About Global China Humanities Series 全球中國人文講座
The Center launches its inaugural Global China Humanities Lecture Series in February 2021. We invite internationally renowned scholars and young, first-book authors to discuss their latest works on topics ranging from Cold War history, diaspora studies, global medicine to literature.
香港科技大學全球中國中心舉辦全新的人文講座系列。我們邀請國際知名的學者、剛推出首本著作的年青學人來探討冷戰史、離散研究、全球醫療史、文學史等等課題。
每次講座先由講者演講50-60分鐘，隨後有30分鐘的問答時間。講座免費，公眾人士均可報名參與，惟必須先報名。講座將以中文或英文進行。
GLOBAL CHINA HUMANITIES SERIES: GLOBAL HEALING: The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan
Prof. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang 楊孟軒教授 ( University of Missouri-Columbia)
26th April 2021 (Mon) 10:00 (HK), 25th April 2021 (Sun) 21:00 (CDT)
Language: English
Please REGISTER HERE to secure your place
Abstract
The Great Exodus examines the forced migration from China to Taiwan in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime collapsed on the mainland. The migration has largely been understood as a military withdrawal operation or a relocation of government. As such, this mass emigration remains one of the least understood population movements in modern East Asia. Peeling back layers of Cold War ideological constructs on the subject, Yang breaks new ground in Chinese Civil War historiography. He lays bare the traumatic aftermath of the Chinese Communist Revolution for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who were forcibly displaced across the sea and for the local Taiwanese who were compelled to receive them. The book underscores displaced population’s trauma of living in exile and their poignant “homecomings” in both post-Mao China and post-liberalization Taiwan. It presents a multiple-event trajectory of repeated traumatization with recurring but different memory productions through time in search of home, belonging, and identity. This trajectory challenges established notions of trauma, memory, and diaspora. It speaks to the importance of subject position, boundary-crossing empathic unsettlements, and ethical responsibility of historians in writing, researching, and representing trauma.
About the speaker:
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (楊孟軒) is Assistant Professor of East Asian History in Department of History, University of Missouri-Columbia. He completed his MA and PhD degrees in Department of History, University of British Columbia. His research focuses on the massive human exodus out of China in the mid-twentieth century during and following the Chinese Communist victory to places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and North America. Dominic won multiple Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) awards and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation grants. He has also been awarded University of Texas Austin Institute for Historical Studies Fellowship and the Taiwan Fellowship. His book is recently shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. In 2020, Dominic received University of Missouri Provost’s Outstanding Junior Faculty Research and Creative Activity Award. He is the first scholar from the Department of History to receive this honor in the award’s twenty-year history.