Intellectuals and the Nation in China and India: A Public Roundtable

The China Beat is very slowly beginning to co-sponsor real events. Our first is this coming Friday.

Friday April 24, 2009, 2:00—3:30, in HIB [Humanities Instructional Building] 110 on the UC Irvine Campus

Sponsors:
UCI’s International Center for Writing and Translation
“The China Beat,” a UCI-based Group Blog

Co-sponsors:
The UCI History Department, the Center for Asian Studies, and the UCI Bookstore

Speakers:
Wang Chaohua, an Independent Scholar, the editor of One China, Many Paths, and a leader of the Tiananmen movement of 1989.

Pankaj Mishra, writer-in-residence and guest instructor UC Irvine (April 20-24), author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond (among other works), and a frequent contributor to many British, American, and Indian periodicals.

Perry Link, Chancellorial Chair for Innovation in Teaching Across the Disciplines, UC Riverside, author of Evening Chats in Beijing (among other works), and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Vinayak Chaturvedi, Associate Professor of History, UC Irvine, author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India and editor of Mapping Subaltern Studies.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom (moderator), Professor of History, UC Irvine, co-founder of “The China Beat,” and co-editor of China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance.

(Note: Some books will be available for sale and signing after the event)

This year has seen or will soon see the arrival of many important anniversaries in the history of Chinese and Indian nationalism—and the history of intellectual life in those two countries. 1909 was the year of the publication in India of two influential books on themes of independence (one of them by Gandhi), for example, while 1919 witnessed the May 4th Movement (China’s first great student-led mass movement), as well as India’s Amritsar Massacre, and 1989 saw the Tiananmen protests and June 4th Massacre take place in Beijing. This roundtable will use these and other 2009 anniversaries—e.g., the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising of 1959 and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China—as a starting point for a wide-ranging consideration of the changing contours of intellectual life in Asia’s two largest countries, and for reflections on the role of nationalist sentiments of varied kinds in the ideologies that have held sway and struggles that have occurred in each land.