This book examines how the early twentieth-century Irish Renaissance (Irish Literary Revival) inspired the Chinese Renaissance (the May Fourth generation) of writers to make agentic choices and translingual exchanges. It sheds a new light on “May Fourth” and on the Irish Renaissance by establishing that the Irish Literary Revival (1900-1922) provided an alternative decolonizing model of resistance for the Chinese Renaissance to that provided by the western imperial center. The book also argues that Chinese May Fourth intellectuals translated Irish Revivalist plays by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O’Casey and Synge and that Chinese peasants performed these plays throughout China during the 1920s and 1930s as a form of anti-imperial resistance. Yet this literary exchange was not simply going one way, since Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge and O’Casey were also influenced by Chinese developments in literature and politics. Therefore this was a reciprocal encounter based on the circulation of Anti-colonial ideals and mutual transformation.
Following his Ibis trilogy on the Canton Trade Amitav Ghosh has written Smoke and Ashes: A Journey Through Hidden Histories (John Murray).
When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels, The Ibis Trilogy, ten years ago, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising at all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.
Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s financial survival. Yet tracing the profits further, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself.
Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant had in the making of our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
The Japanese-born American actor Tetsu Komai (1894-1970) takes a smoke down in Limehouse in the 1933 Sherlock Holmes movie A Study in Scarlet – Komai emigrated to the US in 1907, lived in Seattle, was interned at the Gila River Camp in Arizona in WW2. He appeared in 50 movies….
This week on my resurrected Ultimate China Bookshelf, the beloved modern novel Fortress Besieged《围城》 by Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书 (钱锺书, Ch’ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998). Now exclusively on Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica Substack.
Hollywood costume designer Walter Plunkett’s design for a dress to be worn by Anna May Wong in A Study in Scarlet (1933) – it didn’t get made in the end (B-movie budget was tight & Wong doesn’t appear on screen that much ultimately).
