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Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction In Hajime Nakatani’s “The Empire of Fame: Writing and the Voice in Early Medieval China,” familiar problems appear in an unusual context. The commonplace term early medieval China leads Nakatani to question historiography, reading methods, and ways of de-encoding rank and power. He shows how the graphic regime of the Chinese Han state gave way to a “loquacious network of sociability.” This gentry annexed the old Han practice of perceiving writing, or culture, as imminent in things. But their own medieval optic, which allowed them to read the world around them for signs of fame, opened new styles of self-recognition to this loquacious elite. The gentry’s arrival on the horizon of history, Nakatani argues, is legible in the historical record of “quasi empires,” the elite’s superimposition of the Han empire of signs onto post-Han social collectivities. So far, his is a debate among specialists. What opens Nakatani’s argument to general readers lies positions 14:3 doi 10.1215/10679847-2006-012 Copyright 2006 by Duke University Press positions 14:3  Winter 2006  in his admonition that scholarship not remain oblivious to its modernist and postmodernist foundations. Always in danger of mistaking its own truths as universal, a kind of transference, critical scholarship loses its way http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

Editor's Introduction

Barlow, Tani E.
positions asia critique , Volume 14 (3) – Dec 1, 2006
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
© 2006 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1067-9847
DOI
10.1215/10679847-2006-012
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Abstract

In Hajime Nakatani’s “The Empire of Fame: Writing and the Voice in Early Medieval China,” familiar problems appear in an unusual context. The commonplace term early medieval China leads Nakatani to question historiography, reading methods, and ways of de-encoding rank and power. He shows how the graphic regime of the Chinese Han state gave way to a “loquacious network of sociability.” This gentry annexed the old Han practice of perceiving writing, or culture, as imminent in things. But their own medieval optic, which allowed them to read the world around them for signs of fame, opened new styles of self-recognition to this loquacious elite. The gentry’s arrival on the horizon of history, Nakatani argues, is legible in the historical record of “quasi empires,” the elite’s superimposition of the Han empire of signs onto post-Han social collectivities. So far, his is a debate among specialists. What opens Nakatani’s argument to general readers lies positions 14:3 doi 10.1215/10679847-2006-012 Copyright 2006 by Duke University Press positions 14:3  Winter 2006  in his admonition that scholarship not remain oblivious to its modernist and postmodernist foundations. Always in danger of mistaking its own truths as universal, a kind of transference, critical scholarship loses its way

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positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 2006

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