“In the shadow of the race, China is ranked 19the century. Another history of knowledge about the body”, by Clément Fabre, CNRS Editions, 300 p., €26, digital €19.
Sometimes the best investigations are those that are started for the wrong reasons. As a history student, Clément Fabre first imagined himself as a diplomat, and therefore began to study Chinese. Asked by “Le Monde des livres”, he readily agreed today that this still uncertain project was due to a “Orientalist country image, with an aesthetic edge”.
For, along with working on archives, a master’s and then a doctorate, dispelling vague dreams of embassies, it was the substance of his curiosity about China that he finally came to question. Didn’t he undergo the same experiences tinged with exoticism and simplification as the myriad of consuls, physicians, and religious whose texts he read, all set in the Chinese empire of the 19th century?e century, which they consider mysterious and impenetrable? “This work was born from a critical perspective of my interest in China”he said.
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