Zurück zur Übersicht Mittwoch, 30.06.2021

Mittwoch
08
DEZ

18.00 Uhr

On the Edge - Feeling Precarious in China

Prof. Dr. Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford (UK), Faculty of Oriental Studies

On the evening of November 18th, 2017, a blaze broke out in the basement of a two-storey building in Xinjian urban village, located just outside Beijing’s Sixth Ring Road. At least 19 people, including 8 children, died in the flames. Yet in the days that followed locals had no chance to mourn. Before the gutted building was even fully soused, the local authorities had issued a comprehensive eviction order for Xinjian. Using fire safety as its rationale, the city government condemned the entire settlement: its inhabitants, perhaps as many as 250,000 of them, were forced to evacuate their homes.

Xinjian had emblematized inequality and exclusion well before the fire and evictions of 2017, and its residents long counted among contemporary China’s most precarious people. What kind of change, then, might the evictions mark? Or to put this another way, what does it mean to be officially banished from a place of already de facto exile? In this talk, I suggest that the evictions provoke questions about the limits of inequality and exclusion as meaningful descriptors of social conditions in our times. These limits have prompted Saskia Sassen to argue that we are now witnessing “the emergence of new logics of expulsion” in the global political economy – forces which make the language we use to describe immiseration on a systematic scale too tepid and which compel a rethink of how we define precarity, surely a master concept for the present. In this talk, I explore the logic of expulsion in contemporary China, its capacity to foment both solidarity and social strife, and its relationship with cultural forms. In particular, I look at how people living under precarity in China’s new socialist modern use culture as a space to vent feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain that are taboo under the diktats of so-called harmonious society.

Margaret Hillenbrand is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research and publications to date have focused on literary and visual culture in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, and her latest book, Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China, appeared with Duke University Press in 2020. She is now working on a new project about the impact of precarity on cultural practices in post-millennial China.

Homepage Veranstaltung

https://www.cats.uni-heidelberg.de/medien/lsm.html

Veranstalter

Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS)

Homepage Veranstalter

https://www.cats.uni-heidelberg.de

Kontakt

Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies

Anmeldung E-Mail

livingthesocialistmodern@gmail.com

Alle Termine der Veranstaltung 'Living the Socialist Modern: The Chinese Communist Party at 100—Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives ':

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. What did it mean to “live with the Specter”, to experience what one might call the making of the “Socialist Modern” that found a first point of culmination with the foundation of the CCP in 1921?

In a digital lecture series organized by the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies in Heidelberg (CATS), in cooperation with the ERC-funded research project READCHINA: The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China in Freiburg and the European Institute for Chinese Studies (EURICS) in Paris, we suggest unpacking the impact of this event on lives on the ground in a long century of Chinese and global history. Deliberately designed to offer alternative “histories” of the Chinese Communist Party, we will provide interdisciplinary views and experiences of the “Socialist Modern” and its many variants in a century now past, but also in the present and in the future, probing into different positions from not only from Political Science and Party History, but also from from Everyday History, Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Literary Studies and Sociology, Art History, etc.

Each lecture will focus on a specific time slot, marked by ten-year steps in the century of history that we are looking back to: 1921, 1931, 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, 2011, 2021. Lectures will begin on a particular date branch out, back and forth to the decades before and after so as to provide a long-term view of the situation at hand! We will encourage the use of a variety of different sources and global perspectives on the materials at hand.

Mittwoch, 14. April 2021, 18.00 Uhr

Young, Marxist, and Martyred: The First Movers of Chinese Communism

Wen-hsin YEH, University of California, Berkeley (USA), Department of History

Mittwoch, 21. April 2021, 18.00 Uhr

Plutarch and Transcultural Life Narratives: Analyzing Early CCP Leaders, Cai Hesen and Zhao Shiyan

Marilyn LEVINE (Central Washington University)

Mittwoch, 28. April 2021, 18.00 Uhr

Communist cosmopolitanism

Prof. Dr. Hans van de Ven, University of Cambridge (UK), Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Mittwoch, 05. Mai 2021, 14.00 Uhr

Living as a Cog in the Machine

Prof. Ishikawa Yoshihiro, Kyoto University (Japan), Institute for Research in Humanities

Mittwoch, 12. Mai 2021, 18.00 Uhr

Living the Socialist Modern in 1941

Prof. Dr. Timothy Cheek, University of British Columbia (Canada), Department of History

Mittwoch, 12. Mai 2021, 18.30 Uhr

Creative Life in Yan’an

Prof. Dr. Ban Wang, Stanford University (USA), Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages

Mittwoch, 26. Mai 2021, 16.00 Uhr

1951 - A “Truth Regime” in the Making

Prof. Dr. David Wang, Harvard University (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Mittwoch, 26. Mai 2021, 16.30 Uhr

Singing, Recording, Promoting – New Sounds for New China

Prof. Dr. Andreas Steen, Aarhus University (Denmark), School of Culture and Society

Mittwoch, 02. Juni 2021, 16.00 Uhr

Socialist Transformation of Man

Dr. Xiaohong Xiao-Planes, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Department of Chinese Studies, Paris (France)

Mittwoch, 09. Juni 2021, 18.00 Uhr

A Peripatetic Revolutionary in the 1950s

Prof. Dr. Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz (USA), History Department

Mittwoch, 09. Juni 2021, 18.30 Uhr

Performing New China through Campaigns and Consolidation: The View from 1951

Prof. Dr. Julia Strauss, SOAS, University of London (UK), Department of Politics and International Studies

Mittwoch, 16. Juni 2021, 18.00 Uhr

New Cultural Workers and their Self-Identities: The View from 1961

Prof. Dr. Xiaomei Chen, University of California, Davis (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Mittwoch, 16. Juni 2021, 18.30 Uhr

Fighting against Mao with words

Prof. Dr. Anne Kerlan, L'Ecole des Haute Etudes ein Sciences Social, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Mittwoch, 23. Juni 2021, 18.00 Uhr

1961, a year of not enough significance?

Prof. Dr. Karl Gerth, University of California - San Diego, La Jolla (USA), Department of History

Mittwoch, 23. Juni 2021, 18.30 Uhr

Chinese Socialism after the Loss of the Communist Horizon

Dr. Puck Engman, University of California, Berkeley (USA), Department of History

Mittwoch, 30. Juni 2021, 16.00 Uhr

Echolocating the Social

Prof. Dr. Dayton Lekner, Universität Freiburg, Institut für Sinologie

Mittwoch, 30. Juni 2021, 16.30 Uhr

1971 - Listening to Enemy Radio in the Socialist Media Ecology

Prof. Dr. Jie Li, Harvard University, Cambridge / Massachusetts (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Donnerstag, 01. Juli 2021, 16.30 Uhr

建党一百周年座谈会 — A ROUNDTABLE:

The Studying Party History Small Group

Mittwoch, 07. Juli 2021, 18.00 Uhr

The CCP Goes Global: International Legacies of Cultural Revolution Maoism

Prof. Dr. Julia Lovell, Birkbeck, University of London (UK), Department of History Classics and Archaeology

Mittwoch, 27. Oktober 2021, 18.00 Uhr

Forms of Credibility, Patterns of Identification

Prof. Isabelle Thireau, L' École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Mittwoch, 27. Oktober 2021, 18.30 Uhr

1981 - The Chinese Communist Party and the Search for Historical Justice

Prof. Dr. Daniel Leese, Universität Freiburg, Institut für Sinologie

Mittwoch, 03. November 2021, 18.00 Uhr

Modular Socialism - Interior Design for Everyday Life in 1980s China

Prof. Dr. Jennifer Altehenger, Oxford University (UK), Faculty of History

Mittwoch, 03. November 2021, 18.30 Uhr

Restoring the Food industry in Reform Era China

Prof. Dr. Francoise Sabban, L' École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris (France), Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine

Mittwoch, 10. November 2021, 18.00 Uhr

The Imprint of Maoist Socialism on Private Life in urban China - Shanghai in the 1980s

Prof. em. Dr. Deborah Davis, Yale University, New Haven / Conneticut (USA), Department fo Sociology

Mittwoch, 17. November 2021, 18.00 Uhr

Zhao Ziyang and the Voices for Reform

Prof. Dr. Klaus Mühlhahn, Präsident der Zeppelin Universität, Friedrichshafen

Mittwoch, 17. November 2021, 18.30 Uhr

Radio Audiobooks in Reform Era China

Prof. Dr. Paola Iovene, The University of Chicago (USA), Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Mittwoch, 24. November 2021, 19.00 Uhr

The CCP Faces a Second Undulation of the Democracy Movement

Prof. Dr. Perry Link, University of California, Riverside (USA), Department of Comparative Literature and Languages

Mittwoch, 01. Dezember 2021, 16.00 Uhr

Return to Communism? The Advent of the Xi Jinping Era in China

Prof. Dr. Steve Tsang, SOAS University of London (UK), China Institute

Mittwoch, 01. Dezember 2021, 17.00 Uhr

Living in the Emergent Techno-Developmental State

Prof. Dr. Ya-wen Lei, Harvard Uniersity, Cambridge / MA (USA), Department of Sociology

Mittwoch, 08. Dezember 2021, 18.00 Uhr

On the Edge - Feeling Precarious in China

Prof. Dr. Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford (UK), Faculty of Oriental Studies

Mittwoch, 15. Dezember 2021, 18.00 Uhr

From Anti-Imperialist Coalitions of the Past to Today's Milk Tea Alliance

Prof. Dr. Jeff Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine (USA), Department of History