| DATE: | Saturday-Sunday, December 7-8, 2002 |
|---|---|
| TIME: | Saturday 9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Sunday 9:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon |
| PLACE: | IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton St., 6th Floor |
| FORMAT: | Workshop |
| SPONSOR: | Center for Chinese Studies |
This conference aims to explore the extent to which a new Chinese historiography has emerged over the past few decades, along with the roll-back of state control and the emergence of a market economy. We also want to explore the ways in which the Chinese past is being reconfigured from beyond the confines of the modern nation-state. The linear, teleological and modern professional historiography associated with the Chinese nation-state and the academic institutions it funds and controls no longer exert the same degree of dominance over the way people approach and interpret the past. Engagement with the past is now more varied and more contested, as can be seen, for instance, in new local gazetteers, in film and television as historiography, in the way historians borrow literary modes, in school textbooks, in oral historiography, and in the considerable appeal of biography and autobiography. History produced within academic institutions is now also more diverse and contested. These new developments demand attention to the discursive nature of historiography. What kinds of conventions are shaping these new histories? How are they being determined by the institutions producing them (ranging from television stations to local government institutions)? And how do they relate to the general social and political changes that are occurring throughout the Chinese-speaking world today?
