ABSTRACT
Notwithstanding their emphasis on foiled intercultural conjunction, the accounts of French and European adventures in twentieth-century China discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 envision the modern world as an interconnected sphere, open to the global circulation of peoples and things across cultural borders and boundaries. 1 That world has its roots in historical and ongoing processes of colonialism, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism. It is the arena of multilayered global movements galvanized by empire and its wake: movements of territorial takeover; movements along colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial trajectories; movements of migration, diaspora, exile, travel. Such movements have produced all sorts of modes of interaction and encounter between variform cultural orders. They have engendered cross-cultural formations, spaces, and entities particular to the postcolonial global canvas.
