The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906

2014-07-09My dissertation examines an important historical period during which the United States and China were caught between changing notions of nationhood and empire. Distancing itself from the colonialism of the Old World, American nationalism can be said to be part of a new global logic in which the Chinese found themselves since the first Opium War. Not colonized as part of a single European empire, China’s semi-colonial status signified the kind of emerging capitalist power relation of which U.S. involvement in Latin America and Asia was exemplary. I argue that American and Chinese utopian novels of the period combined seemingly conflicting ideals of nationhood and empire into fantastic and often dystopian visions of world unity