The tale of Lady Tan: negotiating place between Central and local in Song-Yuan-Ming China

This paper explores the story of Lady Tan across genres from biographical record to temple inscription and marvellous tale, highlighting different representations of ‘the local’ in these stories: the loss of local belonging for some, inscribing the morals of a local community for others. Focusing on this tale, this essay argues that locality and belonging were contested constructs, especially during the Song-Yuan-Ming transitional period. Ex-ploring how literati understood themselves in relation to their localities contributes to our understanding of literati identities and the meaning of ‘the local’, in a period with ‘weak central government’, or as a repeating pattern of centralisation and localisation. It reveals the complexities in-volved in giving meaning to locality and negotiating belonging. In Ji'an prefecture, the centralising policies of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors were felt locally and affected how literati positioned themselves between central government and local community. This focus on literati writings from a single prefecture suggests that a close reading of the negotiations that form part of constructing locality and belonging in Ji'an can reveal the potential for a complex interplay between central government and local communities throughout China

Beyond cultural and national identities : current re-evaluation of the Kominka literature from Taiwan\u27s Japanese period

This paper is an offshoot of a larger, ongoing project that intends to deal with the relationship between various artistic formations and the dominant culture in Taiwan\u27s post-1949 era. Though the lifting of martial law in 1987 has demarcated this era into two drastically different periods and a clearer contour of the new period seems to be just beginning to emerge in the mid-1990s, various cultural forces are still busily negotiating with each other. Nonetheless, there seems to be a general consensus as to what constitutes a core of the new dominant culture: the spirit of pen-t\u27u, or a nativist imperative that obliges one to treat Taiwan as the center in one\u27s cultural mapping. The primary driving force for this recent reconstitution of Taiwan\u27s dominant culture undoubtedly came from the momentous changes in the political arena in the post-martial law period. This rather crude factor, however, should not obscure our vision of the longer, more far-reaching evolutionary process of cultural change in contemporary Taiwan. Simply put, since the early 1980s, the older cultural hegemony has been seriously contested by forces coming from the Taiwanese cultural nationalism advocated in a vibrant pen-t\u27u (nativization) trend on the one hand, and from various radical cultural formations on the other. Limited by space, this paper will only deal with specific aspects of the nativization trend, with the main paradigm taken from the literary field. The paper will begin with a brief overview of the indigenous literary discourse in Taiwan’s post-1949 era, followed by analyses of recent scholarly re- evaluations of the Kominka literature from Taiwan’s Japanese period. Through this investigation, I hope to reach a better understanding of some important issues pertaining to contemporary cultural transformation in Taiwan, such as the role of cultural nationalism, the problem of identity construction, and efforts toward institutionalizing Taiwanese literary studies as an academic discipline

The moving boundaries of social heat: gambling in rural China

Whilst gambling for money was prohibited during the Maoist era, since the 1980s it has become very common in many rural areas of central China. It is often the major communal activity in many villages, a focus point of daily gossip and an object of government campaigns. I describe several forms of gambling common in Bashan Township, Eastern Hubei Province, and relate them to local discourses on capability/skill and luck/fate. Gambling reproduces ‘social heat’, which is a desired form of social effervescence as long as it remains within certain boundaries. But the boundaries of accepted gambling and social heat in local sociality as well as those given in official representations and state discourse, are contested, and both stand in an ambiguous relationship to each other; a relationship that is described in terms of ‘cultural intimacy’. Using medium-range concepts such as ‘social heat’ and ‘cultural intimacy’ the article attempts to avoid the pitfalls of totalizing approaches which explain popular gambling as consequence of or resistance to ‘neoliberalism’

Power, identity and antiquarian approaches in modern Chinese art

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late Imperial China. Following various publications by Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730-1797), Wu Yi 武億 (1745-1799) and Qian Daxin 錢大昕 (1728-1804) in the 18th century, the study and collecting of rubbings of Northern Wei stone inscriptions and steles was popular. Such spread of interest in jinshi, inscriptions on metal and stone, also formed a base for studying seal carving, epigraphy and archaic painting. While traditional antiquarians would cherish inscriptions which enabled them to correct mistakes in the transmitted historical texts and the Classics, however, much of the antiquarian activity was adapted to mere literary exercise or connoisseurship, for instance, to supplying materials which could provide models for seal-carving and calligraphy. Examples could be seen in the calligraphy works and seal carvings of the Xiling bajia 西泠八家 (Eight Masters of Xiling, i.e. Hangzhou), also known as Zhe School of Calligraphy and Carving. Their keen interest in seeking inspiration from steles for their artistic presentations has been recorded in their writing and painting. In addition, the way the scholar-collector of the 19th and early 20th centuries mounted the rubbings, seals, inscriptions, paintings, letters and textual evidence studies into one album shows a changing ideology: rubbings were not only for scholarly study in classical learning, but were regarded as part of the art form and were appreciated on various social occasions. The antiquarian movement ultimately served as a tool for re-writing art historiography in modern China. This paper aims to address the phenomenon and formation of the jinshi painting that dominated in late Imperial and early modern China. Through case studies of three important jinshi societies in Shanghai, I will investigate in what way literary taste from the southern region gradually replaced imperial patronage which was in decline after the Qianlong emperor’s reign, and how the shift of the cultural centre from Beijing to the southern regions from the mid-19th century onwards became a reflection of changing power and identity for cultural leaders and their perspectives in history and the history of objects

Yang Weizhen (1296-1370) and the Social Art of Painting Inscriptions

The dissertation explores the text-image relationship in late Yuan literati painting and the social dimension of painting inscriptions. Each of the first three chapters is devoted to the discussion of one painting and its inscriptions by the poet-calligrapher Yang Weizhen (1296-1370) and his contemporaries. By tracing the distinct assembling process of each work, the dissertation investigates the social conventions of painting inscriptions. The fourth chapter recounts the history of painting inscriptions from the fourth to the fourteenth century, with an emphasis on the social dimension, in order to place the late-Yuan practice in a historical context. Furthermore, the dissertation addresses the fluidity of meaning in Chinese painting and the role the audience (inscribers) played in the process of meaning-making. By bringing to light the social dimensions of painting inscriptions, this dissertation prompts a reevaluation of the use of inscriptions in the studies of Chinese painting

Producing space, producing China : a critical intervention

The concepts of the production and representation of space and place are receiving an increasing amount of attention in both the humanities and the social sciences. This paper will use the theoretical knowledge that has and continues to be produced on the subject to come to a better understanding of the spatial origins that constitute the place that is Chinese nation state. The analysis of spatial practises should shed light on the question what China is and wherefrom it receives the legitimacy for its social-spatial integrity. It will be argued that the arrival of modernity and its universal measurement of time and space were essential components in the gradual transformation from ethnocentric place to a territorially defined nation state. The political production and organisation of space employed for the formation of the nation state is argued to be the consequence of the same (globalising) logic that is now said to question and undermine its territorial integrity. Modernity and globalisation are in this paper, in other words, considered to be similar, if not identical, spatial-temporal concepts that both help to create and destruct places. This is arguably best visible in the constant production and reproduction of the most sophisticated of spatial organisations: our cities. I will argue that despite the changing face of cities, of which the disputed contemporary "globalisation" is but one of many, the spatial reality that is the modern nation state remains the same. This is not to return to an orthodox realist interpretation but to understand the very "stuff" that space and place are made of