Dr. Kendall Johnson
Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures; Director of the American Studies Programme, The University of Hong Kong.
Paper title: Forthcoming
Dr. Johnson is an Associate Professor, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Director of the American Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong. His recent books include Henry James and the Visual (Cambridge University Press 2007); A Critical Companion to Henry James: A Literary Reference to his Life and Work (2009), and Narratives of Free Trade in Early American Chinese Relations (editor; forthcoming 2011). He has also published essays on Native American law and literature. He is currently working on early United States trade and diplomacy in "Canton" for a project entitled Speculative Democracy: Characterizing the Corporation in the American Literature before the Civil War.
Abstracts:
The son of a New York printer, Samuel Wells Williams was one of the most influential
representatives of the American Board of Foreign Missionaries (ABCFM). Upon first arriving in Canton
in 1833, he was co‐editor and printer of The Chinese Repository, a 60‐page monthly that stretched
twenty years, ending it print run in 1851. This essay considers Williams’ printing press both as a
specific device and as a practice of writing, composing and disseminating texts in China. By examining
Williams’ changing relationship to the process of printing, we can chart the dramatic shifts in
commercial and cultural relations between the United States and China as the Canton System came to
end in the wake of the First Opium War (1839‐42). The 1856 loss of his printing press in a fire at
Canton confirmed his move from Canton to Shanghai. In a broader sense, the expanded treaty port
system forced him to reevaluate and abandon his Canton‐based printing system...