The conference seeks to explore the transnational dimensions of cultural production in Late Qing and Early Republican China in the fields of literature, theatre and (later) film. China’s encounter with foreign cultural products engendered a fundamental transformation of China’s cultural heritage - in terms of new interpretations and evaluations of the past but also the creation of new forms of “modern” cultural products. Moreover, contact with new Western learning since the late Qing fostered an intellectual and later also academic reflection on these processes, which had its own influence on sinological studies in the West.

The conference’s goal is to shed light on these complex and intertwined processes and to explore various forms of transnational cooperation in cultural projects, to explore the international travel routes of ideas and cultural products, and the transformations of these cultural representations when situating them into a local context.

Historically, the main focus lies on cultural activities before the New Cultural Movement by which we seek to excavate cultural activities that have hitherto been covered by layers of ideologically informed historiography. Such a historiography, which has recently been analysed under the catchword of the “Burden of May Fourth” neglects the significance of these activities by stressing their either feudal or imperialist nature. Whereas this process has been documented rather extensively in recent past, there is still very little research on which specific cultural activities were suppressed or silenced down by this hegemonic act. Thus, one aim of this conference is to display the variety of alternatives existent and of reactions - be it acceptance and resistance - towards these cultural trends; and at the same time to examine the theoretical constructions in a nascent academic scholarship accompanying the process of their disappearance.

Topics that could be dealt with in this context are (among others): the constructions of literary/drama histories and compilation of a literary/drama canon; development of literary/drama critique in new modern media; the invention or construction of modern genres in literature and drama; the evolution of literature, drama and film as academic disciplines; transnational dimensions of the literary field or representations of identity constructions in a transnational environment. Please contact before January 31, 2004 :

Dr. Natascha Gentz (Vittinghoff)
Junior Professor
Frankfurt University
FB 09: Sinologie
Senckenberganlage 31-33
60325 Frankfurt
Email: gentz@em.uni-frankfurt.de, or
nvittin@gwdg.de