Pollia Ng L&S Arts & Humanities
Holmes in China: Translating the Racial Other in the Detective Novel
This project explores the epistemological construction of the racial other through popular fiction in late Qing China by comparing Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890) with Lin Shu’s classical Chinese translation《案中案》(1904). In the detective novel, Tonga, an indigenous Andamanese, is figured as the culprit and sinks into subaltern silence under the Thames and on the page. I will trace his absences and his reconfigurations as “barbarian” and “black man” in the translation in order to examine how Western colonial categories, in linking ethnology with criminology, were assimilated and contested with during nation formation that defined modernity through and against the Other. I stage this project as a colonial and anti-colonial encounter between the “civilized” West and a modernizing China that simultaneously needed to eradicate the savage and resist imperialism. Adopting Said’s philological method, I will compare these linguistic terms with contemporary and Lin Shu translations to point to the ontological instability of race. How is Chineseness identified in proximity and in opposition to Blackness and Primitivism?
Message To Sponsor
I would like to express my gratitude for your trust in my project, and in me. This is the first time that I am undertaking a personal project at the intersection of my interests-- the transcultural interaction of ideas through translation. I am most excited to explore imperial history, narratology, epistemology, race and postcolonial theory. Please see to it that I will make use of this opportunity to expand the scope of my critical inquiries and to enhance my abilities as a researcher.