The Politics of Premodernity

Abstract

90 A & Q Hudson, Mark J. 2014. “Placing Asia in the Anthropocene: Histories, Vulnerabilities, Response.” Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 4: 941–­ 62. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519: 171–­ 82. Mikhail, Alan. 2016. “Enlightenment Anthropocene.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 49, no. 2: 211–­ 31. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–­ 1850. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2013. “Teleology, Discontinuity and World History: Periodization and Some Creation Myths of Modernity.” Asian Review of World Histories 1, no. 2: 189–­ 226. Ruddiman, William F. 2003. “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago.” Climatic Change 61: 261–­ 93. Ruddiman, William F. 2007. “The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis: Challenges and Responses.” Reviews of Geophysics 45: RG4001. Smail, Daniel Lord, and Andrew Shryock, eds. 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smail, Daniel Lord, and Andrew Shryock. 2013. “History and the ‘Pre.’” American Historical Review 118, no. 3: 709–­ 737. Smith, Bruce D., and Melinda A. Zeder. 2013. “The Onset of the Anthropocene .” Anthropocene 4: 8–­ 13. Symes, Carol. 2011. “When We Talk about Modernity.” AmericanHistorical Review 116, no. 3: 715–­ 26. The Politics of Premodernity Tamara Sears In September 2017, the British Museum inadvertently sparked a social media backlash on Twitter when, in responding to a query about how to design exhibition labels to maximize accessibility, the curator, Jane Porter, replied that “Asian names can be confusing, so we have to be careful about using too many.” Facing a horde of hostile comments pointing out the imperial legacies and cultures of looting upon which museum collections were built, Porter quickly qualified her response by pointing to the fact that “dynasties & gods have different names in various Asian A & Q 91 languages.” For example, she noted that the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy is “known by different names in different regions: Avalokitesvara in India, Guanyin in China, Kwanum in Korea and Kannon in Japan” (@British Museum, September 13, 2017). In addition to provoking accusations of racism and calls to decolonize museums, this incident draws attention to the challenges of presenting premodern histories of Asia to present-­ day audiences.1 Issues of intelligibility and accessibility are often solved through processes of simplification that homogenize regions and flatten history. In this case, the homogenization of terminology failed to convey a sense for the complex historical movements of Buddhism as it traveled across Asia and became transformed, in the process of transmission, from the male Indic Avalokitesvara into the female goddesses known by other names in China, Korea, and Japan (Yü 2001). The desire to make legible premodern Asia through positivist universalisms reinforces presentist modes of popular thinking that are anything but benign. In a recent opinion piece published in Hyperallergic, Michelle Wang (2020) calls attention to the CDC’s decision to grace the cover of the May 2020 issue of its journal Emerging Infectious Diseases with an image of a distinctively Chinese textile depicting a leopard standing in a forest populated by bats. In addition to reinforcing the racialization of COVID-­19 and stoking dangerous anti-­Asian sentiment in an era of intensifying xenophobia, this use of imagery constituted an act of gross historical misappropriation. Dateable to the eighteenth century, the textile was originally created as a rank badge for a government official serving during the height of the Qing dynasty. Wang’s critique is aimed at the disingenuous association between late imperial China and the current crisis that is exacerbated by the journal’s cover feature in which the issue’s editors maintain that the many birds and animals depicted on rank badges may serve as “zoonotic reservoirs capable of transmitting viral pathogens” and that bats in particular can be associated with the SARS coronavirus.2 Wang points out that bats in Qing China were associated not with disease but rather with auspiciousness and good fortune. Although beyond the scope of Wang’s critique, it is also notable that the era from which this rank badge hails sits at the edge...