China and the West

Washington Irving and China : general.
Nan Z. Da : By suggesting that China represented to Irving an alternative configuration for the new nation that cannot be glimpsed through historicism alone. For Irving, only alternate worlds can catch the residues of shifting discourses. His Chinese Americas reveal as much the significant role of China in early Republican thinking as Irving’s own interest in clashing discourses of “differentiated histories”, especially those that mediated his sense of what is historiographically representable. To read the Chinas in his works is to acknowledge the contending forces of historical management in play before the grand récit of nineteenth-century American history (and its relationship to China) had hypostasized. Each Chinese America represents a different metahistoriographic investigation into why what Irving called “the art of history writing” makes some worlds and outcomes seem more or less plausible. Further, China-thinking occasioned for Irving a historical consciousness that reflects on how history skipped over, including alternative worlds that never come into being, can be filed away or internalized or accepted as a meaningless knowledge.
Many of the historiographical technologies at his disposal were made available to him from an eighteenth-century tradition of China-thinking – a transatlantic sinology that shaped emergent macrohistorical theories – and an emergent nineteenth-century philosophy of history that once and again made China an object of study. Taking up historical writing at the cusp of the professionalization of the genre in the US, Irving moved between these two very different discursive bodies, producing work that aggressively and consistently blurred the boundary between historical information and authorial fabrication. The macrohisotrical-cosmogonic opening of A history of New York briefly reworks European sinology, slthough one would hardly know it from the way Irving presents this subject as so much nonsense piled on nonsense. Irving entertains the idea that Noah actually landed in China and was better known to the Chinese as Fohi, a theory that he claims is circulated by Chinese historians.
Irving not only reproduced China in the West as a way of disclosing historiography's own determinisms which can be applied forward or backward in time. He also calibrated it to reflect the predicament of those for whom historiography is an embodied practice. In Salmagundi deploys Chinese alterity for its reliable associations with an abstract fidelity to historicity that exacts its price primarily. As the odd, talkative member of Salmagundi returning to America from an extended stay in Canton, Will Wizard performs a Chinese identity chock-full of stock Orientalisms.
Astor envisioned a commercial empire built on the China fur trade that would start in the Mississippi, extend northwest across the Rocky Moundtains, regroup in the Columbia River basin, and expand across the Pacific to China by way of the Sandwich Island. Irving describes the international fur market that makes round trips to Canton, Where China's voracious appetite for pelts results in 'immense prices'.
Chineseness was, for Irving, a ready-made personification of unactualizable histories.