港大中文學院

Please note that the below seminar is cancelled.

2019/2020 School of Chinese Seminar

Cold War and the Chinese Revolution:

The Rise and Fall of “May Fourth Studies” in the United States
冷戰與中國民族主義革命：「五四研究」在美國的興起與衰落

Carlos Yu-Kai Lin林毓凱

November 18, 2019 (Monday); 4:30-6:00pm
Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus
Language: English

The question of how to interpret the nature of the May Fourth Movement, arguably the most important sociopolitical event of modern China, has been at the center of many debates concerning the development of Chinese history, culture, and politics. Yet the studies of “May Fourth” had increasingly lost its momentum and appeal to the younger generation of scholars in the twenty-first century. Many believe that the movement has been overevaluated and overrated. This talk aims to historicize the development of “May Fourth studies” in the Anglophone world as an example to shed light on the three major challenges that the field faces nowadays: the changing international situation, the limitation of old research methods, and the emergence of new scholarship. The author argues that the rise and decline of “May Fourth studies” is closely related to the Cold War geopolitics and is thus a product of a specific socio-historical context. How to address the new world order and local politics is thus key to the survival of this field.

過去一個世紀以來，關於“五四”的研究一直是探討中國文化、政治、歷史發展的辯論焦點之一，但在21世紀的今日，“五四研究”卻面臨多重的挑戰。近年來常有論者認為“五四運動”是個被過度詮釋、過度評價的運動，“五四研究疲乏說”因此成為部分論者的時髦論調。本文以“五四研究”在美國的興起與衰落為例，說明“五四研究”在21世紀的三大挑戰：（一）國際情勢丕變、（二）舊五四關鍵詞的觀點限制、（三）以及新論述典範的崛起。講者認為美國“五四研究”的興衰與冷戰有著密切關聯，該領域因此是特定時空與歷史脈絡的產物，如何因應新的國際情勢與在地的文化政治因而是“五四研究”的新課題與存活關鍵。

Carlos Yu-Kai Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the intellectual history of modern China, history of Chinese fiction, and May Fourth Movement. His works appear in Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas in East Asia, Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, and Dangdai. He is also the chief editor of Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and its Centennial Legacy (Brill, 2020).

林毓凱為香港城市大學翻譯及語言學系助理教授，主要研究領域為晚清民初思想史、中國小說發展史、五四運動研究。其論文散載於《思想史》、《東亞概念史集刊》、《文藝理論研究》、《當代中國研究》、《中國文學研究前 沿》、《當代》，另主編Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and its Centennial Legacy (Brill，2020)。

ALL ARE WELCOME！