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Book Review
| English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. By JAMES L. HEVIA. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003; and Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univer sity Press, 2003. 392 pp. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).
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There is hardly a more appropriate time than now to read James Hevia's inspiring new book, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. As if he were speaking to current events, Hevia reminds us that the pedagogy of imperialism is a Janus-faced operation in which "the violence of arms" and "the violence of language" are used simultaneously for punitive and constructive purposes. In other words, whether it is the carrot or the stick, the so-called "civilizational mission" of imperialism entails physical and symbolic violence that not only disrupts but also reconfigures the colonized sociopolitical order. In the case of China, as Hevia painstakingly illustrates, the Euro-American intrusion in the nineteenth century had indisputably altered the fortune and direction of modern Chinese history. Thus, even though China was not officially colonized by the West, we need to understand its modern era in the global context of colonialism. |
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In many ways, English Lessons is an outgrowth of Hevia's previous award-winning book, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). In that innovative study, Hevia refutes the conventional understanding of the Sino-British encounter in the late eighteenth century in terms of an aggressive West advocating free trade versus an isolated and immobile China. Instead, he equates the cultural arrogance of the British Empire to the sinocentric worldview of the Qing Empire and suggests that both the British and Chinese Empires were equally obsessed with power and prestige. In so doing, he relativizes the exceptionalist claims of these two self-absorbed imperial powers. |
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