Cold War and East Asian Cultural Politics: Chinese Perspectives

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a workshop on the Cold War.

Organized by Xiaojue Wang, Assistant Professor, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, University of Pennsylvania; An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow

The formation of the global Cold War order generated not only geopolitical bifurcation, but also a new way of knowledge production, through which power worked to create allegiance and alienation, intimacy and hostility, divisions and distinctions. In many East Asian societies, modern Chinese literature and culture as well as the paradigm of Chinese studies were reconfigured conforming or resisting the leveling and polarizing forces of Cold War ideology. This process often produced and implicated new formations of ethnic and national identities, literature and cultural politics, reorientations of cultural tradition, and modernization of imaginations in these societies. The field of modern Chinese literature and culture has been marked by a tendency of compulsively rewriting its own disciplinary narratives, which has hitherto taken tradition/modernity, East/West as its discursive basis. By repositioning Chinese literary studies in the framework of Cold War East Asia, the workshop’s purpose is not only to add an inter-Asia, cross-regional comparative dimension, but also to bring diverse imageries of modernity in the larger East Asian area into dialogues.

For full workshop schedule and more information, click here.