臺北帝國大學 vs 京城帝國大學

葉碧苓：〈臺北帝國大學與京城帝國大學史學科之比較（1926-1945）〉，《臺灣史研究》，第16卷第3期（2009年9月），頁87-132。日本殖民統治臺灣與朝鮮之始，分設臺北帝國大學及京城帝國大學，作為「南進」和「北進」政策的學術橋頭堡。殖民地帝國大學仿照日本大學設有史學科，後者設國史學、東洋史學及西洋史學三個分科。殖民地帝國大學不設西洋史學，臺北帝大和京城帝大各自以南洋史學和朝鮮史學取代之。臺帝大史學科的講座設置、師資聘任、學生數皆不及京城帝大。戰後，臺帝大的臺灣史研究成為中國史研究的附庸，南洋史研究消失殆盡；相反，韓國史學則繼承日治餘緒，韓國史、韓中史、中國史研究量多質高。

「戰後初期，臺灣大學因為轉向以教學為主的型態，致使歷史系的教授大多『述而不作』，或者出版的著作多為其課堂講義。直到1970年代起，受完備學術訓練的新世代出現，臺灣史學界的學術研究水準才逐漸回復。筆者期本上質同吳氏［吳密察］此一觀點，但戰後這批來臺學者研究成果不佳的情況，除了『能力』不足以活用臺北帝國大學時代遺留下來的圖書與研究成果外，『職業學生』的監督與『白色恐怖』的陰影，恐怕也是必須列入考量的背景。」（頁95）

for whom are we Internationalizing?

Following Meaghan Morris and Handel K. Wright's introduction on transnationalism and cultural studies on Culture Studies (Vol. 23, Nos. 5-6, Sept - Nov 2009, 689-93), Raka Shome's "Post-colonial Reflections on the 'Internationalization' of Cultural Studies" (694-719) addresses the politics of "internationalizing" cultural studies. Shome, a post-colonial Indian subject position engaging British cultural studies through the space of an American graduate classroom, draws attentions to larger issues such as frequent unexamined points of departure into the "international," the geo-politics of knowledge production, academic protocols and practices, the gross unevenness in transnational exchange and circulation of knowledge, the continued hegemony of English. Here are some excerpts I found very revealing. I enjoy reading this paper.

"for whom is cultural studies 'going global' or 'international?'...For many like me, raised in post-colonial contexts, our intellectual existence itself has always been a 'post-colonial predicament' from day one; our psyches and imaginations could never escape the violence and relations of the 'international'; our imaginations have always had to move through different routes of the 'international' in order to make sense of ourselves and subjectivities." (p. 701)

"Multiply situated across diverse and colliding relations of the 'international', my post-colonial subject position was one that never had the 'luxury' or the choice to avoid the 'international' in my intellectual production including in cultural studies." (p. 702)

"'internationalizing' - as a term - implicitly assumes a level of agency (for the term connotes an action, or possibility of action); but for many of us, given our own history and our 'international relations with cultural studies or other knowledge formations, we were rarely 'internationalizing' as much as being constantly 'internationalized' upon through relations and academic imaginations which were not of our making." (p. 703, emphasis original)

"many non-western scholars who received training in western institutions, or western style institutions, tend to be fairly privileged in relation to their 'home' population; many do not constitute a typical sample of significantly disempowered post-colonial populations in their own nations and regional contexts." (p. 704)

"as a cultural studies scholar doing cultural studies work in non-western spaces and geographies whose 'knowledge' and 'scholarship' simply do not have that kind of recognition from the Anglo/American academy are issues that have to be continually grappled with." (p. 704)

quoting Larry Crossberg about scholars writing outside of the North Atlantic axis "they have three choices...third, they can downplay the specificity of the example by emphasizing the theoretical argument at the expense of actual analysis." (p. 705-6)

"Given that the ethos and research protocols of western (especially US) institutions are now being transported to through engines of neo-liberalism, and imbibed in, so many non-western institutions, the pressure to publish in English language journals or with English language publishing houses has never perhaps been greater, even if one is not situated in a western geography, if one is to 'succeed' as an academic." (p. 707)

"given the geo-political and historical inequities that inform the global landscape and its intellectual traffic, a non-native speaker/writer of 'English' from a Western geography or structure is indeed positioned far more differently in such a landscape than someone from an Asian geography." (p. 708, emphasis original) Shome takes French and Bangladeshi intellectuals as opposing examples.

Conference on Sun Yat-sen and others, and others

Next year, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution in China, which brought an end to the 2000-year-old imperial dynastic rule in China. The National University of Singapore takes the initiatives to organise the conference on Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Chinese Revolution with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and the Chinese Heritage Centre on 25-26 October 2010 in Singapore.

Proposed themes are Sun Yat-sen, Japan and Nanyang; Sun Yat-sen in the Straits Settlements; Sun Yat-sen and Prominent Nanyang Chinese; Nanyang and Financing Chinese Revolutions; Sun Yat-sen and the Emergence of Chinese Modernity; Revisiting the Study of Sun Yat-sen in Nanyang; and etc.

Would you be interested in dryland people and environments? Could scholars in urban studies be engaged in this field of enquiry? Why not? The School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, has the answer by organising the First Oxford Interdisciplinary Desert Conference: Integrating Research, Expanding Knowledge on 15-16 April 2010 at Oxford.

Desert research might sound daunting. Themes for exploration are nevertheless multifarious, such as water and deserts; governing the landscape; deserts and environmental change; sacred and secular heritage studies; sand over the Sahara, Sonora, Simpson...; urban desert environment; health of the deserts; and etc. I hope Chinese scholars in Dunghuang would participate in this interesting conference.

Why has China been going strong in the UNESCO world heritage list only after the Cold War in recent decades whereas another Asian country also with long historical tradition, India, has gained its prominent place as early as in the 1980s? Is it a reflection of the rise of China? A two-day conference to be held in Heidelberg, Germany might give a clue. Organised by the International Scientific Committee for the UNESCO History Project and hosted by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, the upcoming UNESCO History Conference titled UNESCO and the Cold War" will be held on 4-5 March 2010 to explore the influence of the Cold War and the tension between the two conflicting ideological blocs on the UNESCO and the contribution of the latter to connect and reconcile the opposing confrontation.

Recent readings XII

Graham E. Johnson's "From Rural Committee to Spirit Medium Cult: Voluntary Association in the Development of a Chinese Town," Contributions to Asian Studies, Vol. 1, 1971, pp. 123-143. It discusses the emergence of voluntary associations during the urban transformation process in Tsuen Wan, e.g. cooperatives, trade unions, commercial associations, fellow-countrymens associations, neighborhood associations, temple associations etc. With factories and working population figures

Chan Shun-hing's "Politics of Female Subjectivities and the Everyday: The Case of the Hong Kong Feminist Journal Nuliu," Feminist Review, Vol. 92, 2009, pp. 36-53. Based on close reading of selected writings on fashion and travel in Nuliu 女流 (1987-92, 1996-2002), Chan discusses the everyday life of women in the formation of female subjectivities. She draws me to Fran Martin's (ed.) Interpreting Everyday Culture (London : Arnold, 2003) and Chris Rojek's Leisure Theory: Principles and Practices (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

David C.S. Li's "Towards 'Biliteracy and Trilingualism" in Hong Kong (SAR): Problems, Dilemmas and Stakeholders' Views," AILA Review, Vol. 22, 2009, pp. 72-84. General survey.

C. Michael Guilford's "A Look Back: Civil Engineering in Hong Kong 1841-1941," Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 37, 1998, pp. 81-101. In 1901, the Habour Master proposed to construct a cross-habour bridge between Pottinger Street and Robinson (Nathan) Road, there being no engineering difficulty or "any practical obstruction or even inconvenience to shipping," the deck being 12 metres above high water with a swinging or lifting central span. (p. 89-90)

Staurt Hall

Staurt Hall's quotes:

identity is not only a story, a narrative which we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which change with historical circumstances. And identity shifts with the way in which we think and hear them and experience them. Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition. (1995, p. 8)

identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future to be constructed. (1995, p. 13)

identity is always in part a narrative...always within representation. (1997, p. 49)

...culture is not just a voyage o rediscovery, a return journey. It is not an "archaeology." Culture is a production. It has its raw materials, its resources, its "work of production." It depends on a knowledge of tradition as "the changing same" and an effective set of genealogies. But what this "detour through its pasts" does is not enable us. through culture, to produce ourselves anew, as new kinds of subjects. It is therefore not a question of what our traditions make of us so much as what we make of our traditions. Paradoxically, our cultural identities, in any finished form, lie ahead of us. We are always in the process of cultural formation. Culture is not a matter of ontology, of being, but of becoming. (2005, p. 556)

"Negotiating Caribbean Identities," New Left Review, Vol. 1, Jan. 1995, pp. 3-14.

"Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities," in A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 41-68.

"Thinking Diaspora: Home Thoughts from Abroad," in G. Desai & S. Nair (eds.),Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 543-60.

Utility vs Humanities

Michael Bérubé, "The utility of the arts and humanities," Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Feb., 2003), pp. 23-40. excerpts below

"Bad news first", Bérubé announces. "In a material sense the Arts and Humanities are not going to contribute significantly to what will be, over the next century, the true 'growth' areas of higher education in the USA and UK: business, science and technology." (p. 23)

"Most of the university-affiliated artists and humanists I know are profoundly ambivalent about the idea of justifying their disciplines in terms of there social utility...The Arts enrich life, the Humanities teach us what it is to be human, the Arts deepen our spirit, the Humanities teach us what it is to be human, the Arts deepen our spirit, the Humanities preserve our common cultural heritage, bleat, bleat, bleat" (p. 25)

"if the study of the Humanities is defined as the 'self-centered desire to bask in the philosophical and aesthetic pleasures of superb texts', then there is little chance that the Arts and Humanities will be seen by scientists as anything better - or more consequential - than a delightful dessert." (p. 25) "arts-as-dessert" (p. 25) "a delightful dessert" (p. 26)

"surely the more speculative sciences, from astrophysics to evolutionary theory, do not have quite the same claim on practical utility; surely some endeavors in pure mathematics or cosmology contribute no more than does the study of medieval tapestry to the economic or physical well-being of the general citizenry." (p. 26)

"the reason that so few cultural leftists in the Humanities care about new developments in theories of matter or of the evolution of the universe is precisely that such theories have no social utility whatsoever." (p. 27)

"cultural workers have tended all too readily to defend their enterprise in terms of skills and competencies." (p. 29)

"the Arts and Humanities also introduce students to many varieties of beauty and technical virtuosity that do nothing to enhance their interpersonal skills of co-operation or their ability to make a solid economic contribution to their communities and the nation." (p. 29-30)

Jonathan Marks' Why I am NOT a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

"Science is widely accepted to be three different things: a method of understanding and of establishing facts about the universe; the facts themselves, the products of that method; and a voice of authority and consequently a locus of cultural power. This triple identity creates tensions within science and conflicting roles for it." (preface, p. x-xi)

"The biggest obstacle to studying science anthropologically is the choice of whether to universalize it or to particularize it...Is science something that everybody has in their fashion but only certain peoples exercise strongly? Or is science something that only 'we' have? In which case, what do 'they' have?" (preface, p. xi)

Marks contends that "the most reasonable approach is to acknowledge that everyone has knowledge about the world, much of it accurate, which allows them to manipulate their environments in diverse and productive ways. Science, however, is a particular approach to knowledge that is more precisely localized in the cultural history of Europe." (preface, p. xi)

Gladwell now

Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000). Tipped this, finally.

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005). How long does it take to decide how good a teacher is? Two seconds! Blink is a book about that two seconds, almost intuitive repulsion. Decisions, Gladwell's argues, made very quickly can be every bit as good as decision made cautiously and deliberately. (emphasis mine) When should we trust that two-second blink? Blink can be "educated and controlled". A subtle sign means million words. One of the many interesting lessons I learned from this book: Don't lose anyone at hello. Put thin-slicing in the correct context. It takes us some time to understand that we actually like something we thought we hated.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008)."Pepole don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage...It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement...It is only be asking where they [successful people] are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't" (p. 19)

"the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder." (The 10,000-hour rule, p. 39)

"practical intelligence...'knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect." it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it....It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want." (The trouble with geniuses, part 2, p. 101)

"Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities, and at this point. (The three lessons of Joe Flom, p. 155)

"success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantage: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world. (p. 175-6)

"success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed...Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. (p. 267)

Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009).

"hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date." (p. 391)

"A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test." (p. 317)

"Old words in the service of a new idea aren't the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea." (p. 240)

"The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell." (p. xiii)

Recent readings XI

黃毓棟：〈統而不正－－對魏禧〈正統論〉的一種新詮釋〉，《漢學研究》，第27卷第1期（2009年3月），頁235-261。

劉緯道：〈《婦女雜誌》中的戀愛觀〉，《中國歷史學會史學集刊》，第41期（2009年10月），頁201-242。

陳金城：〈史臣與兒臣角色的擺盪－－論蕭子顯《南齊書》的修撰立場〉，《中國歷史學會史學集刊》，第41期（2009年10月），頁365-404。

史曜菖：〈操作反清：以《民報》中「呂留良案」論述為例〉，《中國歷史學會史學集刊》，第41期（2009年10月），頁243-280。

Michèle Martin and Christopher Bodnar, "The Illustrated Press under Siege: Technological Imagination in the Paris Siege, 1870-1871," Urban History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2009), pp. 67-85.

"An analysis of the content of four illustrated periodicals - The Illustrated London NewsandThe Graphic in London and L'Illustration and Le Monde Illustré in Paris" (p. 67, abstract)

A colleague of mine is sitting in a postgraduate course on Cultural Studies and it reminded me of a similar course back in England a few years ago. Just yesterday, I was browsing my Manchester's MA supervisor Patrick Joyce's blog and his article in the journal Cultural Studies and other latest papers. Heather Brook's "Choosing Using: Drug Policy, Consumer Culture and 'Junkie Manquées" (Cultural Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, July 2009, . 95-109) is relevant to HK's recent drug policy and debate. Drug-using is a matter of choice and consumption. Choice is pivotal in consumer capitalism where, paradoxically, not-choosing is not an option. Drug policy manifests the governmentality of consumption which demands drug-users to proper and normal consumption in a way that "drug wars police and produce docile consumers." (p. 99, original emphasis)

Brook quotes Desmond Manderson's work ("Possessed: Drug Policy, Witchcraft and Belief,"Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2005, pp. 36-63), who identifies parallels between witch-hunting and drug policy, contending that "the former seeking to preserve some sense of supernatural agency or will in a world becoming gradually disenchanted by the force of human rationality, the latter seeking to preserve some sense of human agency or will in a world becoming gradually disenchanted with the force of human rationality. (p. 50, original emphasis)

In policy level, drug-users have been represented as "habit-bound, impoverished and unable to choose" and been rejected as smart consumers choosing a meaningful rationale. Brook's title answers this myth, choosing using. "The anxiety mobilizing contemporary drug panics is," Brook argues, "perhaps, connected to capitalist fears that the proliferation of product differentiation will not remain meaningful."

Recent readings X

Niv Horesh's "Between Legal and Illegal Tender: The Chartered Bank and its Notes in and around China, 1864-1939" (Modern China, Vol. 34, No. 2, Apr 2008, pp. 276-289) drew me to his "The Bund and beyond: Rethinking the Sino-foreign Financial Grid in Pre-war Shanghai" (China Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-26) and "Printed in London, Disbursed on the Bund: the Hongkong Bank and its Early Note Issue in Shanghai, 1865-1911" (Late Imperial China, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2006, pp. 109-40), which I read earlier, also Wellington K. K. Chan's "Personal Styles, Cultural Values and Management: the Sincere and Wing On Companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1900-1941" (Business History Review, Vol. 70, No. 2, 1996, pp. 141-67), and Stephen Freeth's Destroying Archives: a Case Study of the Records of Standard Chartered Bank" (Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1991, pp. 85-94).

Latika Chaudhary's "Determinants of Primary Schooling in British India," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 69, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 269-302. Misallocation of resources, i.e. low public spending, for primary education in British India was due to greater caste and religious diversity that put constraints on public spending in basic education.

Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen's "Leopold Ranke's Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography," Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2008), pp. 425-453.

"all history is comment on a text," by Frederick Jackson Turner (W. Stull Holt (ed.), Historical Scholarship in the Unite States, 1876-1901: As Revealed in the Correspondence of Herbert B. Adams (Baltimore, MD, 1938), p. 160)

"History is done with documents...no documents, no history," by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos's Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898), pp. 1-2)

Anne Gerritsen's "Fragments of a Global Past: Ceramics Manufacture in Song-Yuan-Ming Jingdezhen," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient," Vol. 52 (2009), pp. 117-152. "Chinese writers generally ignore matters of technology and commerce beyond the confines of the Chinese realm." (p. 117)

Christian de Pee's "Wards of Words: Textual Geographies and Urban Space in Song-Dynasty Luoyang, 960-1127," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient," Vol. 52 (2009), pp. 85-116. "The conventions of inherited genres of literary composition reorganized the essential horizontality of eleventh-century urban space into vertical, hierarchical geographies that excluded markets, stores, alleyways, and commoners." (p. 85)

Another two articles on literature: Tzvetan Todorov's "What Is Literature For?" New Literary History, Vol. 38, 2007, pp. 13-32; and Laurent Dubreuil's "What Is Literature's Now?" New Literary History, Vol. 38, 2007, pp. 43-70.

A few more:

Sandra Khor Manickam's "Common Ground: Race and the Colonial Universe in British Malaya," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3, Oct. 2009, pp. 593-612. Manickam explores the common bases of knowledge on race among Malay intellectuals and British scholar-officials in British Malaya.

H. V. Bowen's "Bullion for Trade, War, and Debt-Relief: British Movements of Silver to, around, and from Asia, 1760-1833," Modern Asian Studies, 2009, 31pps.

Kent G. Deng, "Miracle or Mirage? Foreign Silver, China's Economy and Globalization from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries," Pacific Economic Review, Vol. 13, 2008), pp. 320-358. A revisionist study that China's demand for foreign silver was actually far smaller than is often claimed.

Some thoughts about food from Hervé This

Hervé This's Building a meal : from molecular gastronomy to culinary constructivism (New York : Columbia University Press, 2009. trans. by Malcolm DeBevoise).

I had an "eat-well" wholemeal bap of M & S for breakfast before going to work in the morning. I felt content.

We city dwellers are used to high-salt-and-high-fat fast food and junk food and we simply cannot get rid of it.

Notwithstanding we eat badly, This raises a fundamental question "what does eating badly really amount? Does it mean eating things that are bad for one's health, or merely things that are thought to be objectionable for one reason or another?"

He despises nonsense claims about the relationship between food and health and warns us to be cautious to food labelled and marketed as natural and good-for-your-health. Indeed, "we don't behave rationally when it comes to diet." (p. 78)

A few more excerpts from this interesting book: "To cook, by its very nature, is a form of technical intervention. Cooks transform nature, just as chemist transform matter." (p. 79)

"Boredom is the result not of doing the same thing over and over again, but of paying no attention to what we are doing." (p. xii)