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Canceled: Notes from the Home Front: One Woman’s Chinese Revolution, 1897-1975

Thursday Lecture Series, Ambivalence

dateApril 2, 2020 timeThursday, 12:15pm EDT location The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University
notification

This event has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience and look forward to rescheduling at a later date. Please watch our newsletter announcements for updates on rescheduled events.

Organizer
  • JM Chris Chang
Notes
  • Audience open exclusively to Columbia faculty, students, and invited guests
  • All others interested in attending, please email SOF/Heyman at [email protected].
Illustration of young person reading with Chinese script above and caption "The Ladies' Journal"

How can we re-create the world of a woman who left no trace in the public record? This talk considers the life of a woman from a politically active Chinese family. She was the daughter of a reformer, wife of a Nationalist official educated at MIT, mother of an underground Communist revolutionary. Unlike the men in her family, she left no first-person accounts of her life. She emerges primarily in interviews with her son and in an unfinished and unpublished historical novel by her daughter. Filial duty, household politics, sexual propriety, marital expectations, maternal loyalty, domestic cosmopolitanism, and shrewd political judgment mingle in her story, raising questions about where revolution lies and how we should track its less visible effects. Her life illuminates the gendering of China’s long revolution, the central importance of women as symbols of the nation, and the limits of what we can know about the past.

Guest lecturer: Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz
Distinguished Professor of History