Annual Worldmaking Conference 2023 - The Making of Epochal Events— Narrating Turning Points in Chinese History:
June 15, Thursday
13:30 – 14:15
Welcome
Björn Alpermann (on behalf of the Worldmaking Center)
Jens Brandenburg & Michael Sondermann (Federal Ministry)
Barbara Mittler (on behalf of the Heidelberg project): Epochal Moments and Grammars and Logics of Worldmaking
14:15 – 15:45
Keynote Address I by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (University of Bielefeld): Epochal Events and Historical Narration
15:45 – 16:00
Coffee Break
16:00 – 17:15
Panel I. Periodization and Master Narratives: Situating East Asia in Global Twentieth-Century History
Chair: Dominic Sachsenmaier (University of Göttingen)
Sebastian Conrad (Freie Universität Berlin): Making Japan Modern: Periodization and the Nation
Viren Murthy (University of Madison-Wisconsin / Fellow Berlin): Hegelian Master Narratives and Periodizing East Asian Modernity
Edward Wang (Rowan University / Fellow Göttingen): Why were 1840 and 1949 not Turning Points in Modern Chinese Historiography? A Tentative Thesis
Barbara Mittler (University of Heidelberg): Rethinking Renaissance: History as Shared Heritage
17:15 – 17:30
Coffee Break
17:30 – 19:00
Panel II. Narrating Environmental Histories: Actors, Discourses, Devices
Chair: Hans van Ess (LMU München)
Wang Yizhou (Hong Kong Baptist University / Former Fellow Heidelberg): Plant as an Actor, Painting as a Device: Human-Nature Narratives on Ming-Qing Transition
Maxime Decaudin (University of Hong Kong / Fellow Heidelberg): Narrating the ‘Barren Rock’: The Environmental Origin of Hong Kong’s Colonial Myths
Sara Landa (University of Heidelberg): Metamorphoses and Shifts of Perspective: Narrating (and Questioning) Epochal Change in Man-Animal-Relations
Wang Yiman (University of California, Santa Cruz / Fellow Heidelberg): Mediating Climate Change in the PRC Adresse Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) 010.01.05 Voßstrasse 2 69115 Heidelberg Homepage Veranstaltung https://www.worldmaking-china.org/en/annual-conference/ 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 'Annual Worldmaking Conference 2023 - The Making of Epochal Events— Narrating Turning Points in Chinese History': “The epochal event [is] (1) an emerging category of a new kind of historical thought [that] is best conceived of as (2) a hyper-historical event that (3) brings about a ‘new reality’ and thereby (4) separates two worlds (5) in its capacity to signal the most momentous transformative changes (6) that extend beyond the limits of human experience (7) both in the world of human affairs and in the more-than-human world of the human-technology-nature entanglement.”[1]
Chinese history has been marked by radical changes in society, culture and the environment, which are often linked to specific events: famines, rebellions, inventions. This conference seeks to investigate how such epochal events determine our understanding of Chinese history and structures its narration. Potential contributions shall investigate how these events were reflected upon by specific actors and in specific media, and how they shaped institutions and social structures. A special emphasis shall be placed on how such events are recorded (in texts, images, statistics etc.) and situated in a particular vision of the Chinese past and future, arguing for their “epochal” quality.
We seek to engage with the question in how far such events are “epochal” at all, whether they necessarily mark a break with the past, thus promising the dawning of a new epoch, a “new reality” (Simon), or whether the “epochal” can also be constructed to make a claim of historical discontinuity that might be quite at odds with the experiences of the actors involved. With Bernard Stiegler we also want to ask whether there is a way to end the epochal: the “epoch of the absence of epoch,” the absence of any collective vision for the future that he attributes to the current disjuncture of our technical and social systems.[2] Contributors are invited to consider how such epochal events or certain types of periodization impacted in their own fields of specialty – if they did at all. They are also free to introduce events that are meaningful within a given discipline, community region, or time period but ignored or marginalized in other narratives – suggesting alternative epochal divides.
[1] Zoltan B.Simon, The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 114.
[2] Bernard Stiegler. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity 2019, chap. 2.
Donnerstag, 15. Juni 2023, 13.30 Uhr Annual Worldmaking Conference 2023 - The Making of Epochal Events— Narrating Turning Points in Chinese History
Freitag, 16. Juni 2023, 09.30 Uhr Annual Worldmaking Conference 2023 - The Making of Epochal Events— Narrating Turning Points in Chinese History
Samstag, 17. Juni 2023, 09.15 Uhr Annual Worldmaking Conference 2023 - The Making of Epochal Events— Narrating Turning Points in Chinese History
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