisang, like many in “Area studies,” has learned to look beyond her/his field for the justification of her/his work. If you are not doing this, you are in a deeply privileged field. Reject that privilege. Tear it out by its roots. You can do this by becoming a better scholar and reading some damn books. This will also help you sniff out bad scholars in area studies. If they justify their work only in terms of its importance to their area of study, don’t bother with them. The last thing you want is people who base their authority on a ‘unique’ culture or understanding. Leave that to creepy nationalists.
  3. Don’t read randomly. There’s a huge amount of weird stuff in some fields. You don’t want to come out of reading about pre-modern Chinese book history talking about how irrational it was because you’ve accidentally imbibed the racist ideologies of some idiot. Your colleagues should play a role in helping you select readings. I’ve received requests from many of the awesome folks in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography for readings on Chinese book history (i.e. Liza Strakhov, Meghan Cook ). This is good for me and good for them.
  4. Listen to and ask questions about the work of colleagues not working in your area. This is a major problem. I’ve seen many Europeanists lose focus as an area studies scholar tries to explain their perspectives. This is demoralizing to me (a white man from Harvard), so imagine what this does to people with less privilege (i.e. basically everyone who is not a white man from Harvard). Continue reading “How to Know What You Don’t Know”

Translation and accessibility

Posted on by devinfitz@gmail.com

One of the big problems with teaching Chinese history, as many will know, is the issue of accessibility. For non-Chinese reading students, many interesting primary sources are sadly inaccessible. There are obviously some great translations available, but as I recently learned trying to teach a seminar on the Kangxi reign, there’s still much work to be done.

In that spirit, I’ve decided to start making translations available. I have two primary reasons for this:

  1. Translations are not really worth anything on your CV. No matter how polished these things become, no tenure or job committee will ever see them as terribly significant. The amount of work it would take to get them really polished and then published is irksome, given the limited returns.
  2. Sharing is caring. Everyone I know has piles of unpublished translations. It seems like an awful waste to wait for the translator to die and to later discover them in their papers. Having spent the last couple of years discovering finished translations of long-dead Sinologists, I’ve decided that I may as well embarrass myself now.

So, to that end, please check out the new translations section on the site.When I realize I’m too busy to actually fix errors in the reams of material I have started, I’ll share things on the main page.

Now, for a brief introduction to the first set of materials.

As a “New Qing” historian/intellectual historian, I’ve found myself looking for materials on zhengtong several times in my brief teaching career. That inspired me, with the aid of Maura Dykstra, to pull together a few documents on the idea of “China,” zhengtong, and the role of history. These documents would pair well with Treason by the Book, a unit on modern China culminating in Zou Rong and nationalism, or whatever else you think is interesting.

Zhengtong and History

 

One final note: There will be errors in these. I’ll edit and re-edit as I use them. These are not translations for anyone to quibble with. If you have a problem with them, edit them for your classes (and add your name under ours). Please don’t fill up my inbox with trivial complaints. Major issues, are of course, welcome to be brought to my attention. If you want to comment, please comment on how you use them in your classes, or, better yet, with names of similar texts you think should make it on to the list.