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This essay applies Sinophone theory and star theory to set the career of early Sinophone star Bai Yun (1916-1982) in its Second Sino-Japanese War to Cold War context, using materials from early newspapers, magazines, Bai Yun’s own writings, and memoirs to analyze his alternative queer latent images and Chineseness. The essay uses a post-loyalist perspective to examine Malaya-born Bai Yun’s diaspora experience, which spanned Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and S.E. Asia. It discusses Bai Yun’s various displaced and decadent diaspora experiences as a post-loyalist of Chineseness, and explores how his amorous exploits upturned the upright orthodoxy of modern Chinese nationalism. His success was accompanied by a chorus of derision and mocking. Bai Yun’s “girlish” pin-up star image, queer latent images, and amorous history challenged the hegemony of masculinity and homogeneity within Chinese Nationalism. The essay also applies star theory to analyze Bai Yun’s career and reverse publicity methods, examining the formation of Bai Yun as a consumption phenomenon in the early Sinophone cultural sphere. On screen, he performed with the stylings of a traditional Chinese feminine dashing young scholar; off screen, he frequently created scandals involving other male and female stars as part of a reverse publicity strategy. This called up and constructed an on-screen persona with a queer latent image. While he successfully attracted controversy and the gaze of the audience, he also enraged the nationalist patriarchal socio-cultural order that the modern media of the KMT and CCP wished to maintain. His case subverts the primary-subordinate relationship of “roots” and “routes” as seen in diaspora Chinese discourse, embodying how the needs, dreams, and collective unconscious of early Sinophone audiences were encoded, mediated, or repressed by Chinese Nationalism and the various ideologies of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cold War. Bai Yun’s multilingual identity enabled him to weave between films in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Amoy. A life spent travelling between Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan also saw him become one of the few Sinophone stars in the Cold War era with the ability to link the four major Sinophone regions: Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and S.E. Asia. Ministry of Education (MOE) This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Singapore, under the Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant RG73/17.

Ma Xianglan and her literati partner Wang Zhideng are remembered as one of the late Ming romantic pairs between a faithful courtesan and her talented scholar. Many Ming-Qing writers wrote about the Ma-Wang romance, and yet Ma Xianglan’s voice is missing from her stories. This essay reconsiders the romance by investigating the relationships between literary and theatrical representations and their social contexts. It focuses on Ma Xianglan’s performance tour to Suzhou in 1604. Most historical sources treat this tour as Ma’s celebration of Wang’s seventieth birthday and thus evidence of Ma’s faithful love for Wang. This essay excavates less-circulated sources and examines the competing narratives of multiple literati writers and of Ma Xianglan herself. By revealing the contradictions in the narratives of the Ma-Wang romance, this study inquires into a specific historical context, the Longwan era (1570–1620), when the story of Ma and Wang unfolded. It asks how the romance served as a vehicle in cultural and commercial networking during the Longwan era and in the construction of Ming loyalism in the Ming-Qing transition.

Andrew Melville (1545-1622). Writings, Reception, and Reputation. Edited by Roger A. Mason and Steven J. Reid. [St Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2014. Pp. xvi, 306. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-2693-6.)This is a collection of studies on the enigmatic Andrew Melville, Scottish ecclesiastical activist, Latin poet, divinity professor, and nominally a minister. His fame lay in being the putative chief driver of Scottish de iure divino Presbyterianism and a stentorian watchman against the drift to church-state fusion. This involved quasi-Manichaean antagonism to both episcopacy and Erastianism, engendering images of him as either a noble dissident or a subversive rebel. The positive picture of Melville projected his herculean efforts, along with his university reforms rooted in his humanist and Calvinist commitment, reinforced by a cosmopolitan past.The book advances the quest for the historical Melville that has been picking up steam after nearly two centuries of inertia. It aspires to strip Melville historiography from the coloring of Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Catholic accounts. There are allusions to a Melville "myth," "legend," and "fable," but any revisionism is not pejorative or triumphalist. Sane reconstruction or reimaging is the objective. Retrieving and elucidating sources is the priority-especially his preferred medium of Latin poetry on various issues-but challenging, as Melville's Latin is "difficult, gnarled and gritty . . . thorny, unyielding" (p. 175). Although some Melville prose is extant, he published nothing in that form in his lifetime-bequeathing a research black hole.The book has nine chapters (plus a sophisticated bibliography of Melville writings), but just seven authors, as Steven Reid is responsible for two chapters (full of nuggets) and the bibliography, as well as serving as coauthor of the introduction. Roger Mason's detective work on Melville's notes in copies of George Buchanan's History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1582) demonstrates its resonance in Melville's ideas of kingship, church-state relations, and Presbyterian origins in antiquity to repudiate Catholic charges of innovation. However, Buchanan's radicalism on tyrant deposition and tyrannicide apparently appealed less to Melville for reasons like loyalism, to which one could add a conservative Calvinism. Reid also raises the matter, suggesting that Melville's reticence was due to a "theological mindset," bowing to scriptural authority as in Romans 13 (p. 6) and the force of "theological imperatives" (p. 70). Yet among Reformed writers everywhere there was a spectrum from the very radical to the very conservative-all claiming biblical legitimation. Reid also considers Melville's "two kingdoms" notion, the parallel autonomous spheres of spiritual and secular jurisdictions. "Strict separation" (pp. 47, 53) may not be the right formulation. In Reformed (as in medieval) theolog)' there was legitimate intersection and degree of mutual coinherence, a sine qua non in what was still a Christendom situation. …

Scholarship on Chosŏn gratitude to the Ming in the wake of the Imjin Wars stresses Chosŏn loyalism and nostalgia for a lost civilizational order then only remnant as a final human outpost on the Korean peninsula standing firm before the tides of northern savagery. There was a very different undercurrent, however, in which the Chosŏn officialdom of the capital saw the Ming as irrational and even culturally alien, if not barbarous, violators of propriety. This paper examines these tensions and contradictions through the construction of Chosŏn state temples to Guan Yu, known in his deified form as Kwan Wang, at the close of the sixteenth century and the roles the cult and its temples played as a discursive space in which the Ming and Chosŏn governments negotiated the nature and dynamics of their relationship.

Fettered Loyalism," "The Losers," "Dissent and the Alternative That Was Lost" - these are all phrases that modern scholars have used to characterize the Loyalist historians of the American Revolution, pointing to the exclusion of the Loyalists from the process of nation building and from the narratives that have been constructed about that process in both the United States and Britain. By this account, the Loyalist historians themselves laid the basis for their exclusion from American historical consciousness in their failure to provide a coherent counter-narrative of the American Revolution that could offset the nationalist accounts produced by the Revolutionary historians. This failure was in turn emblematic of the deficiencies and tensions in Loyalist ideology. Paralyzed by their conservative ideology and their dual loyalties to America and Britain, the Loyalist historians found themselves unable to adapt to the social forces unleashed by the Revolution and the new political order it created, and they were, as a result, defeated in both the Revolution itself and the battle for historical recognition after the Revolution - or so the conventional narrative of Loyalist history goes.1No figure seems to embody the image of the Loyalists of the American Revolution as "losers" better than Thomas Hutchinson, the historian and last civilian royal governor of Massachusetts. The more he tried to mediate between his loyalty to his native Massachusetts and his desire to uphold British authority, the more he inflamed revolutionary hostility to British policies, only to become himself an object of infamy among the Revolutionaries. Finally exiled from his beloved Massachusetts to spend the rest of his life as an alien in the English nation whose authority he had tried to uphold, Hutchinson has seemed for modern scholars to epitomize the tragic fate of the many Loyalists marginalized by their attachment to an outmoded imperial structure at a time when the modern nation- state appeared to be in the process of supplanting earlier imperial forms.2Yet Hutchinson's work as a historian suggests that the Loyalist historians were more versatile and in tune with the prevailing intellectual currents of their time than the image of them as losers has assumed. Hutchinson published the first volume of his History of Massachusetts-Bay in 1764, following with a second volume in 1767 and a third that was published posthumously in 1828. More successful as a historian than as a politician, Hutchinson received wide praise from contemporaries and later scholars alike for the research and impartiality of his history. Yet Hutchinson's history has received little sustained attention from modern scholars, who have treated it alternately as either a dry compilation of facts or merely a reflection of his conservative political ideology.3 Though his history did indeed reflect his political concerns, it was also a serious intellectual enterprise that grappled with the same issues that engaged the leading Enlightenment historians of his time - namely, how to integrate their ideal of philosophical history with the classical tradition of exemplary history and the research and techniques of critical source analysis that derived from the antiquarian tradition of scholarship. Thus, the apparent colorlessness and incoherence of Hutchinson's history were actually the product of his effort to negotiate between both his colonial and imperial loyalties and conflicting definitions of history as a discipline.Such conflicts had become more pronounced by the eighteenth century, as the simultaneous rise of philosophical history and the growing importance of critical scholarship not only came into conflict with one another, but also challenged the primacy of the classical tradition of exemplary history.4 History had in this tradition been seen as distinct from, and indeed opposed to, antiquarian scholarship. Considered the province of men of affairs like Hutchinson, history was supposed to be "philosophy teaching by example," whose purpose was to provide readers with moral lessons of conduct to imitate or avoid. …

Founded just two years after the Freedom’s Journal (1827–29) inaugurated the first African American newspaper in the United States, Jamaica’s first black and antislavery newspaper, the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press (1829–36), steadfastly publicized the planter-dominated colonial government’s refusal to implement the civil rights that the British Crown had extended to the island’s free black and slave populations prior to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. 1 Despite publishing in the face of the colonial government’s repeated attempts to force its suppression, the newspaper achieved a scope of influence that was well attested by a variety of nineteenth-century observers: British abolitionists credited it with providing the accurate reportage they needed to pressure their government to enact more quickly full slave emancipation in the West Indies, while colonial officials denounced the newspaper’s editor as a princi pal instigator of the massive slave rebellion that broke out in Jamaica in the early 1830s. 2 Yet the important contributions made by this and other ground-breaking Caribbean periodicals have since largely disappeared from the narrative of the emergence of black periodicals and print culture in the nineteenth century. One reason for this may lie in the differences between the Afro-Caribbean experience of print and the much better-known tradition of black writing in North America. Indeed, the historical legacies of both slavery and race diverged considerably between the early Caribbean and the United States; it is at best problematic to talk about “black” phenomena in the West Indies in a manner analogous to the North American context. 3 In the West Indies, the emergence of a non-white press was coterminous with the rise of the free people of color as a vocal cleavage in the island’s political public sphere. As the mixed-race descendants of traditionally white European fathers and free or enslaved African or Afro-Creole mothers, the colored or “brown” community inhabited a fraught middle area in the West Indian system of racial domination—a social pyramid constituted by a white planter minority at its apex and a base of

Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. By Maya Jasanoff. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Pp. 460. Cloth, $ 30.00.)Reviewed by Liam RiordanLiberty's Exiles seems likely to become the most influential work on loyalism since Bernard Bailyn's landmark The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA, 1974) and adds to an impressive body of recent scholarship that reexamines loyalism and the Revolutionary era as transnational phenomena.1 Maya Jasanoff 's imperial perspective provides a border-crossing Atlantic view, and looks still further afield to India, to explain how American loyalists informed and anticipated emergent forces in the nineteenth-century British Empire. The book is necessarily sprawling in its territorial embrace, but Jasanoff contains this reach by engagingly narrating numerous life stories. Most importantly, she offers the "spirit of 1 783" as a counterweight to the 1776 bias of most interpretations of the American Revolution and its consequences. Jasanoff returns to this key concept throughout the book as she explores its tenets of imperial expansion, liberty, and authority in far-reaching locales as tested by diverse loyalists. The diasporic experience is paramount here with an emphasis on contingency, coercion, and self-interest among the large cohort of refugees who shared a common empire but lacked a deeply unifying ideology.Jasanoff interweaves the tales of nine principal figures, whose selection shapes the major themes that emerge. Two of the most closely examined individuals, Beverley Robinson and Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston, are contextualized within larger family networks that help extend their stunning geographic trajectories - the former with ties to New York, England, New Brunswick, and India; the latter to Georgia, East Florida, Scotland, Jamaica, and Nova Scotia, and other places as well. Jasanoff highlights racial diversity among loyalists with two closely linked black Baptist preachers, David George and George Liele, as well as the Mohawk Joseph Brant. A more authoritarian paternalism is showcased in the British officials Guy Carleton (though he comes off especially well) and John Murray, Fourth Earl of Dunmore (better known to most as Virginia, and Bahamas, Governor Lord Dunmore), while two less familiar adventurers, John Cruden and William Augustus Bowles (who might also be classified as a Native American loyalist) complete the core group. Revealingly, five of this main cast were born in the British mainland colonies, three in the British Isles (none in England), and one in Iroquoia.While the details of individual lives are well told and carry this highly readable book forward, its scholarly impact lies in a careful reconstruction of loyalist emigration figures and in the original presentation of a global loyalist diaspora directly linked to the emergence of a strengthened British Empire: "All told, the 1 780s stand out as the most eventful single decade in British imperial history up to the 1940s," as they "cemented an enduring framework for the principles and practice of British rule" (11). Jasanoff's conclusion about the size of the loyalist migration out of the rebel colonies and new United States considerably lowers previous estimates to a conservative total figure of about 60,000 white and black loyalists in addition to some 15,000 enslaved people removed by loyalists. (For this and below, see "Appendix: Measuring the Exodus," 351-58.) Of these loyal refugees she documents nearly 38,000 going to the continuing British colonies in North America (some 30,000 to the Canadian Maritimes, including 10 percent who were black loyalists; another 5,500 white loyalists to Quebec; and some 2,000 Indians who settled at Grand River in what would later be part of Upper Canada). Given this demographic dominance some may feel that British North America deserves closer attention: Chapter 6 treats New Brunswick, Quebec, and Grand River in comparative fashion and moves rapidly across their varying circumstances in just 33 pages. …

Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution. By Ruma Chopra. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 201 1. Pp. 320. Cloth, $35.00.)Reviewed by Serena ZabinRuma Chopra's study of New York loyalists does her subjects the honor of taking them seriously. Chopra views loyalists not as heads-in-the-sand reactionaries incapable of seeing the value of radical change but as men who wanted to preserve a system that worked for them and, they believed, for others. In order to reconstruct this perspective, Chopra manages to bring together political thought and material experience - in particular, the experience of military occupation - in ways that are both thoughtful and persuasive.Chopra's central contention is that the introduction of the British army into New York both supported and undermined loyalist politics of persuasion. Although the loyalists initially welcomed the British troops, seeing them as the facilitators of reunion, their enthusiasm for an occupied city did not last long. Most loyalists did not expect to live under martial law; they wanted a return to civil government as soon as possible so they could again enjoy the benefits of the British empire. Their arguments for an attachment to the empire depended on claims to civil liberties and the British constitution, none of which could be enjoyed in a city under military rule. As Chopra writes, "They believed just and balanced civil governance in New York City would win the hearts and minds of wavering colonists" (79). Yet it was hard to make an argument to nonloyalists for the superiority of the British system when New Yorkers faced military assaults on their borders and undisciplined soldiers at home. Loyalists hoped to use New York as a persuasive model for living under imperial rule; it turned instead into a warning against capitulation to imperial power.This is an interesting reworking of the arguments by John Shy and Sung Bok Kim (although Chopra does not acknowledge either) that the presence of troops had a notable impact on civilian populations. In 1973, Shy argued that the forced participation of adult men in the militia as well as the outrages committed by the British Army led to an increased politicization of Americans as they became committed to the Whig cause. Kim, by contrast, argued twenty years later that the same processes, at least in Westchester County, led to the opposite outcome of apathy and depoliticization. By asking what impact British troops, and particularly military rule, had on the loyalist political strategy, Chopra excavates a troubling paradox for New York loyalists.1Chopra describes the Revolution in loyalist terms as an "unnatural rebellion." In their eyes, New Yorkers had no reason to become radical; in the mid eighteenth century, they saw themselves happily connected to the British empire through trade and culture. The city's elites bickered over local political power, but for the most part they agreed that they were a part of an empire that had some appropriate control over them. Apparently, enfranchised New Yorkers agreed with them, for they regularly returned members of both the Delancey and Livingston factions to office. The city's heterogeneity, Chopra argues, meant that New Yorkers rarely formed clear political blocs based on class or ethnicity. The early revolutionary conflicts - Stamp Act riots, Quartering Act conflicts, soldiers chopping down the Liberty Tree, even the "Battle of Golden Hill" - seemed to produce more internal factionalism in New York City than it did loyalism or hostility to the British Empire itself.Chopra suggests that no New Yorkers moved toward separation with Britain until the passage of the Coercion Acts against Boston in 1774. Benjamin Carp has recently argued that the Boston Tea Party of 1773 was in part the Bostoniane' attempt to prove to their radical neighbors in New York (and elsewhere) that they were committed to some form of resistance; it would have been helpful to know what sense Chopra made of the non-importation movement in New York in the late 1760s and early 1770s. …

In eighteenth-century New York, as in many other places, educated gentlemen used classical pastoral and georgic tropes to articulate their relationships with both nature and society. This essay uses the changing use of these tropes to examine the radical changes in the city's culture after midcentury. The new rhetoric of sociability marginalized both pastoral and georgic in favor of a broad mercantile vision of social interconnectedness. Pastoral rhetoric, in turn, became linked to the defense of an elite, traditionalist Loyalism, which embraced its marginalization and doomed itself to irrelevance. As Philip Freneau's experimentation with pastoral demonstrates, the continued prevalence of these tropes in American literature was nonetheless accompanied by their separation from this social context.

One promise of formal truth recovery processes, such as truth commissions, in transitional societies is that they present the possibility of a common narrative emerging about the causes of conflict. At the same time, there is now evidence that such processes also create silences; some narratives are not fully represented. One such silence is in relation to pro-state paramilitaries. Drawing extensively on interviews with a number of loyalist paramilitary activists in Northern Ireland, as well as others attuned to the current state of loyalism, this article explores loyalist paramilitary attitudes to dealing with the past, and in particular, the possibility of a truth commission for Northern Ireland. It considers the reasons for loyalist reticence about supporting such a commission, including their belief that the call for truth serves a republican insurgent agenda, their conviction that they have been abandoned by the state to which they have been loyal, and a general sense of confused political identity within loyalism. Finally, the article considers some ways in which loyalists might be persuaded to engage in a truth recovery process, not least through an attempt to produce a tighter definition of truth. If their narrative succeeds in being properly represented, there may be lessons to be learned for similar transitional societies.

No Turning Point: The Saratoga Campaign in Perspective. By Theodore Corbett. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 436. Cloth, $39. 95.)Reviewed by Benjamin L. CarpAnyone with a passing knowledge of the Revolutionary War remembers the Saratoga campaign of 1777 as a key turning point. The British surrender on October 17 exposed John Burgoyne and William Howe as foiled military commanders; it ruined the Crown's best chance to drive a wedge between New England and the Middle Colonies and bolstered French confidence in the American rebellion. The perennial emphasis on Saratoga reflects traditional historians' preference for focusing on the machinations of statesmen and the military campaigns of senior commanders.Theodore Corbett insists that we revisit this conventional wisdom. It's not that he thinks these conclusions are wrong-in fact, he spends almost no time on diplomacy or on the British ministry's overall direction of the war effort. Instead, he hopes to refocus our attention on "the regional war that surrounded and penetrated the Saratoga battlefields" (369), essentially the Hudson-Champlain region north of Albany, just east of the areas covered in Alan Taylor's The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2006). From this perspective, he argues, Burgoyne's surrender was no turning point at all, but a reverberating regional conflict that distressed inhabitants for almost a decade.Corbett begins by tracing white settlement of the Hudson-Champlain region after 1763, and then he analyzes the region's experience of the war. He stresses the importance of Guy Carleton's 1776 victory at Lake Champlain, which neutralized Fort Ticonderoga and gave Britain a staging area for five more years of invasions. While a narrative like Richard Ketchum's Saratoga: Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War (New York, 1997) ends abruptly with Burgoyne's surrender and its immediate global consequences, Corbett's discussion of the British defeat occurs two-thirds of the way through the book. The remaining pages animate the continued civil war, subsequent British raids, Loyalist migrations, political squabbles among American civil authorities, and the agrarian unrest of the 1780s. The author casts this series of incidents as an unbroken chain of civil conflict that destabilized the various localities in the region. Corbett is finely attuned to the local political geography, and he criticizes military officers who paid it too little attention.The book spends less time on the armies' strategy and provisioning than on politics, security, and recruitment in the region surrounding Burgoyne's march. Corbett offers a wide array of narratives: We observe Burgoyne's "pacification" policy; the Albany Committee of Correspondence raising special militia units for suppressing Loyalism; General Philip Schuyler ordering settlers to evacuate, to prevent them from becoming Loyalists; and settlers in Charlotte County's Argyle Patent and elsewhere attempting to claim the status of "protectioners" for their own security, rather than out of strong Loyalist conviction. He tracks the reign of the "Arlington Junta" who took power in Vermont and dominated the process of confiscating Loyalist property.Corbett is right to reaffirm the Revolution as civil war, a perspective that still receives too little attention outside the war's southern theater. …