Organizer: Shawn McHale, Case Western Reserve University
In the last twenty years, the history of the book and of publishing has moved from an often antiquarian pursuit to one that addresses questions of power, economy, discourse, and readership. Quite independently, scholars like Benedict Anderson are reasserting the centrality of print and other media to the rise of nationalism. This panel, taking these twin developments as a starting point, attempts a comparative presentation of issues in the print cultures of China, Japan, and Vietnam, 1871-1940. How did changing perceptions of publisher and reader redefine the role of print in shaping identity? To what degree can we generalize about "print capitalism" in these countries? Finally, how do these studies help us revise previous assessments of print culture in modern historical development?
Scholars of modern Asian history usually assume that the production and circulation of printed materials played a key role in economic and national development. The models supporting this view, however, are derived from studies of Western Europe. Much research on Asian publishing is still lacking. The three papers on this panel address this problem.
Giles Richter investigates how the circulation of unprecedented quantities of published material through the modern Japanese postal system engendered new forms of community. He looks at the emergence of subscription publishing in Meiji Japan, 1871-1900, and shows how it supported the identification of "consumer-readers" and the formation of readers networks in the Meiji era.
Christopher Reed focuses on the production of printed material through the study of the Shanghai entrepreneur Shen Zhifang (1882-1939). Showing that we must not confuse entrepreneurial skill with capitalist acumen, he shows how Shen owed his success more to personal connections and opportunism than to capitalist logic.
Shawn McHale explores the contrasting relationship between publishers, printed matter, and readers in Vietnamese Buddhist and communist publishing, 1920-1945. He shows how both Buddhist and communist publishers tried, with vastly different results, to shape reader response to texts. The examination of the different publisher-printed matter-reader relationships, ones that owed little to market forces, calls into question the explanatory usefulness of Benedict Anderson's notion of "print capitalism" and its link to national imaginings of community.
Subscribing to a Community: Postal Distribution and the Formation of Readers'
Networks in Japan, 1871-1900
Giles Richter, Columbia University
Much has been written about the instrumental role of print capitalism in the formation of modern Japanese national identity. Few, however, have attempted to explain precisely how the process occurred. How did printed texts reach individual readers-particularly rural ones-and forge them into an "imagined community"? When can one speak of a reader identity responsive to a print culture circulating on a truly national scale?
This paper examines these questions by focusing on the emergence of postal distribution and subscription publishing in Meiji Japan, 1871-1900. It argues three points: first, that the infrastructure of the modern Japanese post office, not printing or a capitalist printing trade, provided a critical means for constructing a modern Japanese identity. The development of postal distribution for publications and mail-order catalogues in the 1870s and 1880s enabled the regular circulation of large volumes of print through the most extensive communications network in Japanese history.
Second, the primary identity which this process created was not that of the citizen (kokumin), but of the "consumer-reader" (kodokusha) or subscriber, who had an ever-growing selection of publications to choose from. Analysis of publishing advertisements and of letters to the editors shows how publishers identified new consumer-readers and competed for their business, and how readers identified themselves as consumers and articulated their needs, desires, or rights.
Finally, postal subscription publishing led to the formation not of one community, but of a variety of "readers' networks" that were increasingly national in scale, but not necessarily nationalist in orientation. For example, "home-town newsletters" (kyodozasshi), which abounded in the 1890s, circulated widely and served to link individuals of common geographic origin who had migrated to the cities. These and other periodicals testify strongly to the consciousness of a common virtual "reading space" that bridged physical separations and forged a new sense of community in Meiji Japan.
Developing an Entrepreneurial Identity: Shen Zhifang (1882-1939) and Chinese
Publishing
Christopher Reed, Reed College
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (London, 1983) is well-known for its examination of nationalism and publishing's role in promoting it. The work is also acknowledged for having included the non-Western world in its provocative observations on "print-capitalism." Despite Anderson's use of the term print capitalism, however, he fails to provide an adequate definition of the term or a sense of its scale. In the case of Republican Interarea, Library, & Teaching, for instance, certainly an era of nationalistic publishing, one is struck by the small scale of this capitalism.
One of the most fascinating publishing entrepreneurs of Republican China was Shen Zhifang (1882-1939), best known as the founder of World Books, the third most prominent of Shanghai's trade book publishers. In my paper, I will examine Shen Zhifang's activities to suggest that the commercial reality of Chinese publishing was far more nuanced than Anderson was aware.
Even in an era when it was common for publishing entrepreneurs to become involved in various enterprises, Shen far surpassed ordinary standards, starting up nearly ten publishing operations between 1901 and 1939. Hobbled, like many of Republican China's printer/publishers, by a lack of capital, Shen combined guanxi, opportunism, and a derring-do, all absent from Anderson's overview of "print capitalism," to publish thousands of titles. Shen's success calls into question Anderson's implied claims regarding the business component of the print capitalism formula.
Constructing Buddhist and Revolutionary Nationalist Print Cultures in Vietnam,
1920-1940
Shawn McHale, Case Western Reserve University
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson posits that the rising importance of vernaculars, the decline of the great religious forms of imagining community, and the expansion of what he calls "print capitalism" sets the stage for the rise of a nationalist imagined community. Does his global argument fit the particular Vietnamese experience? I argue that it does not. Relying on little used Buddhist and communist materials from Vietnamese archives and libraries, I examine the contrasting publisher-reader relationships in Vietnamese Buddhism and communism to develop my point.
There are some superficial similarities between Buddhist and communist print cultures. For both Buddhists and communists, choice of technology influenced reading styles and the spread of a message. Both Buddhist and communist publishers promoted intensive reading of a few key texts, and underlined the importance of following particular methods of reading.
It is no surprise, nonetheless, that Buddhists and communists developed radically different publisher-reader relationships. Buddhist publishers printed tracts with religious subventions and did so for karmic, not capitalist, rewards. Communist ideologue-publishers, who frequently used technologically primitive methods like gelatin printing, spread a revolutionary and anticapitalist message. Both publishers constructed sharply different views of the natures of their readers and their responses to texts.
Both Buddhist and communist publishing made major contributions to Vietnamese senses of community, but ones that owed little to "print capitalism" and that cannot be subsumed under imaginings of a national community.