The Divergence and Convergence between the Told and the Untold: Rethinking the historiography and history of the early modern East-West encounter, with Chinese export porcelain as case study

Abstract

Aiming to scrutinize the history as well as the historiography of early modern East-West encounter, this thesis starts by theorizing three cognitive pitfalls that history itself presented to the historical actors and haunted the subsequent interpretations when perceiving the Other. They are: 1) cross-cultural transmissions tended be taken for granted by the initiator party as inherently good; 2) the dynamic autonomy (where the specific developmental trajectory only makes sense locally, while parallels should be acknowledged in terms of abstract social dynamics) of each social trajectory could not be acknowledged in initial cultural comparisons; 3) some structural similarities between Chinese and European “early modern” societies could delude the historical actors to perceive the Other with their own developmental trajectories (for example, the parallels in consumption and print cultures).

One explicit embodiment of the cognitive pitfalls is the historiographical discrepancy between Chinese and Western scholarship, each side has traditionally paid attention to completely different events and aftermaths of the encounter story. Therefore, a seemingly complementary effort to juxtapose the different schools of scholarship might not be fruitful because 1) the canonized contents from both sides are results of the filtration by the original cognitive pitfalls, thus the leftover contents could not compose a full picture; 2) The different contents have been subsequently interpreted within different methodological traditions.

I thus propose we look at what has escaped the ideologically charged discourses from either party, such as Chinese export porcelain with amorous or erotic subject matters. The re-contextualization of the un-canonized amorous porcelain into the early modern social-historical context in Europe would touch upon some self-conflicting discourses and practices associated with porcelain, including the private indulgence versus public critique, the national pride discourse, and the feminine criticism discourse. The case study of amorous porcelain will demonstrate how an alternative attention paid to topics and objects that fell out of the orthodox canonization functions in a way that identifies and deconstructs the fluid nature of the direction and extent of influence involved in the original encounter, as well as the biased nature of narratives and discourses produced by each party since or even before the original encounter.