10.12.2020Other Spaces, Other Bodies: Exploring the Literary Reconfigurations of the Chinese Prisonscape

Referentin

Dr. Serena De Marchi (Stockholm University)

Datum und Zeit

10. Dezember 2020, 14:00 - 16:00 Uhr

Abstract:

In his novel The Four Books, writer Yan Lianke characterizes the carceral experience of the Chinese re-education camp describing it as “a scar on an old tree, which eventually becomes an eye through which we see the world.” In other words, prison is a scar, a corporeal memory of a wound, that is lived and perceived through the body, which carries its visible and invisible marks. That scar, however, at some point becomes an eye, that is, an observational point of view, a perspective that shapes a certain understanding of reality. We see the present through the wound of the past. But how did this transformation happen? How did the scar become the eye?
With this presentation, my aim is to precisely address this corporeal and symbolic metamorphosis. Through the analysis of prison texts from and about modern China – including autobiographies, memoirs, novels, and reportages – I will discuss the possible mappings of hese carceral experiences into what I have called a prisonscape, that is, a perceptual landscape of observation, an “imagined world” (Appadurai) which is made up of laws and regulations (penal theory), implementations (penal practice), lived experiences, as well as narrative reconfigurations.

Ort

Der Vortrag wird über ZOOM übertragen; Link wird zu gegebener Zeit bekannt gegeben.

Organisation

Asien-Orient-Institut - Sinologie