Montag | 10.00 Uhr | Taiwan Lecture Series, Part I: Cosmologies of Difference on the Taiwan Frontier: Chinese Colonial Discourse in Comparative Perspective: Chinese Taxonomies of Difference: Arguing For and Against Territorial Expansion in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Part 1 Leigh Jenco (London School of Economics) These first two lectures set the stage for our more particular examination of Taiwan’s colonial history by considering in detail the indices of difference through which Han Chinese literati grounded their arguments for and against Chinese territorial expansion during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1636-1912) dynasties. Most recent historiography has assumed that Chinese colonial discourse follows patterns already identified in its modern European counterpart, specifically in its use of concepts such as race, ethnicity, and culture in defining difference. In contrast, I offer a four-part taxonomy that I argue renders Chinese colonial discourse more accurately in its own terms. The taxonomy might be described as follows: The first “assimilative” view defended colonial expansion as a form of inclusion, in which the imperial center was both normatively required and empirically able to transform ever greater numbers of China’s frontier peoples into proper civilized subjects. Expressed in terms of longstanding Chinese assumptions about the inherent universal tendencies (xing) of human moral development, this argument opposed a second, “exploitative” view in which non-Chinese were seen as sub-human inputs to colonial resource extraction. A third, “materialist” view held that civilized persons possessed different material natures than so-called “barbarians,” and urged the drawing of geographic boundaries between these two populations. Ironically, those separatists who claimed the most radical difference between civilized and barbarian tended to support decolonization policies, urged the protection of aboriginal groups against incursion by Han settlers, and criticized the extension of imperial power beyond the fairly narrow boundaries of the previous Ming dynasty. Their conclusions matched those advanced by holders of a fourth, “contingency” view, who saw non-Chinese barbarians as fully human, yet aligned with historically contingent and culturally relative timelines of development. In this lecture, we examine specifically the discourses associated with the “assimilative” and “exploitative” views. We attend to how xing, human nature, changed conceptually through time, starting from pre-Qin texts such as the Mencius through to their re-emergence in the Tang dynasty, then on to its application to colonial contexts in the late imperial period. How were these assumptions about xing deployed to shore up both state legitimacy and territorial expansion? Adresse Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) CATS R.010.01.02 Voßstrasse 2 69115 Heidelberg Homepage Veranstaltung https://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie/research/tls/taiwanlec19s_de.html Veranstalter Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) Homepage Veranstalter https://www.cats.uni-heidelberg.de Kontakt contact@cats.uni-heidelberg.de Alle Termine der Veranstaltung 'Taiwan Lecture Series, Part I: Cosmologies of Difference on the Taiwan Frontier: Chinese Colonial Discourse in Comparative Perspective': This year’s Taiwan Lecture Series offers object lessons with objects from Taiwan in the Museum of Ethnology (Seeing Taiwan), a lecture series with renowned LSE Historian Leigh Jenco on colonial Taiwan (Thinking Taiwan), and finally a workshop and concert with Taiwan composer Chen Shih-hui and famous Sheng-Player Wu Wei (Hearing Taiwan). Students who would like to take this class for credit will participate in all activities related to the class. They will each analyze and introduce one object, and they will prepare abstracts of the readings for the lecture series and the music workshop. At the end, students will write a seminar paper. Montag, 22. Juli 2019, 10.00 Uhr Chinese Taxonomies of Difference: Arguing For and Against Territorial Expansion in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Part 1 Leigh Jenco (London School of Economics) Montag, 22. Juli 2019, 14.00 Uhr Leigh Jenco (London School of Economics) Dienstag, 23. Juli 2019, 10.00 Uhr Chen Di’s Record of Formosa (1603): A Chinese Anti-Imperial Text in Global Perspective Leigh Jenco (London School of Economics) Dienstag, 23. Juli 2019, 14.00 Uhr The Dangers of Republican Freedom in Dutch Colonial Formosa, 1624-1662 Leigh Jenco (London School of Economics) |