LSHH Online Research Seminar: Dr Antje Richter on Medieval Chinese ‘Records of the Strange’

Join us for the first online talk of 2022–23 in the Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage Seminar Series!

Dr Antje Richter (University of Colorado Boulder) will be presenting on ‘Negotiating Replacement Anxiety in Medieval Chinese ‘Records of the Strange’’

Wednesday 2nd November, 5–6pm, online via Blackboard Collaborate
Link to join: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/91862c8a6e774d59bf75cd0111b0ae9e

This event is open to all. The online meeting room will open at 4.45pm.

Abstract

The large corpus of early medieval Chinese narratives now classified as records of the strange includes an abundance of stories of mistaken identity, whether an ostensibly human protagonist turns out to be an animal, or a plant is revealed to be a demon—to mention only two of many possibilities. This talk focuses on stories in which a nonhuman animal successfully impersonates a human but is eventually found out. The questions asked of these materials touch on issues of identity, privilege, and narrative: What does it take to pass as and replace a human, and possibly even a particular human? How are personal identity and privilege conceptualized, also across species and gender? How do narratives of initially mistaken and finally revealed “true” identity operate and what literary means do they employ? The talk proposes that the political and social changes that shook early medieval China moved questions about ethnic, social, and personal identity to the center of thought, and that the literary conventions of records of the strange made the genre particularly suited to deliberating and negotiating these matters, especially in terms of access to certain social spheres.

Speaker Bio

Antje Richter, Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, received her PhD from LMU Munich 1998. Her publications include Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China (2013), A History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture (2015), several co-edited volumes, and more than 30 articles. She is currently completing a monograph on notions of health and illness in medieval Chinese literature.

Story submitted by Laura Gill
lgill@lincoln.ac.uk