Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars 2016
Associate Professor
Department: Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University of South Carolina
Sino-Arabic Enlightenments: At the Limits of Comparison
At
the end of the nineteenth century, intellectuals in Beijing, Cairo,
Shanghai, and Beirut grappled with problems that were strikingly
similar: whether the written language could transmit modern knowledge;
the pressure to reconcile classical learning with “modern” (understood
as Western) thought; the role of traditionally educated people in new
institutions; and the extent of the authority granted to those who could
import, or translate, modern knowledge. Pursuing a new line of inquiry
in comparative literary and cultural studies, this project connects the
intellectual “enlightenment” in China in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century with the “enlightenment” or “awakening” (Nahḍah) in
Arabic-language cultural and intellectual history of the mid-nineteenth
through the early twentieth century. Through a historically and
linguistically rigorous account of these developments in the Chinese and
Arabic-language worlds, this research contributes to the fields of
world history, comparative literature, translation studies, Asian
studies, and Middle Eastern studies.
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