Becoming yellow Keevak, Michael
2011., 20110418, 2011, 2011-04-18, 20110101
eBook
In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their ...willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.
In On Saving Face, Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century ...colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It involves proper behavior and the avoidance of conflict, encompassing every aspect of one’s place in society as well as one’s relationships with other people. One can “give face,” “get face,” “fight for face,” “tear up face,” and a host of other expressions. But when it began to become known to the Western trading community in China beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was distorted and reduced to two phrases only, “lose face” and “save face,” both of which were used to suggest distinctly Western ideas of humiliation, embarrassment, honor, and reputation. The Chinese were judged as a race obsessed with the fear of “losing (their) face,” and they constantly resorted to vain attempts to “save” it in the face of Western correction. “Lose face” may be an authentic Chinese expression but “save face” is different. “Save face” was actually a Western invention.
Western readers have yet to come to terms with the fact that during much of our history very little was ever "known" about China. There was never any lack of information from missionaries and ...travelers and traders. But what kind of information was it? Wha
Rather than working in official channels for the East India Company, however, both George Smiths were part of a considerable and hitherto shadowy group of individuals known as "private traders," who ...ventured to the East like so many others to seek their fortunes in the burgeoning trade in tea and silk. Both locations were involved in an increasingly globalized network of trade and credit, the instability of which led to a severe financial crisis in Canton in the late 1770s, when enormous amounts of money that had been lent to Chinese merchants for decades could not be repaid. The debts incurred by the 1779 financial crisis, finally, were also an important stimulus for mounting the ill-fated Macartney embassy to China in 1793, and Hanser's final chapter speculates about how at least two of these George Smiths may have had a hand in encouraging the British government to pursue a goal that every European knew was practically a hopeless cause: how to get the Chinese to negotiate on any terms but their own.
A World of Impostures Keevak, Michael
The Eighteenth century (Lubbock),
07/2012, Volume:
53, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Keevak talks about the history of forgery. Forgeries are ubiquitous. Yet it has also been noted, and in fact noted by many eighteenth-century commentators themselves, that the Age of Reason produced ...an unusually large number of famous fakers: Thomas Chatterton, James Macpherson, George Psalmanazar, William Henry Ireland-to name just four, and just four in England. The realm of literary forgery (including piracy) is even more densely populated, and not simply with famous examples like Chatterton, Macpherson, or William Laudet.
Diplomatic “Face” Keevak, Michael
On Saving Face,
12/2022
Book Chapter
By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of “saving face” had become so generalized that it began to appear in every variety of scholarly and popular commentary -- not just about China but ...indeed any context in which a person (or a government) might try to avoid humiliation through some form of appearance, pretext, or falsehood. But this usage was very far from the way “face” was actually employed in the Chinese tradition, as is shown in contemporaneous diplomatic documents included in the Chouban yiwu shimo or “The Complete Management of Barbarian Affairs,” where matters of “face” were often mentioned. One searches in vain, however, for anything like the Western version of “saving face.”
