The East Asian Studies Center 50th Anniversary Conference presents:
Paul Pickowicz
University of California, San Diego
Title: Very Close Encounters: Modern China at the Grassroots
Time: 1:00- 2:00 PM
Abstract: This presentation examines the ways in which ordinary citizens at the grassroots of society remember the past. The underlying assumption is that this type of bottom-up history matters. The focus is on modern China and the recollections of grassroots eyewitnesses to major historical developments. The presentation stresses the uniqueness of the field of oral history and features a number of compelling filmed interviews with local people who were eyewitnesses to major events of both the Republican period (1911-1949) and the Mao years (1949-1976). To what extent do filmed interviews provide historical information and insights that are not available from other kinds of sources? The lecture will compare the documentary film projects in which Prof. Paul Pickowicz was involved in the 1980s and 1990s to the documentary films produced by young, independent Chinese documentary filmmakers who are active today in the effort to connect the present to the past. There is great international interest in the recent rise of China and the global influence of China in the present-day. This presentation argues that anyone who hopes to understand the importance and impact of China today needs to locate current developments in the larger context of modern Chinese history. What are the connections between the problems and prospects of the present to the complicated dynamics of the past? Most important, how is the past remembered by non-elites and everyday citizens who experienced modern Chinese history at the grassroots? How do these remembrances different from official narratives?
Paul G. Pickowicz is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, San Diego. His books include Marxist Literary Thought in China (1981), Unofficial China (1989), Chinese Village, Socialist State (1992, winner of the Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies), New Chinese Cinemas(1994), Popular China(2002), Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (2005), From Underground to Independent (2006), The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (2006), Dilemmas of Victory (2007), China on the Margins (2010), Radicalism, Revolution, and Reform in Modern China (2011), China on Film (2012), Restless China (2013), Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis (2013) Filming the Everyday (2017), and China Tripping (2019). He is associate producer of the documentary films China in Revolution, 1911-1949 (1989) and The Mao Years, 1949-1976 (1994). Pickowicz was honored by the German government in 2016 with a Humboldt Research Award for lifetime accomplishments in research and teaching.
Free and Open to the Public
This event is sponsored in part by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center. Additional sponsors include: East Asian Studies Center, Institute for Chinese Studies, Institute for Japanese Studies, Institute for Japanese Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Office of International Affairs.