The Politics of Common Reading: Vernacular Knowledge and Everyday Technics in China, 1894-1954

Examines the transformation of vernacular knowledge during a pivotal period of modern Chinese history, 1894 to 1954. What did common readers read in the midst of the revolutions that punctuated China’s long Republic (1894-1954)?How did they manage the often-unprecedented challenges of the era?What did they know and how did they know it? In The Politics of Common Reading, Joan Judge traces the unfolding of a consequential politics of accommodation that engaged commoners as knowers rather than as an unenlightened mass.A response to the institutional failures of the era, this politics was enacted through an informal knowledge infrastructure comprised of low-budget publishers, rustic bookstalls, and a piecemeal national network.As yet unstudied, this infrastructure produced and circulated up to ten times the number of books as official, mainstream channels. A corpus of some five hundred of these cheap collections of recipes and techniques serves as the basis for this book.Judge focuses on