The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894-1954 - Softcover

Judge, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226842819 ISBN 13: 9780226842813

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Examines the transformation of vernacular knowledge during a pivotal period of modern Chinese history, 1894 to 1954.

What did common readers read in the midst of the revolutions that punctuated China's long Republic (1894-1954)? How did they manage the often-unprecedented challenges of the era? What did they know and how did they know it?

In The Politics of Common Reading, Joan Judge traces the unfolding of a consequential politics of accommodation that engaged commoners as knowers rather than as an unenlightened mass. A response to the institutional failures of the era, this politics was enacted through an informal knowledge infrastructure comprised of low-budget publishers, rustic bookstalls, and a piecemeal national network. As yet unstudied, this infrastructure produced and circulated up to ten times the number of books as official, mainstream channels.

A corpus of some five hundred of these cheap collections of recipes and techniques serves as the basis for this book. Judge focuses on four challenges common readers faced: how to cure an opium addiction, avoid an electric shock, prevent a cholera infection, and graft a plant. She further draws on government, archival, periodical, and fiction materials in devising composites of individual common readers so that we can better know them: details of the crises they faced, the remedies they tried, and the knowledge they relied on as they concocted cures and applied technologies. She argues that the acts of conciliation and assemblage these readers engaged in shaped the broader epistemic terrain from which historical change was actualized in China's century of revolution.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joan Judge is professor of history at York University. She is the author and coeditor of several books, including, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226842819
• ISBN 13: 9780226842813
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
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