Center for Historical Research

Presented by Xin Fan of the University of Cambridge as part of the Anger in History series at the Ohio State University Department of History's Center for Historical Research.

The vast distance between the Far East and the Far West is not only a gap in geography but also one in feelings. As early modern European thinkers failed to emotionally connect themselves to the Chinese body, they were debating the hypothetical question of killing a mandarin (Ginzburg, 1994; Hayot, 2009). This lack of sympathy continued to exist in the twentieth century, and it became a root of the Western bewilderment of the Chinese anger. To many, this anger seems to register an irrational, xenophobic aspect of Chinese nationalism engineered by the party state. Chinese propaganda further reinforces this stereotype, according to which Chinese people are always angry and their feelings are so easily hurt by foreign countries (King, 2017). Yet the making of the angry Chinese is more than just a state project. In this paper, I attempt to contextualize and humanize the Chinese anger by historicizing this emotional feeling to the live-or-die experience during the War of Resistance against Japan. As the case study on Ping-ti Ho’s critique of New Qing History shows, the cultural memory of the war and the emotional attachment to one’s culture together contributed to Chinese educated elite’s growing resentment against Western perspectives on China. The Chinese anger is not just a far cry of nationalist emotions but also a bodily experience of war and national survival.

About Xin Fan: Xin Fan is a Teaching Associate in Modern Chinese History at the University of Cambridge. His most recent publication is "World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century" (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He also co-edited "Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia" (Brill, 2018) with Professor Almut-Barbara Renger at the Free University Berlin. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, “The Right to Talk about China: The Rise of Emotional Politics, 1900 to 1949,” as well as collaborating with scholars in Europe, America, and Asia on several projects on nationalism, historiography, and conceptual history.

Co-sponsors of this talk are the Institute for Chinese Studies, the Department of Political Science, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Mershon Center.

Featuring Professor Ling Zhang from the Department of History at Boston College.

This talk introduces part of my new book entitled 108 Meters. The Xin’an river valley in east China historically sustained an affluent society with a dense human population. When a major dam was installed in the river in the mid-twentieth century, the valley experienced a dramatic transformation. The transformation was first and foremost geological. Following that was the changes to the physical, socioeconomic, and emotional relationships between people and the land that went under water. Seventy years have gone by. Mourning of the lost land has passed on across three generations. It has evolved into diverse forms and prompted different actions. The various earthly memories those men and women have made and continue making, as my oral history and ethnography reveal, are reshaping that watery world, especially in the new historical context of environmental degradation, resource shortage, and climate change.

About Ling Zhang: Born and raised in a river town in east China, Ling Zhang studied literature, philosophy, and history at Peking University in China and economic and environmental history at University of Cambridge. Her first book The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) received the 2017 George Perkins Marsh Prize for the Best Book in Environmental History by the American Society for Environmental History. Ling is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Shanxi University in China. With John McNeill, she co-edits the “Studies in Environment and History” book series published by Cambridge University Press. As an associate researcher at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, she convenes a research series called “Environment in Asia.”

This Ohio State University Center for Historical Research (CHR) presentation was co-sponsored by the Institute for Chinese Studies, the East Asian Studies Center, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Find out more about CHR at https://chr.osu.edu.

Featuring Dorothy Noyes, Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. Volodymyr Zelensky is not the first actor to have come to the rescue of liberal principles in a time of crisis. Indeed, a charismatic gesture of self-sacrifice is the inevitable turning point in liberalism’s formulaic narrative of decadence and recovery. In accounts built on this formula, the personal performance serves as a general call to order, an example that not only validates neglected norms but inspires both active emulation and mimetic identification. A year on from the Russian invasion and Ukraine’s remarkable response, I will examine the Western uptake of Ukraine’s and Zelensky’s astute self-presentation as exemplars of liberal democracy. While this well-coordinated performance complex has served the immediate purpose of garnering Western resources for the war effort, the chain of emulations prompted by it has generated its own logic. The exemplary lineage claimed in Zelensky’s performances has arguably encouraged a Zeitenwende straight back to the twentieth century. In contrast, Ukraine’s earlier involvement in another chain of emulation, the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring, evoked the forward-moving, foundational episodes of the liberal order rather than its subsequent defense. This second exemplary network became highly consequential for Ukraine’s relationship with Russia, but was insufficient to garner meaningful Western support. Dorothy Noyes is Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. Noyes studies political performance and the traditional public sphere in Europe, with an emphasis on how shared symbolic forms and indirect communication mediate coexistence in situations of endemic social conflict. She also writes on folklore theory and the international policy careers of culture concepts. Among her books are Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016); and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy, co-authored with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Her current book projects are Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics and, co-edited with Tobias Wille, The Global Politics of Exemplarity. Presented by the Ohio State University Department of History Center for Historical Research (CHR). Find out more about CHR at chr.osu.edu.

A talk by Joseph Manning, Professor of Classics and History, Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale University. Introduction by Professors Sara Butler and John Brooke. The talk is followed by a comment by James Stagge, Civil Environmental and Geodetic Engineering, Ohio State University.  

The 160’s BCE was the critical decade in Ptolemaic history. Environmental factors have never been considered until now in the understanding of social dynamics, or in the economic, military and fiscal history of the dynasty. The decade has often been marked as the beginning of serious state decline. The causes of this decline have often been identified: internal problems (ethnic tension between Greeks and Egyptians; over-extraction of resources leading to unrest, sometimes serious and sustained, currency inflation), depravity of the kings themselves, and the increasing political and military domination of the Mediterranean by Rome. Polybius adds political neglect, moral decay, and Ptolemy IV’s love of opulence and a succession of young kings after Ptolemy IV. A new chronology of volcanic eruptions from polar ice core analysis affords us an opportunity to reevaluate historical dynamics within Egypt, to examine more critically how shocks to the annual Nile flood may or may not have played a role in “decline” and social unrest. Ice cores also allow us to tie events in Egypt to those across the Indian Ocean in the same years.  

This talk is part of the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research's Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change Series. For more information about CHR, please visit https://chr.osu.edu.  Co-sponsored by the Departments of Classics and Anthropology, the College of Earth Science, and the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center.

This talk was given by Prof. Steve Kern at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University. It is part of the Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change Series.

Stephen Kern is a Humanities Distinguished Professor in the  Department of History at Ohio State University. The commentator for the talk is Professor Christopher Otter from the Department of History at Ohio State.

Commentators judge that new speedy communication, transportation, and production technologies over the past forty years have created many unforeseen problems including unemployment, mental illness, alienation, addiction, and environmental degradation, problems that some interpret as crises. This paper traces dialectically the impact of these new accelerating technologies from 1880 to the present and shows how they also stimulated new thinking about and experiences of slower paces. It argues that a fuller understanding of an acceleration of experience should interpret how contrasting paces as faster or slower arise out of each other. The new technologies also increased choices for whatever pace was appropriate for many human needs, presto or adagio, that those increasing choices had positive existential value.

Find out more about this series at https://chr.osu.edu

Brian Smedley, Director of the American Psychological Association’s Health Disparities Office and Chief of Psychology in the Public Interest, presented this talk at the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research as part of its series, "1619 and Beyond: Explorations in Atlantic Slavery and its American Legacy." 

His work centers around the issues of health care equity and the ways in which Psychology can help us to resolve some of the most deadly public health and social welfare issues we face today.  He is a co-founder of the National Collaboration for Health Equity and has served as Vice President of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Health Policy Institute.

Find out more about the Center for Historical Research at https://chr.osu.edu.

A talk by Michael Berry, Professor, Modern Chinese Literature and Film, UCLA at the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research.

Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang began as a blog which ran for sixty days from January 25 through March 25, 2020, documenting the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. The blog quickly became an online phenomenon, attracting tens of millions of Chinese readers. Wuhan Diary also provided an important portal for Chinese around the world to understand the outbreak, the local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. The diary featured a curious mixture of quotidian details from Fang Fang’s daily routine under quarantine, medical insights from the author’s doctor friends, and brave observations about the official response. Eventually, Fang Fang’s account would become the target of a series of online attacks by “ultra-nationalists,” spawning debate about COVID-19, Sino-US Relations, and nature of civil society in China. As the English translator of Wuhan Diary, this lecture will alternate between first-hand insights from the translation process and broader observations on how the diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate in China, ultimately hinting at the power of writing.

This talk is part of the Center for Historical Research Series, "Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change." 

Presented by Roberto Barrios, Professor of Anthropology, University of New Orleans at the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research. Introductions by Professor John Brooke, Dept. of History and Prof. Jeffrey Cohen, Dept. of Anthropology, Ohio State University. This talk is part of the Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change Series. 

In the case of Western European historiography, the origin of the crisis concept is often traced to Classical Greece, where it was used in the medical and legal fields to denote decision or a judgement. During the Middle Ages, the latter meaning of crisis as judgement lent itself to application in Christian teleological histories of salvation, with the Final Judgement being conceived as a crisis that would mark the transition between two qualitatively different temporalities: the history of humanity and the eternal utopia of the Kingdom of Heaven. This Christian Medieval meaning of crisis would eventually permeate 18th Century historiography, where the term came to describe critical moments of upheaval that marked transitions between different epochs, a meaning that endured in 19th Century evolutionary social theory.   

At the same time, crisis’ classical meaning as judgement is also commonly seen as the origin of the 18th Century Western European notion of critique. In 20th Century social science, this connection between crisis and critique resurfaced when a number of scholars came to see upheaval as a methodologically opportune moment that makes visible socio-political fault lines, contradictions, and structures that are more difficult to document during times of “normalcy.” Most notable among these scholars was Marshall Sahlins, who popularized the term crise révélatrice. But proponents of the revelatory merits of crises drew a modernist blindside as they assumed the vantagepoint for beholding a crisis was one that was informed by Marxist or political ecological theory, granting these analytical perspectives status as universally applicable transcendental critiques. Since the 1960s, post-structural deconstructions of Marxist analyses have helped us recognize the situatedness of Eurocentric social theory. In light of these contributions and in the context of global challenges such as anthropogenic climate change and the COVID 19 Pandemic, this presentation explores the following questions: If crises are, indeed, revelatory, what role does the beholder’s epistemological vantagepoint play in what is revealed to the observer? If crises are laden with the potential for social change, can they also bring about epistemological change and if so, for whom and how?  This presentation was co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology.

Comments are turned off.