Time: Wednesday October 9, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM BJT
Zoom ID: 982 9603 2352
Speaker: Harriet Evans, Professor Emerita of Chinese Cultural Studies (University of Westminster) and Visiting Professor of Anthropology (LSE)
Abstract:
Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing’s “old city” in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar—one of the capital city’s poorest neighborhoods and only a stone’s throw from Tian’anmen Square—lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of Dashalar’s original inhabitants have been relocated, displaced by gentrification. In Beijing from Below Harriet Evans captures the last gasps of subaltern life in Dashalar. Drawing on oral histories that reveal memories and experiences of several neighborhood families, she reflects on the relationships between individual, family, neighborhood, and the state; poverty and precarity; gender politics and ethical living; and resistance to and accommodation of party-state authority. Evans contends that residents’ assertion of belonging to their neighborhood signifies not a nostalgic clinging to the past, but a rejection of their marginalization and a desire for recognition. Foregrounding the experiences of the last of Dashalar’s older denizens as key to understanding Beijing’s recent history, Evans complicates official narratives of China’s economic success while raising crucial questions about the place of the subaltern in history.
Speaker’s Bio:
Harriet Evans is Professor Emerita of Chinese Cultural Studies (University of Westminster) and Visiting Professor of Anthropology (LSE). She has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexuality in China, and on political posters and visual culture of the Mao era. Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center was published by Duke University Press in 2020. Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in, co-edited with Michael Rowlands, and based on a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, was published in 2021 by Lexington Books. Evans is currently developing a new collective and multidisciplinary project on the shifting cultural legacies of Chinese and Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean since the early nineteenth century.
Duke Kunshan University 苏ICP备16021093号
