scholarly journals The late ascent of Darwin's Descent: exploring human evolution and women's role for a new China, 1927–1965

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Lijing Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Comprehensive Examination ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract Darwin's ideas held sway among Chinese intellectuals by the early twentieth century. Yet the usual emphasis was a Spencerism instead of Darwin's original ideas. As a result, translations of The Descent of Man in the early twentieth century quickly fell into oblivion. When the embryologist Zhu Xi (1900–62) eventually decided to give all evolutionary theories a comprehensive examination, he nevertheless found the idea of sexual evolution inadequate, as expressed in his volume Biological Evolution (1958). Only in the 1950s did serious efforts to translate Descent gather momentum, thanks to eugenicist and sociologist Pan Guangdan (1899–1967). Such efforts were not only responses to a renewed interest in Darwinism under the socialist regime, but also expressions that synthesized both scholars’ earlier paths in wrestling with schemes of human evolution and the roles of women in China's survival and renewal. Trained in different scientific and cultural milieus and holding almost oppositional views, the two scholars nevertheless converged in finding new meanings in Darwin's Descent.

Swan Song, or a Phoenix Rising

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 147-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
YI Ping
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Global Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Warring States ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
Basic Ideas

It is well-known that the basic ideas and principles of modern international law originated in Europe. In a period during the early twentieth century, however, a number of Chinese intellectuals examined and demonstrated that international law had already existed during the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Periods in China. They committed themselves to exploring and carrying forward ancient Chinese international law as a way to maintain China’s rich cultural tradition in a global order governed by the West. This may be a swan song of the Chinese intellectuals who rose up against the oppression of imperialist powers and sought a more balanced order in the then-contemporary world. Were their efforts to be revived in another way, however, the swan song could be akin to a phoenix rising, initiating a time of renewal, bringing such ideas back into consideration.

The Chinese Renaissance: A Transcultural Reading

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 783-795 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gang Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Hu Shi ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
European Renaissance

This paper examines the ways in which the idea of renaissance was understood and appropriated by Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century. My discussion foregrounds Hu Shi, one of the most important intellectual leaders in modern China and the main architect of the Chinese vernacular movement. I analyze his rewriting and reinvention of the European Renaissance as well as his declaration and presentation of the Chinese Renaissance in various contexts. Hu's creative uses of the Italian Renaissance and passionate claims for a Chinese Renaissance reveal the performative magic of the word renaissance and prompt us to ask what a renaissance is. The Chinese Renaissance and the fact that various non-European countries have declared and promoted their own renaissances invite a scholarly reconsideration of “renaissance” as a trans-cultural phenomenon rather than as a critical category originated and therefore owned by a certain culture.

scholarly journals When natives became Africans: A historical sociolinguistic study of semantic change in colonial discourse

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Susan Fitzmaurice
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial

AbstractThe word native is a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain’s southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history of native as a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case of native, a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.

scholarly journals At the Borders of Non-Work: Poor Female Workers and Definitions of Vagrancy in Early Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

2015 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-224
Author(s):  
Lerice de Castro Garzoni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
Female Workers ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
The Press ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article discusses how residents of early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, defined vagrancy. Commentators on the 1890 Penal Code sought to explain the terms of the article related to vagrancy, article number 399, and its application. Evaristo de Moraes, a lawyer, essayist, and public intellectual at that time, similarly dedicated several works to this topic, as did journalists and literary writers who worked in the press. But these debates in the lettered realm were not isolated from the views and actions of average citizens, a phenomenon that one can observe by reading the criminal proceedings against women who were arrested for repeat offenses against anti-vagrancy laws. In the interventions and arguments of the accused and their defenders, it is possible to observe how vagrancy took on new meanings and how, over the course of time, the relationship between these women and the world of work evolved.

Frugal Modernity: Livelihood and Consumption in Republican China

2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margherita Zanasi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Republican China ◽  
Developmental Needs ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
Chinese Intellectuals ◽  
Economic Modernization ◽  
China’S Economy ◽  
Life Movement

This article examines the development of the Chinese discourse on consumption and standards of living from the early twentieth century to the implementation of the New Life Movement in the mid-1930s. During this period, the idea that China's economy was characterized by scarcity rather than growth—and thus was experiencing a different level of development from the industrialized West—caused Chinese intellectuals and officials to question the wisdom of adopting Western-style consumerist habits and “extravagant” standard of living. In this context, they struggled to find a balance between a supposedly universal model of economic modernization and China's particular nation-building and developmental needs. This early twentieth-century debate illustrates how nationalist and developmental perspectives hindered the adoption of liberal models of consumerist economy, marking the beginning of China's uneasy relationship with a free-market economy as well as a growing tension between urban consumerist trends and central planning. It also helped bring about new forms of frugal modernity that were to culminate in the New Life Movement.

Periodical Readership in Early Twentieth Century Bengal: Ramananda Chattopadhyay's Prabāsī

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 204-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAMARPITA MITRA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Sensitivity ◽  
Visual Space ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Leisure Reading ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
New Meanings ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
Literary Journal

AbstractThis paper investigates some key questions regarding the socio-cultural implications of a relatively understudied print media, the literary miscellany, its production and consumption in early twentieth century British Bengal. Through a study of Ramananda Chattopadhyay'sPrabāsī, a major literary journal that set the trend ofsacitra māsik patrikāor illustrated monthly magazine in Bāṅglā, its literary innovations and editorial interventions, this paper explores how periodical reading and the notions of aesthetics and culture that it cultivated became intimately tied up with questions of middle class identity and class differentiation. It shows how this pioneeringsacitra patrikācame to command a literary and visual space that, by the time of the Swadeshi years, was conceived as co-extensive with the future sovereign nation. Problematizing notions of a quotidian practice like leisure-reading that had become integral to the lifestyles of an expanding middle class, this study shows howPrabāsīnot only lent new meanings to ideas of sustained interest and participation in public life amongst its readers, but that it also represented a self-consciously, high-brow cultural sensitivity that the Bengali bhadralok were to claim and safeguard as their own.

Some Polish Composers of To-Day

Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fertile Soil ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Progressive Group ◽  
Karol Szymanowski

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.

V1214: Edward Loughborough Keyes: An Early Twentieth Century Leader In Urology

2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 320-320
Author(s):  
Peter J. Stahl ◽  
E. Darracott Vaughan ◽  
Edward S. Belt ◽  
David A. Bloom ◽  
Ann Arbor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century
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