No Time to Make Sense of Global War: The Erasure and Reemergence of a Chinese Novel of WWII

About This Event

In 1946 and 1947, the novelist Li Jieren 李劼人 wrote a fictional account of life in western China during the war against Japan. Dance of the Heavenly Demons (天魔舞) appeared in installments in a local newspaper. The exigencies of the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists forced him to stop working on the novel before he had intended to, but it still constitutes a fascinating account of experience of the war in a Nationalist-held city in China’s interior. The talk discusses the novel’s depiction of the global dynamics of war in this formerly relatively isolated region of the world. It also addresses why the novel disappeared shortly after it appeared and then reappeared in the 1990s. It argues that the novel constitutes a valuable corrective or supplement to accounts of the war that have disregarded the perspectives of people whose experiences have been marginalized by subsequent events.

Featured Guests

Kristin Stapleton, University at Buffalo

Co-sponsors

Asian Studies and History Department at Skidmore College