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BOOK REVIEWSCHINA 805
coherent tone of humor, wit, and lightheartedness and drawing out their possible implications for the individuality of Mid-Northern Song literati culture, this study indeed can stimulate discussion and view the poetry [of Mid-Northern Song] from a fresh perspective (p. 8). Perhaps there is no need for the books subtitle; had the author given more analysis to the social space in which Ouyang Xius and Mei Yaochens poetry circulated and its representation of Mid-Northern Song literati culture, this study could have better underscored the multiple perspectives outlined in Meaning beyond Words.
MEOW HUI GOH
Ohio State University
English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. By JAMES L. HEVIA. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. xviii, 387 pp. $84.95 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).
James Hevia attempts to reinterpret three familiar episodes in modern Chinese history: the Arrow War (185660), the Self-Strengthening Movement (186194), and the Boxer Uprising (18991901). The intellectual framework is that advocated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), namely, imperialism deterritorialized and reterritorialized the victim to extract benets therefrom. Hevia has succeeded wonderfully, making nonsense of the preachings of such imperial historians as David Fieldhouse, who insists that British imperialism was not prot-seeking (The Colonial Empires, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965). Such historians select sentences from the speeches of British politicians to prove their points. Hevias photographs and analysis of looted treasures, auction catalogs, and mass executions of suspected Boxers have already extracted such words as violent (Robert Bickers, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History) and savage (Ruth Rogaski, American Historical Review) from reviewers before me.
First, the Arrow War. Nourished by the works by J. Y. Wong (Yeh Ming-chen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976; and Deadly Dreams, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Hevia takes Wongs arguments further by suggesting that the opening of the interior of China as a result the countrys defeat enabled ruthless Anglo-American prot seekers, whose activities had hitherto been restricted to the ve coastal ports, to deterritorialize the interior of China with the now legalized opium. The British might not have intended the drug to work such wonders. Nonetheless, China was deterritorialized. The intended part involved the use of Yehs archive, captured at Canton in January 1858,...