Reflections on Musical Loss and Dynastic Time Across the Ming-Qing Divide

Abstract

A perennial Chinese cultural myth equates the fall of a dynasty with the death of a musical tradition, particularly as embodied in the persons of court entertainers and courtesans. This talk will explore both the power of this myth of musical loss in the aftermath of the Manchu conquest and the Ming’s demise in 1644-1645 and the inadequacy of this myth when it comes to doing music history, which refuses to map neatly onto dynastic time. 

About the Speaker

Prof. Judith ZEITLIN is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. A scholar of early modern Chinese literature, her innovative work combines literary history with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, theater, music, medicine, gender studies, and film.

Her many publications include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (2007), Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (1993), and co-edited works such as Writing and Materiality in China (2000), Thinking in Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (2007), Chinese Opera Film (2010), and The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality (2019).

In 2014, Prof. Zeitlin co-curated a major exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art called Performing Images: Opera in Chinese Visual Culture. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. 

For Attendees' Attention

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