Changing referents: learning across space and time in China and the West

Even as globalisation has exposed the Eurocentric character of the academic theories used to understand the world, most scholarship continues to rely on the same parochial vocabulary it critiques. Against those who insist our thinking cannot escape the dominant terms of Euro-American modernity, this book shows how methods for understanding cultural others can take theoretical guidance from those very bodies of thought typically excluded by political and social theory.

Toward the Creative Engagement of Chinese Thought -- Westernization as Barbarization : Culturalism, Universalism and Particularism -- Can Cultural Others be Historical Others? L The Curious Thesis of "Chinese origins for Western knowledge" (Xi xue Zhong yuan) -- Why Learning from Others is Political, not (only) Epistemological : Arguments for "Changing Referents" (Bianfa) -- How Meaning Moves : Tan Sitong's Metaphysics of Culture -- Where Knowledge Creates its Own Object : Yan Fu and Liang Qichao on "The Study of Groups" (Qunxue) -- Culture as History : Envisioning Change in the May Fourth Era -- The Culturally Unprecedented : "Old," "New," and the Political Tractability of Background Conditions -- Here and Now : Modern Chinese Thought as a Source of Innovation