The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906

In the final decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty in China, technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, telegraph, and photography were both new and foreign. In The Stone and the Wireless Shaoling Ma analyzes diplomatic diaries, early science fiction, feminist poetry, photography, telegrams, and other archival texts, and shows how writers, intellectuals, reformers, and revolutionaries theorized what media does despite lacking a vocabulary to do so. Media defines the dynamics between technologies and their social or cultural forms, between devices or communicative processes and their representations in texts and images. More than simply reexamining late Qing China's political upheavals and modernizing energies through the lens of media, Ma shows that a new culture of mediation was helping to shape the very distinctions between politics, gender dynamics, economics, and science and technology. Ma contends that mediation lies not only at the heart of Chinese media history but of media history writ large.

Author: Shaoling Ma
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 06/11/2021
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.65d
ISBN13: 9781478011477
ISBN10: 1478011475
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Media Studies
- History | Asia | China

About the Author
Shaoling Ma is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore.