Debating China in Translation: Reading Between the Lines

The talk will discuss my experience translating China From Empire to Nation-State by Wang Hui (Harvard University Press, 2014) and What is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History by Ge Zhaoguang (Belknap/Harvard, 2018), and editing The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Harvard, 2023) by Wang Hui. I will also take some time to address responses to these works (e.g. reviews, etc.) and how they reflect prominent concerns in the Chinese studies field in the English-speaking world as well as long-standing debates about the relation between the academic humanities and practical politics.

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Michael Gibbs Hill is the Vera Barkley Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures at William & Mary. He is the author of Lin Shu, Inc: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford, 2013). His current projects include a study of intersections between Chinese and Arabic literatures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a sourcebook of historical materials (co-edited with Kristian Petersen) on Muslims in modern China. In spring 2024, he was a Fulbright scholar at the American University in Cairo.