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This essay is a critical reaction to the movement for the revival and constitution of guoxue (national learning), not just as a system of indigenous knowledge and scholarship, but also as an embodiment of Chinese national culture. Situating the conceptualisation of guoxue in the context of the May Fourth new cultural movement, the essay attempts to show: a) that guoxue is a category devoid of substance, not least because its classificatory scope cannot be adequately defined, b) that guoxue was invented in the early twentieth century in response to the pressures created by the influx of Western learning that had begun to unsettle and displace forms of classical learning, and c) that the idea of guoxue is rooted in the conviction of the singularity of national culture. Historically, guoxue has opposed such national projects as national language and national literature. Revisiting a selection of representative views of progressive May Fourth and communist intellectuals on the need to develop and construct a new national language and literature for China's modernisation, the essay argues for the need to develop a historical understanding of the process in which classical learning has been displaced and to recognise the importance of this process for the development of China's intellectual modernity. (China Perspect/GIGA)

Scandalous Bodies is an impassioned scholarly study both of literature by diasporic writers and of the contexts within which it is produced. It explores topics ranging from the Canadian government's multiculturalism policy to media representations of so-called minority groups, from the relationship between realist fiction and history to postmodern constructions of ethnicity, from the multicultural theory of the philosopher Charles Taylor to the cultural responsibilities of diasporic critics such as Kamboureli herself. Smaro Kamboureli proposes no neat or comforting solutions to the problems.

"This original and scholarly work uses three detailed case studies of plays Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear and Cymbeline to cast light on the ways in which early modern writers used metaphor to explore how identities emerge from the interaction of competing regional and spiritual topographies"--

This article examines the role of gender in depictions of national identity in early modern English travel literature. I show that human sexual relationships were believed to be echoed in relations between territories, which were often represented as masculine or feminine. Travellers used metaphors representing marriage, seduction and rape to describe geopolitical relationships, including colonialism, tribute payments and rebellion. Representations of Ireland and the Irish, and the Ottoman Empire and the Turks are among the most revealing. I argue that such metaphors were especially favoured by travel writers because gender was believed to be inherently mutable, thus providing a variety of easily understood and mutually accepted narratives to describe international political relationships.