The Centre for Comparative Modernities is delighted to announce the final session in its 2024/25 Autumn term workshop series on 12 November 2024. Please note all sessions will be online on Zoom at 14:00 UK time:
https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/8603919782?pwd=OGxydGs1QVNKZTJrbTJuZkF3ZEZIZz09
Meeting ID: 860 391 9782
Passcode: 444615
Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai – Lauren Walden, Birmingham City University
Abstract
This talk introduces the first book dedicated to introducing Chinese Surrealism, which utilises Chinese and French language primary sources to both further internationalise the movement and counter a scholarly bias towards Japanese surrealism, a nation that partially colonised China. Through historical contextualisation, I argue that Shanghai surrealism adopted a dialectical form, resonating with the modus operandi of the Parisian movement as well as China’s traditional belief system of Daoism. Reconciling the thought of Freud and Marx, Surrealism subsumed the multiple contradictions that divided Republican Shanghai, East and West, colonial and cosmopolitan, ancient and modern, navigating the porous boundaries that separate dream and reality. Unlike tight-knit surrealist groupings with a leader, I find that Shanghai Surrealism was a much more diffuse entity, disseminated across copious different periodicals, avant-garde groups, and the entire gamut of political ideology, ranging from Nationalist party supporters to Communist sympathizers. As such, through case studies of the Storm Society, Chinese Independent Art Association, Pang Xunqin, Lang Jingshan, Manhua (cartoon artists) as well as the periodical press, I show that the pervasive presence of Surrealism in Shanghai can be attributed to a wide range of factors: a yearning for national renewal, the stagnancy of the guohua genre, anticolonial protest, the rise of Western individualism, circumnavigating censorship and experimentation in search of a unique artistic voice.
Biography
Lauren Walden is a Research Fellow at Birmingham City University and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Contemporary Chinese Art. Her first book Le Surréalisme de Paris à Shanghai was published with the Giacometti Foundation in 2022. An expanded English edition will appear in October 2024 with Hong Kong University Press and she is currently working on her second monograph Surrealism and the People’s Republic of China under contract with Routledge which is due to appear in 2025. Her PhD argued for Surrealist photography as a pivotal vector in the dissemination of non-European iconographies as diverse as Africa, Oceania, Latin America and China. She has been published in Visual Studies, Visual Resources, Visual Anthropology and the Revue Histoire de L’Art and she has previously held fellowships at the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds and the Centre for Creative Photography in Arizona.
Darwinism and Artificial Selection: Understanding Ecological Modernity of Post Darwinian era – Priyanka Guha Roy, Kazi Nazrul University (India)
Abstract
Darwin’s natural selection theory established that species (both plants and animals) achieve mutation from their parent species. Human selection or Artificial Selection also helps to multiply species as asserted by Darwin and his critics. Again, Lamarckian idea of ‘spontaneous generation or natural transition from non-living to living matter and simplest form of life that advanced gradually leading to the formation of human race, denounced the medieval concept that God created other species and humans whose social and biological progress was asserted by Robert Chambers and Herbert Spencer. This progress among other things, involved artificially selecting rare and valuable species as well. Thus human manipulation or implementations of artificiality became the order of the Renaissance and Baroque periods when truth regarding the humans and the natural world was sought. The period saw the development of biogeography as a promising field imbued with the task of ecological intelligence on species growth and geographical distribution leading to the development of a greater ecological manoeuvring during the phase of post-Darwinian ecological modernity. The environment turned racist to serve the notion of Bio-conquest phase of ill-imperialism, facilitating species transfer and exchanges. Plant importation was one such weapon that bio-conquest employed in British India in the late 19th and early 20th century spreading plant diseases from imported invasive pests, insects and fungi. Woolly Louse of the apple was caused by pests from American cotton plants imported into British India, Cotton stem weevil spread from Cambodia cotton. The present paper thus locates environment to understand Victorian modernity and clubs several historical flaps such as Artificial Selection, ecological Intelligence and plant transfer to understand a phase of environmental manoeuvring developing an inert environment that stopped communicating with the humans. That environment became predictable, calculable, and manipulable signifying a newer concept called, environmental modernity.
Biography
Dr. Priyanka Guha Roy is Assistant Professor and Head of History department at Kazi Nazrul University. She is also visiting faculty at Gaur Bango University. She works as an Academic Counsellor in Indira Gandhi National Open University. She is the Co-ordinator of the Value Added Course ’History of Science, Technology, Environment and Medicine’ sponsored by UGC and organized by the Department of History, Kazi Nazrul University. She is the principal investigator of the project Plant Pathology and Plant Diseases in Colonial India (1905-1947) funded by the INSA. She is specialized in Ecological history, Ecological Economic History, Economic History, and History Of Science, Colonial Forest History. Recently, she has published an edited book on “Empowering Women: Reflections and Trajectories”. Presently she is working on an edited volume on South Asian Colonial Ecology: Trends and Perspectives to be published by Routledge. A review of the book ‘India’s Forests Real and Imagined: Writing the Modern Nation’ by Alan Johnson has been reviewed and is to be published by White Horse Press.
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