Events

This event is organized by swissnex, Singapore, and in partnership with University of Zurich and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

This is a closed door event, by invitation only.

ABSTRACT

This year’s early March offered a strange sight to citizens of Shanghai’s outskirts: more than ten thousand dead pigs were floating downstream on Huangpu river, heading for the ocean. Only a few days later, several thousand dead ducks followed on their heels. The local authorities denied any impact on Shanghai’s drinking water, although this part of the river is used as a source. In view of the grave environmental problems that currently haunt China, netizens compared the agro-industrial assault on the nation’s vital resources to a defeat in war, employing a famous quotation from their rich poetic tradition. The lines from the Tang poem, “The nation destroyed though mountains and rivers remain. / In the city in spring grass and trees are lush”, only required a minor editing, or re-assemblage. Even the effects threaten to be comparable, since both scenarios refer to man-made disasters.

In traditional Chinese culture, the rivers and mountains were considered to be the moral and spiritual essence of the nation. They constituted a sacred geography where the life force of renewal and reconstruction remained active, though at times hidden – for instance when a war was lost or the imperial court in moral decline. Since the environmental effects of China’s capitalist rise have surfaced, concerned writers and artists engage with these problems in a way that is both poetic and philosophical. In this lecture, I will explore the legacies and connectivities which are invoked in these green narratives and analyze some ideas concerning the dynamics and possible solutions envisioned in these cultural responses. We will highlight aspects of ethics, aesthetics, pedagogy, history and political action and contextualize them in the conceptual framework of nature writing.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Andrea M. Riemenschnitter is Chair Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich. Previously she taught at the University of Heidelberg. She is Honorary Fellow at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and has held visiting professor positions and visiting research fellowships at Beijing Normal University, the University of California, Berkeley and Tsinghua University, Beijing. Born in Munich, Germany, she was trained in Chinese studies, German literature, musical studies and social sciences in Bonn, Goettingen, Munich and Taipei. Her books include The Visible and the Invisible: Poems Leung Ping-kwan (ed., 2012); Carnival of the Gods. Mythology, Modernity and the Nation in China’s 20th Century (in German, 2011); Jia Pingwa – Stories from Taibai Mountain (ed., in German, 2009); Diasporic Histories. Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (ed. with D. Madsen, 2009); Legends from the Swiss Alps – Ruishi A’erbeisishan de chuanshuo (with P.K. Leung, 2009); A Friend to the Text. Explorations of Chinese Antiquity (ed. with R. Altenburger and M. Lehnert, in German, 2009); Gao Xingjian – Sleepwalking. Reflections on Theatre (tr. with M. Gieselmann and others, in German, 2000); China Between Heaven and Earth. Literary Cosmography and National Crisis in the 17th Century (in German, 1998). In her research, she focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese cultural history (late Ming to present), theories and methodologies of cultural analysis, processes of cultural flow and exchange, Chinese transnational and translation studies, theories and mythologies of/in modernity, as well as theatre and performance studies. In her new project she studies environmental theories and literature as a visiting senior research fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.