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Despite globalizing forces, whether economic, political, or cultural, there remain conspicuous differences that divide scholarly communities. How should we understand and respond to those discursive gaps among different traditions and systems of knowledge production? Critical Zone is a book series in cultural and literary studies that is concerned with current critical debates and intellectual preoccupations in the humanities. The series aims to improve understanding across cultures, traditions, discourses, and disciplines, and to produce international critical knowledge. Critical Zone is an expression of timely collaboration among scholars from Hong Kong, mainland China, the United States, and Europe, and conceived as an intellectual bridge between China and the rest of the world. The second volume of Critical Zone, as does its predecessor, consists of two parts. The first part includes original essays that deal with the concept and practice of “empire,” as a collective response to the question of how imperial formations and operations, in the past and at present, should be examined in a larger context of international politics and how historical imperialism may be considered in relation to the conditions of our time. Part II includes two sets of translations of essays, first published in Chinese, about two recent debates in China: one on the canonicity of Lu Xun and the other on the problem of how to reform Peking University in the context of globalization. These two groups of translations are led by review essays that contextualize the debates.

Amid the globalizing forces, whether economic, political, or cultural, there remain conspicuous differences and divergences that divide and antagonize scholarly communities. How should we understand and respond to those discursive gaps among different traditions and systems of knowledge production? Critical Zone is a book series that is envisaged as a forum where communities of critical scholarship can come together to share ideas and participate in the debates that preoccupy the humanities today. The series aims to improve understanding across cultures, traditions, discourses, and disciplines and to produce international critical knowledge. Critical Zone is an expression and an embodiment of timely collaboration among scholars in Hong Kong, mainland China, the United States and Europe and is conceived as an intellectual bridge between China and the rest of the world. Each volume in the series has two sections. The first section contains original articles on a set of related topics by scholars from around the world; the second section includes review essays highlighting one or two issues in regional critical scholarship and translations that reflect intellectual trends and concerns in the region, in particular in China.