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Nicolai Volland, Gal Gvili. Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895–1962., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 408–409, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae547
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China and India share a contested border and a complex modern history. Subject to colonial and imperialist violence, in widely different ways and time frames, both nations have occasionally looked to each other as an epistemic source of understanding their respective places in the modern world. In this bold and insightful study, Gal Gvili sheds light on Chinese perceptions of and engagement with India, from the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to the Sino-Indian border conflict in 1962. Gvili’s study joins a small but growing body of research that brings into communication the histories of Asia’s largest nations, and contributes to the expanding field of global history, especially historical studies of the Global South. A literary scholar by training, Gvili draws primarily on literary and cultural texts to build her case, and is concerned first and foremost with perceptions and reception, and with the methodological and ethical implications of the act of comparison as a scholarly practice.
