The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China

Author:
Michelle H. Wang

Publication date:
November 23, 2023

Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract:
This is the first English-language monograph on the early history of maps in China, centering on those found in three tombs that date from the fourth to the second century BCE and constitute the entire known corpus of early Chinese maps (ditu). More than a millennium separates them from the next available map in the early twelfth century CE. Unlike extant studies that draw heavily from the history of cartography, this book offers an alternative perspective by mobilizing methods from art history, archaeology, material culture, religion, and philosophy. It examines the diversity of forms and functions in early Chinese ditu to argue that these pictures did not simply represent natural topography and built environments, but rather made and remade worlds for the living and the dead. Wang explores the multifaceted and multifunctional diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China.

Les Man du Fleuve Bleu : La fabrique d’un peuple dans la Chine impériale

Author: 

Alexis Lycas

Publication year: 

12 mai 2023

Publisher: 

Anacharsis

Abstract:
De la dynastie des Han (206 av. J.-C.) à la fin des Tang (907 apr. J.-C.), il a existé en Chine, sur le cours moyen du fleuve Bleu, une population insoumise qui n’a laissé nulle trace et dont on ignore à peu près tout. Ces mystérieux Man ont pourtant défié l’empire, l’ont parfois soutenu, se sont trouvés tantôt hors et dans les limites de la puissance chinoise.

Alexis Lycas se livre ici à une enquête fascinante sur les écrits des chroniqueurs, poètes, administrateurs ou militaires qui ont tenté un millénaire durant d’appréhender et définir ces populations rétives. À travers les circonvolutions de ces documents de diverses natures se déploie une « rhétorique de l’altérité » rapportant l’histoire d’une colonisation étirée sur plusieurs siècles, en même temps que se laisse deviner comment le pouvoir central a fabriqué un peuple pour mieux le dominer.

The Craft of Oblivion：Forgetting and Memory in Ancient China

Editor:
Albert Galvany

Publication date:
July 2023

Publisher:
SUNY Press

Abstract:
The Craft of Oblivion is an innovative and groundbreaking volume that aims to study, for the first time, the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization. Oblivion has tended to be relegated to a marginal position, often conceived as the mere destructive or undesirable opposite of memory, even though it performs an essential function in our lives. Forgetting and memory, far from being autonomous and mutually exclusive spheres, should be seen as interdependent phenomena. Drawing on perspectives from history, philosophy, literature, and religion, and examining both transmitted texts and excavated materials, the contributors to this volume analyze various ways of understanding oblivion and its complex and fertile relations with memory in ancient China.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Albert Galvany

PART I. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL NARRATIVES

1. Cultural Amnesia and Commentarial Retrofitting: Interpreting the Spring and Autumn
Newell Ann Van Auken

2. Elision and Narration: Remembering and Forgetting in Some Recently Unearthed Historiographical Manuscripts
Rens Krijgsman

3. Shaping the Historian’s Project: Language of Forgetting and Obliteration in the Shiji
Esther Sunkyung Klein

4. The Ice of Memory and the Fires of Forgetfulness: Traumatic Recollections in the Wu Yue Chunqiu
Olivia Milburn

PART II. PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS

5. The Daode jing’s Forgotten Forebear: The Ancestral Cult
K. E. Brashier

6. So Comfortable You’ll Forget You’re Wearing Them: Attention and Forgetting in the Zhuangzi and Huainanzi
Franklin Perkins

7. The Practice of Erasing Traces in the Huainanzi
Tobias Benedikt Zürn

8. The Oblivious against the Doctor: Pathologies of Remembering and Virtues of Forgetting in the Liezi
Albert Galvany

9. Wang Bi and the Hermeneutics of Actualization
Mercedes Valmisa

PART III. RITUAL AND LITERARY TEXTS

10. Embodied Memory and Natural Forgetting in Early Chinese Ritual Theory
Paul Nicholas Vogt

11. Exile and Return: Oblivion, Memory, and Nontragic Death in Tomb-Quelling Texts from the Eastern Han Dynasty
Xiang Li

12. Lost in Where We Are: Tao Yuanming on the Joys of Forgetting and the Worries of Being Forgotten
Michael D. K. Ing