The Imperial Self and the Barbarian Other

Mair points out that in the “concatenation of writing, authority, and empire” the Persian and Chinese realms were “uncannily similar.”^[782] As noted earlier, the doctrine of wen signified the imbrication of culture, civilization, and literature for the Chinese imperial elite.

Not surprisingly, then, literary and symbolic practices in China were intertwined with the imperial politics of difference and strategies of incorporation and exclusion. The transformation of Taiwan from a savage island beyond the seas into an integral part of the Chinese Empire with its annexation in 1684 is an instructive case of how the politics of difference was articulated in a range of literary and other texts. Chinese travel writing on Taiwan as a frontier region utilized a range of human differences (physical, cultural, intellectual, and moral) while locating such differences in terms of degrees along a spectrum of human universals.^[783] The category of gender was used in order to signify relations of power, with deviations from patriarchal norms deemed to be signs of barbarism: the “savage” woman's body was contrasted to the “proper” Chinese female's body, and indigenous men were feminized to express the subordinate status of the colonized subject. These gendered representations were imbricated with anxieties about the improper crossing of the ethnic divide by Han Chinese men and the dangers of “going native,” as a result of which intermarriage between Han Chinese and indigenes was prohibited.^[784] Notions of physical, cultural, and moral differences intersected in visual representations of Taiwan as a frontier region.^[785]

Literature and practices of writing also played a key role in reconfiguring the boundaries of civilization when China confronted the changing place of Japan in the global geopolitics of the late nineteenth century.

Until then Japan was viewed as a minor island kingdom at the eastern edge of Chinese civilization, but in the changing world of the 1870s and 1880s defining the borders between what was Chinese and Japanese became an urgent question about the validity of the Chinese worldview and its notion of civilization.^[786] The new world order meant that the choice was between continuing to view Japan as part of the Chinese civilizational and linguistic zone, or as now alien and closer to the West.^[787] Since writing was seen as integral to civilization, this bookish conception of civilization and its textual model structured the worldview of the majority of Chinese scholars who traveled to and wrote about Japan in the late nineteenth century, grounding their belief that China and Japan shared the same cultural identity as tong wen or shared writing, which included practices like “brush talking.” Tong wen also referred to the standardization and unification of the writing system in the third century bce, brought about by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China; it therefore evoked the authoritative regularizing of language and the unifying of Chinese civilization around a common set of written texts and shared patterns of communication central to the imbrication of writing, authority, and empire.^[788] As Mair has noted, a key factor in the perpetuation of the “stunningly complex and politically pervasive bureaucratic structure” of pre-modern China was proficiency in this writing system.^[789] Howland discusses the “brush talks” of the 1870s and 1880s, showing how they reflected the cultural priorities of a Chinese imperial elite, with the participation of Japanese scholars in the ritualized play of civilized sociability and occasional poetry reinforcing this sense of a shared civilization.^[790] But the new “Western” elements in Japan during the 1870s and 1880 also destabilized this framework.^[791] One approach to this new state of affairs was Huang Zunxians Poems on Divers Japanese Affairs (1880) which assumed that ancient Chinese ways and texts were the origins of observed Japanese practices; this was expanded to argue that Western learning itself originated in China.^[792] At the same time, Huang Zunxian introduced a new set of terms giving Chinese readers the vocabulary for describing this new world and cultural order.^[793] Ultimately, though, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 showed that as a world order Chinese civilization was under threat, and it could only be restored through redefinition.^[794]

However, the dramatization of the politics of difference in imperial literatures often revealed the boundaries between the civilized self and the barbaric other to be fragile and porous.

Ancient Greek literature employed a complex set of signifiers evoking the “otherness” of the barbarian in ethnic, psychological, and political terms. Many tragedies from the Athenian theater of the fifth century bce portrayed barbarian characters and refer to barbarian customs.^[795] This polarization can be partly explained by the military conflict with Persia in the early fifth century bce, with the image of an external enemy helping to forge a sense of community among allied states, while reinforcing a Greek self-perception of democracy and egalitarianism in contrast to Persian and “Oriental” despotism and hierarchy. Details about the Persian administration and the representation of its excessive protocol created an antithesis between Greeks and non-Greeks predicated on a political psychology in which a despotic Persian administration is the opposite of the Athenian democratic system and the accountability of Athenian magistrates.^[796]

However, in ancient Greek literature the barbarian world was not just the home of tyrants and savages; it was also the place where those who retained an intimacy with mystical knowledge that civilized Greeks had lost enjoyed harmonious relations with the heavens. Several barbarian characters in Greek tragedy have Hellenic virtues equaling or surpassing their Greek counterparts, and the tension between the deviant acts of ancient heroes in Greek myths and the practices of contemporary barbarians undercut the opposition between Greeks and barbarians in some texts.^[797]

The porosity of the civilized-barbarian distinction also reflects the practices of the politics of difference on the edges of empires, and the complex relationships between primary empires and the “shadow empires” which were structurally linked to them.^[798] The interaction between the Xiongnu Empire's confederation of nomadic clans (second century BCE - first century CE) and the Chinese empire shaped China's statecraft and ideology. The empires on the Eurasian steppes came into existence with the unification of China and disappeared when it collapsed, and the contact zones between the two were characterized by coercion and conflict as well as negotiation and accommodation.^[799] Teng has discussed the redrawing of the “savage boundary” within Taiwan in terms of frontier management on a par with the Great Wall and other Qing projects that worked with the civilized-barbarian distinction.

Maps reinforced the distinction between imperial civilization and the realm beyond the pale, but in practice the distinction was more of a continuum than a clear line.^[800] Frontier regions like Taiwan were not always characterized by a binary opposition between colonizer and colonized: they were home to a multilevel hierarchy of colonial officials, both Manchu and Han, along with Han Chinese settlers and a variety of indigenous peoples.^[801] The shift from conceptualizing Taiwan as a wilderness to a “hedgerow” captures the ambiguous nature of the boundaries between imperial civilizations and barbarism. Taiwan occupied a liminal position neither fully inside nor fully outside the Chinese domain; “rather, it was itself the boundary between the inner and the outer.”^[802] Moreover, while Chinese frontier literature was often preoccupied with “savages,” it also reflected on Chinese culture itself and this sometimes led to a questioning of the latter's universality.^[803] These tensions between difference and sameness, distance and union, and the exotic and the familiar, were evident in Taiwan's move from savage island to Chinese province in Qing literature and maps.^[804]

Post-imperial literary texts have dramatized the psychic and emotive investment in the figure of the “barbarian” as a precarious process of self-definition. In her study of the collision between Chinese and British notions of civilization and barbarism in the nineteenth century, and the British efforts to ban the Chinese character they took to represent “barbarian” from the Anglo- Chinese Treaty of1858, Lydia Liu argues that the sovereign and imperial British subject tried to root out the ghost of the barbarian from itself so that it could become whole, positive, and real.^[805] J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) explores the porosity of these boundaries, and the psychic and symbolic investments imperial subjects make in the figure of the barbarian.

Set in the frontier town of a crumbling empire, its first-person narrator, an aging magistrate with a libertine past who struggles with his sexual desires for a tortured and semi-blinded “barbarian” girl, is increasingly drawn to the barbarians the “empire” sets itself up against. The novel chronicles the reversals between the terms “civilization” and “barbarianism” in an atmosphere of extreme imperial violence and torture, and plots the magistrate’s slide into “treachery” as he confronts the extra-legal military powers that aim to shore up the empire’s frontiers. The “barbarians” are a spectral presence in the book, embedded in the paranoid logic of an empire that keeps its civilized population in a constant state of fear. They rarely appear qua barbarians, and when they do, they disaggregate into distinct individuals with specific cultural and linguistic identities, and as a range of different groups from “fisher folk” to “nomads.” In the novel “barbarians” tend to be a continually receding horizon that the “empire” can never reach. Far from the sovereign subject becoming whole by rooting out the ghost of the barbarian, here that ghost is embraced and the magistrate is left feeling “like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.”^[806] He is confronted with the disintegration of the epic shape of imperial world history that Quint argues was inaugurated by Virgil’s Aeneid:

What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged end of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies.

It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.^[807]

Romance narrative, with its random or circular wandering and stress on contingency and change, was the “other” of the teleological plot of this epic linear narrative.^[808] In Coetzee’s novel, the disintegration of the epic shape of world history and the protagonist’s consequent sense of aimlessness marks the return of romance. It is also a sign of the magistrate’s dissenting voice within the empire; as Quint puts it, “in opposition to a linear teleology that disguises power as reason and universalizes imperial conquest as the imposition of unity upon the flow of history, the dissenting narrative becomes deliberately disconnected and aimless.”^[809] This experience of disconnection and aimlessness marks the end of Waiting for the Barbarians. Romance as a genre of writing also evokes appetites or desires as part of being human, in opposition to imperial narratives of reason that want to “straighten out” human experience.^[810] Throughout the novel, the magistrate struggles with the ebb and flow of his own sexuality, in contrast to the military officer stationed at the frontier to bring order to chaos, who is “the kind of man who drives his body like a machine... ignorant that it has its own rhythms.”^[811]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

The Imperial Self and the Barbarian Other

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