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Coming to Terms with the Nation
Studies China's "Ethnic classification project" (minzu shibie) of 1954, conducted in Yunnan province.
The Chinese Computer
The fascinating, untold story of how the Chinese language overcame unparalleled challenges and revolutionized the world of computing. A standard QWERTY keyboard has a few dozen keys. How can Chinese—a language with tens of thousands of characters and no alphabet—be input on such a device? In The Chinese Computer, Thomas S. Mullaney sets out to resolve this paradox, and in doing so, discovers that the key to this seemingly impossible riddle has given rise to a new epoch in the history of writing—a form of writing he calls “hypography.” Based on fifteen years of research, this pathbreaking history of the Chinese language charts the beginnings of electronic Chinese technology in the w...
The Chinese Typewriter
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today.
The Chinese Typewriter
How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today. Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and...
Artificial Intelligence and the Apocalyptic Imagination
The increasing role and power of artificial intelligence in our lives and world requires us to imagine and shape a desirable future with this technology. Since visions of AI often draw from Christian apocalyptic narratives, current discussions about technological hopes and fears present an opportunity for a deeper engagement with Christian eschatological resources. This book argues that the Christian apocalyptic imagination can transform how we think about and use AI, helping us discover ways artificial agency may participate in new creation.
A Will for the Machine
This study takes up the relations among computerization, labor, and the arts in South Africa. There are many books about the history and discourses of computerization in the United States but relatively little about these phenomena anywhere in the Global South. In A Will for the Machine, Mark Sanders outlines South Africa’s entry into the computer age in the 1960s and ’70s and explains how it coincided with the high point of apartheid. South Africa’s government viewed automation and computerization as one way of barring Black Africans from skilled work and reserving it for whites. Sanders unpacks this peculiar history, relates it to early twentieth-century struggles around mechanization in mining and telephony in South Africa, and analyzes responses to it by the writers Miriam Tlali and J. M. Coetzee, the artist William Kentridge, and Handspring Puppet Company. Showing how the arts realize ideas about the ethics and politics of automation, Sanders contributes to debates about locally divergent understandings of computer technology and human-computer interaction.
Intentional Invisibilization in Modern Asian History: Concealing and Self-Concealed Agents
Scholars from the humanities and social sciences have repeatedly faced the challenge of writing history beyond the constraints and frameworks set by grand narratives and established historiographies. This book addresses the intentional invisibilization and concealment of people, knowledge, and ideas in historiography – both by historians and by the historical actors themselves – as an object of study. It does so through the lens of Asian bondage and dependency in modern and contemporary history. This collective work focuses on ‘concealment’, ‘self-concealment’ and ‘invisibility’ to analyze the asymmetrical agency involved in the act of hiding someone or something from being ...
From the Mists of Martyrdom
This book is the result of nearly three years of fieldwork among the Sibe, an ethnic minority long caught up in processes of Chinese imperial expansion and nation building. Split into two groups since the eighteenth century, 5000 kilometres separate Sibe in their Manchurian homeland from their co-ethnics in Xinjiang, northwest China. After 200 years, contacts were re-established in the 1950s. In this study, the author focuses on the (re)construction of ethnic awareness by ``local'' and ``official'' Sibe historians. Analysing how the cornerstone of Sibe history~-- the Great Western Resettlement~-- was turned into a myth, she demonstrates that writing their own history allowed the Sibe to reinterpret their shared past and identity. Combining analysis of primary sources and text-based data with ethnographic observations, this monograph offers a window on previously unknown dimensions of Chinese nation-building and makes an original contribution to historical anthropology.
The Han
Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295805979 This ethnography explores contemporary narratives of “Han-ness,” revealing the nuances of what Han identity means today in relation to that of the fifty-five officially recognized minority ethnic groups in China, as well as in relation to home place identities and the country’s national identity. Based on research she conducted among native and migrant Han in Shanghai and Beijing, Aqsu (in Xinjiang), and the Sichuan-Yunnan border area, Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi uncovers and discusses these identity topographies. Bringing into focus the Han majority, which has long acted as an unexamined backdrop to ethnic minorities, Joniak-Luthi contributes to the emerging field of critical Han studies as she considers how the Han describe themselves - particularly what unites and divides them - as well as the functions of Han identity and the processes through which it is maintained and reproduced. The Han will appeal to scholars and students of contemporary China, anthropology, and ethnic and cultural studies.
Nation and Ethnicity
Winner of the Foundation Council Award of the Georg-August-University of Göttingen Public Law Foundation in the category of “Outstanding Publications of Young Scientists”, 2017. In Nation and Ethnicity: Chinese Discourses on History, Historiography, and Nationalism (1900s-1920s) Julia C. Schneider give an analysis of nationalist and historiographical discourses among late imperial and early republican Chinese thinkers. In particular, she researches their approaches towards non-Chinese people within the Qing Empire and the question on how to integrate them into a Chinese nation-state. Non-Chinese people, mainly Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and Turkic Muslims, (Uyghurs), have not been considered as important factors in the history of early Chinese nationalism so far. But Chinese nationalist and historiographical discourses tell not only a lot about the Chinese image of the Other, but also shed new light on the images of the Chinese Self and its assumed ability to assimilate and integrate other ethnicities.
