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positions 3:l Spring 1995 9% of the Western human sciences. We seek a Chinese subject who is in some sense identical to ourselves. What we find instead are koutouing Chinese, subjects who only occasionally âstand upâ to a political and social order which by Western liberal standards is always assumed to be oppressive. From this perspective, Chinese differences are invariably coded as Chinese fai 1u r es. While accepting that it is extremely difficult to separate koutou from this dominant characterization, particularly when fragments of it continue to colonize representations on both sides of the Pacific,z I will attempt in the second section to disengage koutou from this history and consider it as multiple rather than singular, indeterminate rather than transparent. At stake here, therefore, is more than simple redefinition. To destabilize koutou is to call into question pervasive assumptions about historic China on the part of contemporary American, European, and Chinese intellectuals. Regardless of whether Chinaâs past is interpreted as premodern or feudal, koutou stands as an emblematic and essential signifier of nonmodernity, of servitude, and, perhaps most scandalously, of inequality. To be modern, it would seem, is to be free; and to be free one presumably
positions asia critique – Duke University Press
Published: Mar 1, 1995
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