Reischauer Lecture Series: The Century of Self-Definition: How China has Thought About Itself and Defined Itself to the World from the Late Qing to the Present Day

Speaker: RANA MITTER, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, St. Cross College, University of Oxford
Discussant: JIE LI, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University

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LECTURE 2 OF 3: AN ERA OF EMOTION?
One factor that defines Chinese engagement with the world today is its highly emotional character, in terms of self-presentation that can move from saccharine to shrill at remarkable speed.  But emotion is not new – the use of the registers from exhilaration to depression defines the way that China, Japan and the Koreas have chosen to present themselves over the past century, whether through (often highly gendered) lenses of Asianism, revolution, martiality, discourses of “national humiliation,” or of global citizenship.  How much of this draws on emotional registers defined by modernity, and how much from a repertoire shaped by a culture with much longer roots?

For more information, please visit:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/rana-mitter-fairbank-center-annual-reischauer-lecture-series-night-two/

The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.