INTERCULTURAL INTERVENTION
Dawid Rogacz in conversation with Q. Edward Wang
DAWID ROGACZ
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Dawid Rogacz is Assistant Professor in Asian Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland); he is a philosophy writer and researcher specializing in Chinese philosophy, philosophy of history, and, particularly, the intersection of both. His other research interests revolve around comparative philosophy, Marxism, and the philosophy of culture. His recent publications include Chinese Philosophy of History: From Ancient Confucianism to the End of the Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and “The Virtue of a Historian: A Dialogue between Herman Paul and Chinese Theorists of History,” History and Theory 58, no. 2 (2019), 252–67.
Q. Edward Wang is Professor of History and Coordinator of Asian Studies at Rowan University (US) and Changjiang Professor of History at Peking University (China). An expert on comparative historiography and global history, Wang has published extensively on these subjects, including editing the four-volume Historiography: Critical Readings (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021); coauthoring (with Georg G. Iggers) A Global History of Modern Historiography (London: Routledge, 2008/2017); and coediting (with Georg G. Iggers) Marxist Historiographies: A Global Perspective (London: Routledge, 2015) and Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002/2006). He also authored Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) as well as a dozen books in Chinese. He is Editor of Chinese Studies in History and a board member of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography and of Storia della Storiografia.
Cite this post: Dawid Rogacz and Q. Edward Wang, “Intercultural Intervention,” One More Thing… (blog), History and Theory, October 2023, https://historyandtheory.org/omt-poznan/rogacz-wang.
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Dawid Rogacz: You trained as a historian in both China and the United States. What are the main differences, if any, in cultivating historians’ competencies, so to speak, between these two countries, and which elements of the education of historians tend to be prioritized over the others?
Q. Edward Wang: I completed undergraduate and graduate studies in China and then obtained my PhD in the United States. In China, historical education at the bachelor level was quite comprehensive. For two years, I studied the general history of China, Asia, and “the West,” which typically focused on Europe and the United States. At the time, I became interested in learning foreign languages, primarily German and English. Certainly, courses in non-Western history were also offered in the United States, but not as obligatory ones, and students were, in principle, given much more freedom in terms of finding their specialized interest. On the other hand, graduate training in the United States urges you to focus on several fields apart from your major. In that sense, there are also similarities between these two systems. You are expected to complete the comprehensive examination in these fields; however, you need to focus on your main area of study and develop the thesis based on your learning experience and the reading list prepared by your supervisor.
DR: As a student, you had to learn a lot about Chinese historiography. A few decades later, you and Professor On-cho Ng published Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China, a landmark study of premodern Chinese historiography that was instrumental in the formation of the young Sinologists from my generation. [1] Do you observe any comeback of some premodern ways of narrating the past and the accompanying views on historical writing in present-day China or, generally, East Asia?
QEW: Well, that is an excellent question. When me and On-cho were writing the book back in 2000, the whole historical discipline was under attack by postmodern criticism, which also resulted in opening to and appreciating the different traditions of historical writing. Before our monograph, the English scholarship on Chinese historiography was small and created for relatively narrow circles. Our book offered a more comprehensive discussion of the development of the Chinese tradition while keeping in mind how to maintain the dialogue with the West, as we were writing this for the English readers.
As for the return of the traditional ways of historical writing, let me start by saying that it is to my pleasant surprise that the problem of historians’ morality is now revived in Western scholarship. The special issues of such journals as History and Theory or the Journal of the History of Ideas dedicated to this question mark a new trend in going beyond the Rankean model of historiography. In light of this, we can reevaluate the East Asian tradition where providing moral lessons was always a motivating force behind recording history. However, with time, this approach became condemned, and Asian historians are now by and large dedicated to the Rankean model. There are also other reasons for that “empirical turn” of the Chinese histography in the 1990s, such as the attempt to distance from political and ideological issues, which also contributed to the spread of microhistories. On the other hand, historiography is still very attractive and has saved its enduring appeal to the community of Chinese intellectuals.
DR: It is also connected with the rise of modern Chinese historiography, which was, in many ways, a rupture with the traditional Chinese historical thinking. Your research frequently discusses such “turning points” in the historiography of China—notably, the May Fourth Movement. [2] Could you encapsulate the main points of the revolution brought about by this movement, at least in terms of the tasks and methods of historiography?
QEW: I will be glad to. If we are to mark one such turning point, then Liang Qichao’s “new historiography” [3] was definitely such a breakthrough. I believe, though, that such turning points have a much longer tradition, being inscribed into a long-held transformation of historical thinking. In that sense, Confucius’s break with a purely descriptive approach to historical records was the first such milestone, and the second one was represented by Sima Qian [4] and other Han historians, who shaped the form of imperial historical writing. The third turning point is marked by the Tang dynasty, which fully institutionalized and systematized that process. Note that more than one-third of the standard histories of China (out of twenty-four) was compiled during that period. The fourth breakthrough is to be seen during the Song dynasty, which on many points resembles the Renaissance in European intellectual history. Song historians explored various genres of historiography and started to rewrite histories, as it is seen in Sima Guang’s work [5] and his encyclopedic mode of historical writing. The next turning point is constituted by the rise of evidential scholarship (kaozheng) [6] in the eighteenth century, when the field of source criticism has emerged. So, already before the work of Liang Qichao there had been five turning points in Chinese historical thinking.
Personally, I do not think that 1949 was such a significant change in terms of the development of historical writing. That was essentially part of the period I will describe as “China in the world,” meaning China in the Westernized world or the West-centered world. Whether you follow Western liberalism, nationalism, or Marxism, they are all products of Western culture. However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, there was a conscientious effort to formulate a new model of historiography—a development that is still ongoing; how successful, we do not yet know. These most recent trends can be identified as the seventh turning point.
DR: Let us stay with these trends, as your research eventually went far beyond the studies of Chinese historiography. You called for establishing the global history of modern historiography and edited a monumental four-volume anthology of critical readings in world historiography. What are the main methodological challenges and traps of this type of cross-cultural and wide-ranging research?
QEW: That is also a question that I have been thinking about in general. I was in some sense “recruited” by Georg Iggers, who was always very cosmopolitan and offered me a contract to cowrite a global history of modern histography. My interest in comparative historiography started already during my graduate studies in China, then I had a chance to meet several European scholars in the early 1980s, and finally [I] came to study in the United States. When the opportunity presented itself, I happily used my experience but, at the same time, began to expand my intellectual horizons, including not only East Asia but also the Middle East and other traditions, which is of course quite demanding already in terms of the number of languages one should command. For me, however, it has always been some mission, the essential part of which was to encourage other Asian scholars to intervene in the Western discourse.
The field of the world histories of historiography emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century with books such as G. P. Gooch’s History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. [7] In the 1930s, several American historians also wrote general histories of histography. All these histories, however, were produced by Western scholars. Even when Daniel Woolf asked me to contribute to A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, [8] the editorial board consisted only of European and American scholars. This motivated me to do that kind of work. The first challenge was, of course, connected with the ways of communicating between various traditions. The other challenge is the cultural background one must get acquainted with, which requires much reading. Nonetheless, the most important thing was always finding a common theme that enables [me] to bring together different narratives, which I have been continuously working on. Due to my experience and background, I might be one of the few people in the academic historical community that can do the job.
DR: How would you then define the status of historiography today, both inside and outside of academia?
QEW: I have been uninterruptedly attending world congresses of history since 1995 and can definitely identify myself as a “watcher” of the development of historical studies today. Generally speaking, the whole landscape [has become] more and more diversified; at the same time, “there is no king in Israel,” as I used to say. It is very different from, say, the nineteenth century, when Rankean historiography or simply political and diplomatic history ran the show and everybody tried to employ archives in more or less the same fashion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars began pondering how to diversify the ways the past is narrated, and due to the postmodernist movement, the literary side of historical books came to the fore. However, besides that brief moment, we experience the further “scientification” of the field of history, and such trends as digital history, environmental history, and neuro-history are all signs of this process. It is clear now that historians must borrow methods from both the social sciences and the natural sciences, which becomes challenging to historians trained in a classical manner. On the other hand, there seems to be an agreement concerning what sort of tradition today’s historians should go beyond or transcend, and that is nation/state history. Several approaches, from cultural history and women’s history to the history of emotions or food history, make considerable efforts to go beyond the nation/state paradigm established in late nineteenth-century Germany, but in some sense generally in Europe. A common enemy, so to speak, connects all these diversified subdisciplines, and for the very same reason, global history is so important these days.
DR: So, what is the future of historical theory, especially after narrativism? On the one hand, this became a new part of the canon, a true benchmark in the development of historical theory; on the other hand, many scholars are still not eager to treat it seriously. Partially for that reason, but also owing to the just-mentioned diversity of ideas, the theory of history reached a certain stalemate.
QEW: When we talk about the contribution of Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit to historical theory, it is usually about bringing narrativity itself to the focus of our attention. However, both of them in their later work tried to (re-)integrate experience with historical writing and even questioned writing as the only form of representation of the past. Today, we are even more aware of how to engage with the past in multiple and multilinear ways, often within the framework of the so-called visual turn or oral turn. This goes against the natural tendency of literary narratives to generalize the structure and develop a master (grand) narrative; coherence and connectedness—what Germans call Zussamenhang—is, after all, the primary function of the narrative. Nevertheless, this is rapidly changing, and we are possibly facing another breakthrough in Kuhn’s sense of scientific revolution. But again, although there are many innovative projects and prospective scholars, we still lack a more systematic theory or a systematic presentation of some theoretical stance that would ignite such a breakthrough.
DR: One of your recent projects examines the reception and circulation of Western theories of history in East Asia. What is the response of East Asian historians to such trends as world history, environmental history, or cultural history?
QEW: In our project, we want to view Asia not as one unit but as several areas in a way that reveals the importance of intra-Asian dialogues and the encounters between the West and Asia. In principle, the Japanese follow Western theories rather closely. However, they also keep their traditions, such as, say, the study of social history, people’s history, and everyday history, which have a long-lasting tradition in Japan. The Chinese are not that interested in investigating the history of everyday practices, as their tradition focuses on studying social macrochanges, which has a lot to do with Marxist influence, but it [is] also under the sway of Confucianism, and even the ancient Gongyang school, [9] which opens Chinese theorists to speculative ways of looking at the past and the future. Koreans are more motivated by their concern, including national and transnational history, which is directly affected by the whole situation in the Korean peninsula. In this way, we want to provide an Asian intervention into the field of historiography and historical theory and to animate the interactions between Asian scholars.
DR: As if that were not enough, in addition to your extensive theoretical work, you wrote a remarkable and acclaimed cultural history: Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History. [10] Can the history of chopsticks serve as a case study for observing some large-scale or long-durée developments?
QEW: Exactly. My first motivation was to provide a case study of the new cultural history “from below,” as that is an ordinary object in people’s lives throughout East Asia. The second one was to expand the current scholarship since there were books on the history of chopsticks written by Chinese and Japanese scholars. However, my intention was to make an intra-Asian comparison within the chopstick culture zone. Finally, it also had something to do with my mission of providing the Asian intervention in the discourse because there are several books on Western utensils: forks, knives, et cetera, but chopsticks, whose history is much, much longer and whose function goes way beyond the tools of eating (for instance, they were also used as gifts), did not have their English-language history. As a symbol of culture, they now witness globalization, which is also emblematic since chopsticks symbolize social communication: sharing instead of dividing, and transferring instead of breaking.
DR: This cultural meaning of chopsticks is very thought-provoking. The Latin motto divide et imperia echoes our experience of dining. In East Asia, in turn, the concept of harmony (he) comes from blending various ingredients together.
QEW: To my pleasant surprise, the Chopsticks book was very successful. For many readers, I might be actually more famous as a culinary historian than as a theorist of history. Now I am almost finishing a similar project—namely, a global history of the sweet potato. The reason, again, is somewhat motivated by the fact that, while the white potato or the Irish potato had been a significant part of food history, the sweet potato, which was an Asian crop but became an African crop, was omitted. This will be my case study of genuinely global history. I think that the experience of writing actual history helps me rethink my theoretical assumptions, while the latter shaped my project in terms of its target, its framework, and its place in the existing scholarship—and not just in food history but also in contemporary history in general.
Notes
[1] On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020).
[2] The May Fourth Movement was a cultural and political modernization movement that originated from student protests in Beijing on 4 May 1919. The demonstrations originally had a nationalist and anti-imperialist character.
[3] Liang Qichao (1873–1929) was a Chinese philosopher, politician, and journalist who is widely acknowledged as the father of Chinese journalism and the chief figure behind the modernization of Chinese culture, historiography included. His “New Historiography” (Xin shixue) of 1902 advocated scientific methods of investigating “facts” from the past.
[4] Sima Qian (145–86 BC) was a Chinese historian and author of the Records of Grand Historian (Shiji), a foundational text of imperial Chinese historiography, for it is a general history covering a 2,500-year period.
[5] Sima Guang (1019–1086) was a Chinese historian and politician and the author of the monumental Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance (Zizhi tongjian), a chronicle spanning 1,400 years of Chinese history from 403 BC to 959 AD.
[6] Evidential learning (kaozheng) was a school of textual and historical criticism in late Ming and early Qing China represented by, for example, Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, and Cui Shu.
[7] G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1913).
[8] Daniel R. Woolf, ed., A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1998).
[9] The Gongyang school was a group of thinkers supporting the Gongyang Commentary (Gongyang zhuan) to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) attributed to Confucius, who proposed a speculative, tripartite scheme of historical development and believed in the coming of a future sage-king.
[10] Q. Edward Wang, Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
