“All Men Are Strangers”: The Failure of Peripatetic Rulership and the Birth of the Private Self

Description

Sui Emperor Yang is a notorious “bad last ruler” in Chinese history. His Grand Canal project, his establishment of multiple capitals, and his frequent tours throughout the realm are traditionally regarded as acts of extravagance and self-indulgence. This talk, which is part of my forthcoming book Writing Empire and Self: Poetic and Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China, argues that imperial mobility was an effective strategy for creating a cohesive polity out of the multipolar world of the late Northern and Southern Dynasties, and that its discontinuation in fact contributed to Sui’s downfall. Examining how the Sui rulers’ strenuous efforts at establishing a coherent polity through building a national transportation and communication network are belied by the failure of peripatetic rulership and by a pervasive sense of blockage and displacement voiced by Sui courtiers in their private poems, this talk shows that poetic articulation of fragmentation directly contradicts the state’s construction of infrastructural coherence. The split between private and public created a space for the discourse of a private self that could not be co- opted into the imperial system by the state.

Speaker

Xiaofei Tian is Ford Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies at Harvard. Born in the city of Harbin in 1971, she graduated from Peking University in 1989 and obtained PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 1998.  After teaching at Colgate University and Cornell University, she joined Harvard EALC in 2000. While her main teaching and research area is Chinese literature and cultural history of the Middle Period (first through thirteenth century CE), she has also taught and published on late imperial and modern literature and culture. Her interest in poetry and poetics, the mediality of literature, court culture, and Chinese literature’s complex negotiations with Buddhism has been driving much of her work. Her book Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture (a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2006) examines how scribes, editors, readers, and commentators participated in constructing the image of the iconic poet. Another book, Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557), contextualizes the splendid court literature of a much maligned period in Chinese history and proposes the emergence of a new poetics informed by the Buddhist view of the phenomenal world. Her book in Chinese on the great sixteenth-century novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (秋水堂論金瓶梅) , reprinted many times since its first publication, explores the Buddhist vision embodied in the narrative of the novel’s Chongzhen recension, and argues for an awareness of the cultural politics and ideological choices embedded in modern scholarship.