James H. Liu - Collective Remembering and the Making of Political Culture

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108833523

DOI: 10.1017/9781108985093

Looking back, it might be fair to describe parts of the writing of this book as writing meta-science. I struggled with the craft of trying to write narrative science about moments in history where the author is embedded as a mote in a sequence the science is intended to encompass. This gives rise to perplexities and paradox. I address these perplexities through a dialectic, involving a tension between opposites, including an inquiry into truth and a quest for harmony. In dealing with perplexity and antinomy in human science, reflexivity is essential.

Human science in the late twentieth century, the time of my enculturation into adulthood, was ill-equipped for such endeavor. The world at the time was dominated by a single civilization that thought itself superior to all others. As one living inside this collective, I recollect reading three books in 1980 that would be central to my future development: Sima Qian s Records of the Grand Historian , Edward Gibbons s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , This is written into the history of how that history (the Han dynasty) is remembered. History and meta-history rolled into one. I am grateful to my father, Shu-hsien Liu, a New Confucian philosopher, and my mother, An-yuan Liu (critic and translator), who introduced me to Sima Qian as part of my culturally hybrid upbringing in Carbondale, Illinois.