The Global and Regional in China's Nation-Formation by Prasenjit Duara

Author:Prasenjit Duara [Duara, Prasenjit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Political Ideologies, Social Science, Political Science, Nationalism & Patriotism, Asia, History, Sociology, Geopolitics, China, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781134015306
Google: Z1N5AgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17474348
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Modern patriarchy

Women have been represented as the embodiment of the essential truth of a nation or civilization, not only in China and Japan, but in many parts of the modern world. Recent studies of gender histories in the West (and especially in Latin America) have shown how women and their bodies, systematically excluded from the public sphere during much of the modern period, have served as a crucial medium for the inscription and naturalization of power: ‘Explored, mapped, conquered, and raped, the female body and its metaphorical extension, the home, become the symbols of honor, loyalty, and purity, to be guarded by men.’9 Partha Chatterjee has drawn our attention to how modern nationalists in late-nineteenth-century India appropriated the middle-class production of a sphere that he calls the inner domain of sovereignty of nationalist ideology. Like Chinese nationalism, Indian nationalism was built on a duality of the material versus the spiritual and cultural. Thus, while the Indian nation had much to learn from the material and scientific civilization of the West, in spiritual matters India had the upper hand and a contribution to make to world civilization.10

Chatterjee’s particular contribution is to show how this dualism was organized so as to create an inner realm of national life that could not be contested by the colonial power. Nineteenth-century Bengali middle-class intellectuals had reworked certain historical texts to define the ‘ideal woman’ and distinguish her from depictions of the ‘traditional’ (that is, recent historical, rather than quintessential) Bengali woman, from depictions of contemporary lower-class women, and from the figure of the Western, materialist and masculinized woman. Modern Indian nationalism found this trope of the enlightened but quintessentially ‘traditional’ woman highly congenial, and appropriated it as the core of the essential nation. Tradition thus came to mark a realm of inner sovereignty that was simultaneously demarcated as domestic, spiritual and feminine. The Hindu nationalist representation of woman—educated and educating, but personifying the spiritual virtues of domesticity—gave body to this national essence. While on the one hand this lofty idealization of the Hindu woman provided new aspirations for some women, we can assume that it was patriarchal because it was an image shaped by men for women to follow.11

In East Asia, this representation of woman was less directly connected to colonialism, but it was decidedly a response on the part of a patriarchal elite to manage the shift to a more Westernized society and changing relations between the genders, and between the domestic and public spheres. In China, we can understand this phenomenon precisely as the nexus between a global process and historical institutions of gender relations. Most of the early nationalists and reformers emerged from the habitus of the gentry and inherited the patriarchal traditions of this society and its ideals of womanly virtue. The rhetoric of female virtue and sacrifice, exemplified most particularly in the cult of chaste widows and virtuous wives, was pervasive in late imperial China.12 During the early twentieth century, when the increasing integration of China into global capitalism produced

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