China “Asleep” and “Awakening.” A Study in Conceptualizing Asymmetry and Coping with It.
Authors
Languages continually enrich themselves and other languages with concepts they exchange. While not a modern phenomenon, the denser and faster communications during the 19th and 20th centuries have resulted in a large-scale homogenization of the world's modern languages around a core of globalized concepts with their modern order and hierarchy. The common features of these concepts are hidden below the linguistic surface of the different languages and most speakers are unaware of them. Concepts are abstract and cannot directly guide action in time and space. For this purpose, recourse is taken to metaphor and simile. These in turn lend themselves to become the material for visual representation, for example in political cartoons.
The article investigates the migration of such metaphors and their visualized forms across languages and cultures. It will focus on the metaphor of “China asleep/China awakened.” This metaphor became common parlance during the 19th century and has remained in the global metaphorical canon to this day. The article addresses the dynamics of this highly asymmetrical translingual and transcultural migration, the cultural brokers involved, and the contact zones where the exchanges take place.
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Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
