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In the 1921 short story Shangren fu, Xu Dishan challenges nineteenth century developmental thought, which saw the condition of women in certain societies as touchstone to these societies' level of civilization. The link between civilization and the "the woman question" circulated across Asia, disseminated by new disciplines such as folklore studies, and through missionary education, which enshrined female literacy as the first rung in the ladder of civilizational progress. Many Chinese writers portrayed female characters simultaneously as emblems of national backwardness and of hopes to rise from "savagery" to "civilization." My reading of Xu Dishan's work reveals a radical alternative to this view. Xu Dishan drew upon ancient Indian folktales to imagine a nonlinear literary horizon in which women do not stand for the nation but embody transregional possibilities. Taking Xu Dishan's work as a key intervention in Chinese literary culture, this study seeks to move beyond the notion that modern knowledge "arrived" in China from Europe by way of Japan exclusively, by revealing India in particular to be a critical site through which Chinese fiction grappled with the woman question as part of a larger discussion about the meaning of civilization in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Gender, Modernity, and the End of the Fil-Hispanic World" examines how modern social life was imagined by the early twentieth-century Filipino writer, Jesús Balmori, who was thirteen years old when Spain sold the Philippines to the United States. As a famed poet, journalist, and novelist, Balmori adapted Latin American "modernista" writings to criticize life under the new imperial regime. Balmori's first novel, Bancarrota de almas, draws on a worldly Hispanic tradition that produces no possibilities for the future of the Spanish-speaking elite within the Pacific Archipelago. This is, in part, because Bancarrota de almas represents the incursion of North American modernity as a threat to Filipino masculinity produced through the bodies of Filipina women. Balmori's turn to a pan-Hispanic worldview thus depends on the segregation and re-domestication of women, and abandons the potentially liberationist politics of the nation for the repressive politics of the home. By exploring Hispanic culture between nonmetropolitan sites, this article opens new ways of thinking about South-South relations in literary studies, as well as how gender conditioned the transition from Spanishlanguage literature in the Philippines to a literature based in English and the indigenous languages, such as Tagalog. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]