Memory and Community in Early Southern Song

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a discussion with Professor Stephen West on how texts produced from, or attributed to memory, were instrumental in creating localized "imagined communities" of alienated and estranged refugees in and around Hangzhou.

Speaker: Stephen West, Department of Languages and Literatures, Arizona State University

According to Li Chi (1928), the flood of refugees from North China during the Jurchen invasions was the largest single migration in Chinese history. The effects of that migration ranged from the influence of standard Central Plain dialect (汴洛 or 中原官話) on the dialect spoken in Hangzhou to a flood of text production that lamented the fall of the Northern Song. This talk will investigate how texts produced from, or attributed to memory, were instrumental in creating localized "imagined communities" of alienated and estranged refugees in and around Hangzhou. Such an investigation is meant to counter the post-Enlightenment impulse to identify such texts as mimetic representations of the objects, events, and people of the north that they describe and to further appropriate these localized voices into seamless narratives on the development of Chinese cities and their relationship to political change.