"The Sovereignty of the Dead and the Disorder of War in Twentieth Century China and Taiwan," with Professor Rebecca Nedostup

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies presents a talk by Rebecca Nedostup, historian of society, politics, and culture in modern China and Taiwan.

Alongside the rise of new state and transnational mechanisms to aid the enormous numbers of displaced and disinherited victims of mass violence and disaster during the twentieth century, other actors continued a most basic kind of social ordering: carrying out the proper burial of the dead. As warfare became more politicized, the nation-state and global regimes alike tightened controls over living and dead displaced persons. Nonetheless, the longstanding experience of lineages, native-place associations, religious groups, and charities was still necessary to ameliorate such problems. At the conclusion of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), private citizens expended enormous efforts to repatriate the known, lost dead to their original hometowns, or to rebuild community through the rewriting of genealogies. During a time when the central government floundered to meet its political promises, and the conclusion of one conflict hastily gave way to the prolonged mobilization of the Chinese Civil War and Cold War, socio-religious organizations and individuals worked to re-establish moral and cosmic order by emplacing the displaced dead.

Rebecca Nedostup a historian of society, politics, and culture in modern China and Taiwan. Among her interests are displacement and emplacement; the social roles and sovereignty of the living and the dead; and the critical analysis of the state over the long term. She is writing a book, Living and Dying in the Long War, on the making and unmaking of community among people displaced by conflict in China and Taiwan from the 1930s through the 1950s. Nedostup is the author of Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Harvard Asia Center 2009), and several other publications on religion, ritual, and politics in modern China, most recently, “Finding Nature in Religion, Hunting Religion from the Environment” in Religious Diversity & Ecological Sustainability in China (Routledge, 2014; Chinese edition中国宗教多元与生态可持续性发展研究, Academy Press, 2013). She teaches at Brown University.

Light Refreshments will be provided.

RSVP here.