26.04.2023

Lecture: ZHANG Junlei, "Women, Luzon, and the Notion of Center and Periphery in the Qilin Leopard (1822), a Tanci Fiction"

Dr. ZHANG Junlei (Tübingen University), "Women, Luzon, and the Notion of Center and Periphery in the Qilin Bao 麒麟豹 (The Qilin Leopard, 1822), a Tanci Fiction", a lecture in the colloquium "History and Culture of China"

Dienstag (Tue), 2. Mai  2023, 16:00 c.t. Hybrid-Veranstaltung in Wilhelmstraße 133, Raum 30
https://zoom.us/j/99197285644?pwd=Zzg4R3ZLS0F5NmdkdW1QMjhSVDFnQT09
Meeting ID: 991 9728 5644
Passcode: 524240

The Chinese tanci 彈詞 (plucking rhymes) fiction Qilin bao 麒麟豹 (The Qilin Leopard, 1822) contains an unusual description of the Philippine Luzon Island as a foreign threat to Ming China. War, conquest, and the first encounters between Chinese and European cultures in the Qilin bao deserve special attention when we investigate the significance of how women were empowered and contained in the narrative through the author’s manipulation of many literary devices, not limited to cross-dressing, divine intervention, inaccuracy of geographical and historical information, as well as the art of magic. Through exploring the notions of gender, race, and imagination of the other, this paper investigates how female characters and the foreign Luzon Island were represented in this tanci work in order to understand the changing perception of womanhood in Chinese society and Luzon’s location and its people, in Chinese ideas of the central kingdom versus barbarians, as well as in world geography.

Dr. Zhang Junlei is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany, working on the project “Colonial Orders, Threatened Orders” founded by the DFG (German Research Foundation). Previously Dr. Zhang taught at Grinnell College and Rutgers University in the United States. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the School of International Languages and Cultures at Arizona State University (2019). Her research interests focus on studies of classical Chinese theater, drama criticism, print culture, and the reciprocal cultural exchanges between China, Taiwan, and the Philippines, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has published in several renowned peer-reviewed journals, such as Ming Studies, Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Renaissance Quarterly.