Reading Distance: Chinese and Arabic Literatures at the End of Empire, 1850-1950

FAIN: FEL-273230-21

Michael Gibbs Hill
College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA 23186-0002)

Research and writing leading to a book on the connections between intellectual “enlightenment” in China and Nahda (i.e., awakening) in the Middle East from the 19th to the first half of the 20th century.

This project breaks new ground in comparative literary and cultural studies, connecting the intellectual “enlightenment” in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the “enlightenment” or “awakening” (Nahda) in Arabic-language cultural and intellectual history of the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Using materials in Chinese and Arabic—often in translation or in dialogue with writings in English, French, and German—my project begins in the mid-nineteenth century, when these two intellectual and literary traditions were relatively isolated from one another, and extends to a moment in the 1940s that saw substantial exchanges among intellectuals from the Republic of China and Egypt. Through a historically and linguistically rigorous account of these developments, my project pushes the limits of the methods of global intellectual and cultural history and comparative literature.