4.29 | 5:30-7:00 PM | AB 1079
People have long seized on that which they consider elemental as building blocks of their symbolic worlds, including their national identities. Recent work in the environmental humanities contends that attention to “elemental materiality” can help us to decenter the human and think ecologically about social issues. In that vein, this talk looks at the formation of Chinese national identity from two fresh perspectives: firstly, human engagements with the earth, and secondly, human engagements with the atmosphere. The terrestrial perspective is more intuitive, since the concept of “national soil” persist into the twenty-first century. I connect this concept to the history of agrarian fundamentalism in twentieth century China, which forces us to grapple with the materiality of land and soil and disrupts popular ideas about the nature of nationalism. The celestial view is more counterintuitive: though tianxia (“under heaven”) is a popular shorthand term for China, it is typically land, not sky, that people see as constituting their national “geobody”. However, the history of atmospheric science in China reveals that scientists operating under international standards developed notions of the “Chinese climate”, in which China appeared to be a natural object. Taken together, these Janus-like perspectives help us to recognize the role of elemental forces in intellectual perceptions of China as a sovereign, limited, and transhistorical entity during the twentieth century.
