Tokens of exchange

The problem of translation has become increasingly central to critical reflections on modernity and its universalizing processes. Approaching translation as a symbolic and material exchange among peoples and civilizations and not as a purely linguistic or literary matter, the essays in Tokens of Exchange focus on China and its interactions with the West to historicize an economy of translation. Rejecting the familiar regional approach to non-Western societies, the contributors to this volume contend that "national histories" and "world history" must be read with absolute attention to the types of epistemological translatability that have been constructed among various modern languages and cultures. By studying the production and circulation of meaning as value in areas including history, religion, language, law, visual art, music, and pedagogy, the essays consider exchanges between Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and the Chinese between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and focus on the interchanges occasioned by the spread of capitalism and imperialism. Concentrating on ideological reciprocity and nonreciprocity in science, medicine, and cultural pathologies, the contributors also posit that such exchanges often lead to racialized and essentialized ideas about culture, sexuality, and nation. The collection then turns to the role of language itself as a site of the universalization of knowledge in the contemplation of such processes as the invention of Basic English and the global teaching of the English language. By focusing on the moments wherein meaning-value is exchanged in the translation from one language to another, the essays highlight the circulation of the global in the local as they address the role played by historical translation in the universalizing processes of modernity and globalization.