Staging the World

Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China and Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History and co-translator (with Xueping Zhong) of Cai Xiang's Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966, all also published by Duke University Press. She co-translated and coedited (with Lydia H. Liu and Dorothy Ko) The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory.

• Preface & Acknowledgments Part I 1. Introduction: Shifting Perspectives on Modern Chinese Nationalism 2. Staging the World Part II 3. Deterritorializing Politics: The Pacific and Hawaii as Chinese National Space 4. Recognizing Colonialism: The Philippines and Revolution 5. Promoting the Ethnos: The Boer War and Discourses of the People Part III 6. Performing on the World Stage in Asia 7. Re-creating China’s World Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

“Staging the World fundamentally challenges the conventional assumptions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual history and proposes a creative, alternative imagining of the historiography of modern China. This is a rare work of intellectual ambition and righteous moral sense.”-Lionel M. Jensen, author of Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization “Rebecca Karl not only explores an exciting period in Chinese intellectual history but also provides an alternative mapping of global relations based on a constellation of common subordinated nations. Those who, like me, are not specialists of Chinese history will find this vision of the world from below a refreshing revelation.”-Michael Hardt, author of Empire (with Antonio Negri)