East Asian Humanities Workshop: “Spring Wind Beyond Yumenguan: Tang Frontier Poetry and the Limits of War Against Man and Nature in the Early PRC" by Aaron Gilkison

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Please join us for Aaron Gilkison’s talk: “Spring Wind Beyond Yumenguan: Tang Frontier Poetry and the Limits of War Against Man and Nature in the Early PRC.” Our discussant will be Ben Han (second-year MA student at EALC). Following the talk, we will be hosting a dinner for all attendees in Knight Building Room 102. If you would like to attend this talk and the dinner, kindly RSVP by Tuesday, November 5. 

In this talk, Gilkison will examine the use of Tang Dynasty frontier poetry in 1950s–60s documentary film and poetic works on military land reclamation efforts in Xinjiang and China’s Northeast. The equation in these works between war against humans and war against the nonhuman environment prompts me to reevaluate the meaning of war in the early PRC. Through exploration of contemporaneous literary criticism on frontier poetry, he contextualizes these works within a discourse in the early PRC in which just war is limited to the creation and maintenance of a flourishing human and nonhuman community.