Events

Jointly organized by the Asia Research Institute, and the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Prasenjit Duara, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In the mid-20th-century the historian John Fairbank gave Western agency a central place in his study of trade and diplomacy on late imperial Chinese coast. Decades later the historian Paul Cohen, who examined Chinese culture and society, suggested that scholars should seek the dynamics of historical changes by looking within China. Fairbank and Cohen wrote at a time when China was largely closed to the United States and the world was divided by contesting visions of modernity. They pursued strategies that looked either “inwardly” into or “outwardly” outside of China. Today the map of the world has changed and China takes a central place in a globalizing system. From a scholarly perspective, both the territorial “bounded-ness” of China and its internal coherence have been convincingly questioned. Nor would most scholars look for the “Chineseness” of the Chinese people in a set of stable attributes maintained in a condition of immobility. Boundaries have become porous and people have become mobile. With these recognitions: How do scholars these days frame their questions about China? How do they generate insights that would be attentive to conditions both “inside” and “outside” of China, and above all to the dynamics of interactions between the two? Innovative researchers have turned to the re-conceptualization of “marginality,” “spatiality,” “materiality,” and “mobility” (among other viable strategies) to re-imagine the constructions of “China” and “Chineseness.” The purpose of this talk is to elaborate on these conceptual approaches and share reflections on their intellectual rewards.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Wen-hsin Yeh is Richard H. & Laurie C. Morrison Chair Professor in History, University of California, Berkeley. A historian of modern China, her work examines ideas and politics in spatial and institutional contexts. She is the author of The Alienated Academy: Cultural Politics in Republican China (Harvard 1990), Provincial Passages: Space, Culture, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (California 1996), Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China (2007) and scores of essays and book chapters. A former Chair of Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, she has been directing over a dozen interdisciplinary research projects and produced an equal number of edited volumes. She is a Humboldt Foundation Senior Fellow, a Distinguished Humanities Visiting Scholar at Peking University, and a Guanghua Humanities Distinguished Lecturer at Fudan University. In 2015 she is to deliver the Yu Ying-shih Lectures at New Asia College. At the present she is working on two projects, respectively concerning modern Chinese intellectual history and the writing of Taiwanese history.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Quek Geok Hong via email: chsqgh@nus.edu.sg.