Chen Di's Record of Formosa (1603) and an Alternative Chinese Imaginary of Otherness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8958148 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Leigh Kathryn Jenco (0000-0001-7249-7843, London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 17-42 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Historical Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0018246x1900061x |
| OpenAlex | W3082091467 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 27 |
This article examines Chen Di's 1603 text Record of Formosa ( Dongfan ji ), the earliest first-hand account in any language of the indigenous people of Formosa (now called Taiwan). Recent commentators have viewed Chen's text as a key elaboration of Chinese imperial discourse and its various tropes of hierarchical difference. In contrast, I argue that Chen reads the perceived cultural differences between his society and Taiwan's indigenous peoples as evidence of the contingency, rather than inevitable superiority, of a historical story that produces the outcome of ‘civilization’. Building on a broader understanding of Chen's intellectual biography and his extant works, I show that Chen Di places the indigenes along a different timeline in which they forge their own contingent history parallel to, rather than behind, that of a civilizational centre. By doing so, Chen's historical narrative resists aligning their society with Han Chinese forms of development and offers a glimpse of how late Ming syncretic thought could produce an account of legitimate otherness
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Chen · China · Civilization · Contingency · Epistemology · Extant taxon · Genealogy · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Timeline · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology
Provincializing Europe
Lords of all the world
A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology
From Philosophy to Philology
Daoism in the Ming (1368-1644)
The Earliest Chinese Eyewitness Accounts of the Formosan Aborigines
Connoisseurship and the Defense Against Vulgarity
Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period
Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, 1644-1912 (2 vols)
Symptoms of an Unruly Age
Early Chinese Mysticism
Minority histories, subaltern pasts
Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368-1644
Marriage and Mandatory Abortion among the 17th-Century Siraya
A Mid-Ming Account of the Road Into Exile
Ontologies of Taiwan Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Anthropology
On the 'Raw' and the 'Cooked' Barbarians of Imperial China
Taiwan's Early Metal Age and Southeast Asian trading systems
Headhunting in ancient China
Enlightenment against Empire
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |