1. Gender and Colonial Knowledge of the Other
“Given the role that women have played in colonial knowledge of the other, it should be no surprise that matters pertaining to gender have been central to the Chinese state’s successive imaginaries of modernity” (xiv).

2. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Snake Charmer, late 1860s
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Snake Charmer, late 1860s. Example of French Orientalist school of painting. Used on the cover of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Quotes below from Linda Nochlin’s analysis of the picture, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America (May 1983). Things to notice: The viewer is not included in the audience. “Our gaze is meant to include both the spectacle and its spectators as objects of picturesque delection.” Partially exposed body of young boy: eroticized mystery. “Authentic, realistic, ethnographic” detail. Gerôme was respected in his time as a painter with a highly realistic technique. The absence of a sense of history or temporal change, making it a timeless frozen past. Representation of the “vice of the idle Muslim.” “The white man, the Westerner, is of course always implicitly present…his is necessarily the controlling gaze, the gaze which brings the Oriental world into being, the gaze for which is it ultimately intended.”

3. Jean August Dominique Ingres, Grand Odalisque, 1814
Jean August Dominique Ingres, Grand Odalisque, Another example of French Orientalist painting. Ingres’s depictions of Turkish harem woman are especially famous. He painted not from life, but from his imagination of an exotic Near East.

6. Photographer unknown, Chinese Courtesan (. ), c1875
Photographer unknown, Chinese Courtesan (?), c1875. Note how the template/pose of the Orientalist odalisque or reclining female has been transplanted to the Far East in the studio set-up of this photograph.
(Photograph taken from The Face of China: As Seen by Photographers & Travelers, )

7. Courtesan with book. In contrast with slide 4 (taken by a Western photographer), these next three photos show how actual courtesans in Shanghai chose to pose for photographic portraits.
(From front cover of volume 1 of Haishang hua yinglu [A record in images of Shanghai flowers], Qi Xia and Dan Ru, editors, Image cited in Gail Hershatter’s book Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai.)

8. Courtesan in Operatic Dress, Qi Xia and Dan Ru, 1917.

9. Courtesans with automobile, Qi Xia and Dan Ru, 1917.

11. Characteristics of Modernity/ies
The idea of modernity grew and spread through processes of colonialism and become integral to the nation-state system that emerged.
It entails a narrative of progress, a break from an “irrational” tradition and a teleological unfolding, in which we always overcome and surpass that which came before.
Modernity is put into effect through science and management projects, the development of new social institutions (e.g. prisons, hospitals, factories, schools), and new ways of organizing people.

12. modernity Rofel proposes
Other Modernities
Understandings of
modernity Rofel is
“writing against”
Modernity arose discretely in the West and then was simply mimicked in the rest of the world.
Modernity arises autonomously within nation-states.
Modernity leads to the same practices and effects everywhere one finds it.
Through globalization, modernity makes the world homogenous.
Understandings of
modernity Rofel proposes
Modernity is a story people tell themselves (an imaginary) about themselves in relation to others.
The experiences of people caught up by modernity’s “enchantment” do not always fit smoothly and cleanly into the narrative. These disjunctures reveal the powerful ways in which modernity operates.
The discrepancies between different versions of modernity provide a way of challenging its power.

13. Imaginary (n.) Synonyms: narrative, yearning
Lisa Rofel brings together ideas of national “imagined communities,” of “social imaginaries” that shape identity, and of the psychoanalytic “imaginary.” With this term, she want “to emphasize the powerful hold of modernity, its phantasmic qualities, its displaced desires, and its necessarily dialogical constitution” (285).
For more on her definition, see footnote 2 on page 285.

14. Jin Shangyi and Wu Biduan, Mao Zedong with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, published on the cover on Meishu magazine, Jin was a graduate of Maksimov’s oil painting class; Wu had studied in Leningrad from CAFA painters. Example of a socialist imaginary of modernity, a staging of the world made in counterdistinction to the West.

15. Cohort
Groups who developed “a sense of identification in coming of age through particular political movements and state regimes--the early years of Liberation, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era” (10).
Cohort analysis highlights the dynamics of temporality and history.
Rather than analyzing a singular moment of cohort formation, Rofel emphasizes the reformation of cohorts as they live through diverse historical periods.

16. “Island Girl,” Wang Xia, 1961.

17. “I Am a Seagull,” Pan Jiaxia, early 1970s.

18. Dan Lianxiao (Dalian Electronic Ceramics Factory worker) 大连电瓷厂工人单联孝, Be This Kind of Person, propaganda painting 做人要做这样的人（宣传画）, dimensions unknown

19. A 1991 health magazine, Friend of Health, has a young female model on its cover (From Judith Farquhar’s Appetites).

20. Subaltern
Originally a term applied to subordinates in military hierarchies.
Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Diaries writings about hegemony, covertly adopted the term (as of way of encrypting his writing to get it past prison censors). He used it to signify a non-unified “proletarian,” those whose voices could not be heard as a result of being structurally written out of the capitalist bourgeois narrative.
The Subaltern Studies Group later picked up the term from Gramsci in order to locate and re-establish a “voice” or collective agency in postcolonial India for those denied access to representation by colonialism.
Gayatri Spivak, one of the group’s members, wrote a well-known and debated article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In it she argues that efforts to give collective voice to a subaltern group inevitably run in to the problem of creating dependence upon intellectuals to “speak for” the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves.
Rofel uses the term to refer to “a category of subjectivity that represents the underside of power” (3-4).