Rediscovering China from Today's Perspective The Dialectic of Recognition and the Rediscovery of China: After Orientalism

摘要

The cultural relationship between China and the West, including the hypothesis of a rediscovery, does not fit neatly into the binary pattern implied by the model of Orientalism associated with post-colonial theory. Even in the era of high imperialism, the Sino-Western relationship involved complexities for which the paradigm of colonizer and colonized is too simplistic and therefore requires a theorization of a post-Orientalism. As evidence, the narrative fragment 'The Boxer Rebellion', by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, published posthumously in 1957, explores the psychological dynamic between a European soldier and a Chinese prisoner in order to demonstrate the immanent ambivalence of imperialism and its Orientalist categories.