In the second event for the Silk Road Imaginaries project at the Neubauer Collegium, Tamara Chin (Brown University) will share work from her book manuscript The Silk Road Spirit and the Modern Human Sciences, 1870–1970, in which she argues that the modern colonial encounter in and around China prompted unprecedented interest in the connected past. Chin will discuss the narrative frameworks and tropes that modern historians in East Asia, South Asia, and East Africa introduced over the period 1870–1970 for the systematic study of historical contact, showing the profoundly local figurations of the connected past for diverse histories of colonialism, enslavement, and religion. Prasenjit Duara (Duke University) will serve as the respondent.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

About the Speakers

Tamara Chin is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is the author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard, 2014).

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, 1988), Rescuing History from the Nation (University of Chicago, 1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman, 2003), and The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge, 2014).