Asia Lecture Series Fall 2023
Asia Lecture Series Fall 2023
The UTC Asian Studies Program, Department of History, and Center for Global Education cordially invite you to a guest lecture by Dr. Yajun Mo of Boston College (note to IT: please embed the link to the speaker's full name and institution, https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/history/people/faculty-directory/yajun-mo.html). Dr. mo will give a public lecture on China's internal tourism toward the west in the twentieth century.
Public Lecture: "Head to the Northwest”: Modern China’s Movement Westward
Date: Wednesday, October 4, 2023
Time: 5:00pm Eastern Standard Time
Location: UTC University Center Raccoon Mountain Room
About the Lecture: During the 1920s and 1930s, “Head to the Northwest” (dao xibei qu) became a popular slogan in China. Hard to reach for average travelers, why did the Northwest - an area encompassing both the traditional Chinese heartland and the multiethnic borderlands - capture the nation’s imagination? Based on her book, Touring China: At History of Travel Culture, 1912-1949 (Cornell University Press, 2021) [note to IT: please embed the link to the book title, https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.utc.edu/stable/10.7591/j.ctv1hw3x3z], Dr. Mo’s talk explores this modern China’s westward movement by examining two different modes of travel: scientific exploration and commercial tourism. Travel and tourism became an important means for coastal Chinese to engage with the northwestern frontier provinces. Appearing in popular print media, travel narratives and photographs of the Northwest helped reconfigure it from a remote backwater of the Republic into a prominent site of Chinese civilization as well as the geopolitical locus of China’s limited sovereignty. These travel narratives allowed a broad spectrum of urban readers to formulate a spatial imagination of the Northwest as an integral part of the Chinese nation-state.
About the Speaker: Dr. Yajun Mo is Associate Professor of History at Boston College. Her research focus on China’s production of its national image. She is currently working on a book manuscript that focuses on the life and work of Shanghai photographer Zhuang Xueben, whose explorations and photography of the Sino-Tibetan frontiers in the 1930s and 1940s provide one of the broadest and most striking visual records of the region and its diverse peoples. Dr. Mo’s first book, Touring China: A History of Travel Culture, 1912-1949 (Cornell University Press, 2021), explores how early twentieth-century Chinese sightseers described the destinations that they visited, and how their travel accounts gave Chinese readers a means to imagine their vast country.
Contact: Dr. Fang Yu Hu ([email protected])
