China and the World – the World and China

Edited by Barbara Mittler, Joachim & Natascha Gentz and Catherine Vance Yeh

A wide range of topics is covered in this collection of four volumes of essays in honor of Rudolf G. Wagner. The expansive time frame from pre-modern to contemporary China in China and the World – the World and China reflect the breadth of his own scholarship. The essays are also testimony to his ability to connect with scholars across the globe, across disciplines and generations.

The first volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Pre-modern China) brings together a set of contributions relating to the pre-modern period which reveals thematic clusters that correspond to the three main periods of Chinese pre-modern history. While the first six contributions on the early China period focus on conceptual questions of text interpretation and reconstruction, the following five on medieval China all deal with religious topics whereas the last four contributions, covering the late imperial period, address issues of the entangled relationship between the self and the exterior.

The contributions in the second volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Late Imperial China) are linked by a common interest in questions of transculturality, hybridity, contact zones and third spaces. These are concepts and ideas quite central to Rudolf G. Wagner’s scholarly oeuvre. Each of the contributions addresses these notions in their own particular manner, sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly. But there is more: the authors in this volume also share an interest in the hidden, the unsaid, the unknown – forgotten people and objects become main protagonists. In addition, the importance of translation as a cultural practice and new perceptions and understandings of the role of translation in Late Qing cross-and transcultural interactions and the significant impact of particular actor networks involved in these translations emerge as two more common questions addressed throughout this volume.

The studies in the third volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Modern China) span a long twentieth century of cultural production in China. All of them, each in a different manner, deal with one crucially important set of questions, one that has been very much at the heart of Rudolf G. Wagner’s work: questions of readership and reception, and, related to this, of persuasion, legitimation and trust: how does one successfully draw an audience in China; how does one convince; what is an effective rhetorics or argumentation?

The fourth and last volume (Transcultural Perspectives on Global China) is testimony to the imprint Rudolf G. Wagner has made beyond many borders, with contributions from Indology to Egyptology and Theology, from world history, to world literature, to Esperanto as a world language, and talking about travelling concepts and objects such as tea, comics, and knowledge. This volume also contains a number of reminiscences about Rudolf G. Wagner, the border-crosser: his radical bonmots, his role as great master-teacher for people from many different walks of life, in short, his expansiveness, … and more.