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China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC, by Daniel F. Vukovich. New York: Routledge, 2012. 190 pp. US$44.95 (Paper). ISBN 9780415835381.
Pity Daniel Vukovich for the task he has given himself in this collection of essays. Reading his critique of Western writing and knowledge on China, and his attempt to rehabilitate the Maoist era, one cannot but think of the professor of Hitler studies in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise whose mission is to make his object of study as popular as Elvis. An assistant professor in comparative literature at Hong Kong University, Vukovich, however, has a strong point in arguing that the discourse on the non-West is ruled by a desire to make the world the same, to turn it into a mirror image of a liberal and capitalist United States.
China and Orientalism consists of a collection of texts on seemingly disparate topics. One of the chapters deals with Mao's great famine, another deals with Western studies of Chinese film, a third digs deep into the novel Mao II, and still another dissects our understanding of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. This diverse collection is held together by a postcolonial critique of "Sinology"-in Vukovich's terminology, all Western knowledge production on China. Referring back to Edward Said, Vukovich argues that this "Sinology" rests on both Cold War thinking and earlier European Orientalism; Western knowledge and writing on China are thus "part of a neo-colonial or imperialist...