Learning to Understand the Other: Timothy Mo's Novel An Insular Possession

Title

Learning to Understand the Other: Timothy Mo's Novel An Insular Possession

Author

Erhard RECKWITZ

Page

49-70

DOI

Abstract

In his novel, which appeared in 1986, the author, who himself is of mixed British-Cantonese descent, deals with the historical events leading up to the opium war in the 1830s and the subsequent foundation of the colony of Hong Kong. In addition to being a fascinating historical account of the subjugation of the Chinese Empire at the hands of the British and the mercantile colonial interests motivating it, it is also a kind of bildungsroman about Gideon Chase, the young clerk of an American trading company operating in China. After becoming initially interested and finally totally absorbed in Chinese culture, he eventually ends up as a distinguished professor of Chinese Studies in the United States. The analysis of the novel will trace the trajectory from mutual contempt and hostility between Europeans and Chinese plus its underlying binarisms to Chase's going beyond the ethnocentric perception of the Other as an aberration from a norm that is constituted by the European self. In the present case this is a one-sided process because the Chinese are singularly uninterested in the Europeans, but Gideon Chase's penetrating insights into the intricacies of Chinese culture provide a fictionalized instance of how the encounter between Europeans and Chinese could have worked out had there been more intercultural mediators like him with his hermeneutical approach to understanding the Other.

Keyword

An Insular Possession, the European self, ethnocentric perception, binarisms, Colonialism, the Other

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