Abstract

113 Book ReviewsZito, Angela, and Tani E. Barlow (eds), Body, Subject & Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) SAGE Publications, Inc.1995DOI: 10.1177/002190969503000113 P. Steven Sangren Cornell University Ithaca, NY Cultural studies and post-structuralist historical analyses have at least this in common with an earlier cultural anthropology-a warrant to remind us that many verities about nature and humankind that we (moderns, Europeans) assume to be eternal or universal are in fact cultural constructions, categories of language and thought that themselves have histories (genealogies) and are products of social processes. Much recent academic work sets out energetically to demonstrate that lin- guistically and culturally constructed, fictioned, imagined "subjectivities" are both more and less than their representations might seem to make of them. Less, because rather than eternal, such "truths" are, in a word, positions produced in systems of symbolically constituted relations; more, because no mere epiphenomenal or super- structural accompaniment to social realities, such representations and discourses exercise a positive productivity in constituting them. Self-consciously and exuberantly (sometimes hyperbolically) iconosclastic, this edited volume participates energetically in this enterprise, clearly intending to engage Chinese studies more directly in wider polemics. In this spirit, Shigehisa Kuriyama proposes an interesting