“Four Poems and a Funeral: A Global Approach to the Chinese Boxer Crisis of 1900”. by Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine
Published: 19 January 2021
“Four Poems and a Funeral: A Global Approach to the Chinese Boxer Crisis of 1900”. by Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California, Irvine
4pm–5.30pm Wednesday 3 February 2021
Zoom Registration Required at: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlc-2vrjsjH9y4Pq_8Na6ej8pvAScZhg8G
Abstract
This talk will use analysis of a quartet of poems that were written by very different sorts of authors and a 1901 re-enactment of the Siege of Beijing to shed light on some often overlooked aspects of a much-studied series of events. The presentation will showcase some of the themes in the The Ghosts of 1900: Stories of China and the Year of the Boxers, the speaker's book in progress. One of these themes is that, in trying to make sense of the crisis in China while it was underway and soon after it was over, people in varied locales made use of a wide range of historical analogies, which likened the Boxers to famous figures of the past, ranging from from participants in North American Ghost Dance movements to participants in Scotland's Jacobite Risings.
Speaker bio
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020). He was editor of the Journal of Asian Studies from 2008 until 2018.
The Scottish Centre for China Research Seminar Programme gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the MacFie Bequest.
First published: 19 January 2021
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