The politics of time in early Chinese translation of Western modernity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Western modernity, the darker side of which is global coloniality that is dependent upon translation, is essentially a culture of time. While the temporality of modernity has been well analysed and explained in the West, it remains largely unknown how the politics of time has been operating in and through translation in the Rest. This article attempts to explore ways in which the politics of time is played out in early-modern textual and extratextual translation of modernity in China, whose traditional conception of time and vision of human life encoded in its language differs from those of the West represented by Greco-Roman and Christian traditions. By examining a few cases in the Jesuits’ translational activities in the later Ming and early Qing dynasties, it demonstrates how modernity’s temporal–spatial construct asserted itself in China by way of biblical chronologization, and spatial and textual manipulation in geographic, philosophical, and science translation, through which modernity has, in time, changed China.