Speaker: Rebecca Nedostup, Associate Professor of History, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, Brown University

Two decades of intense hot and cold war in China and Taiwan between the 1930s and 1950s produced not only significant economic, political, and environmental changes, but notable consequences for the epistemological structuring of everyday experience. Using examples of shifting conceptions of physical and cosmological refuge found in Jiangsu, Sichuan, and Taiwan, I suggest some ways in which the scale and conduct of warfare during this period challenged but did not entirely erase extant conceptions of space and time. Although national and geopolitical frameworks threatened to eclipse alternate ways in which people made community among the living and the dead, knowledge and projections of spatial and chronological arrangements were still intimately tied to the social networks that activated them – even as such networks were themselves in flux. The tension between state utilizations of population displacement and the self-conception and self-organization of the displaced themselves would set the stage for the large-scale social experiments and new migration patterns of the late twentieth century.

Rebecca Nedostup is a historian of twentieth-century China and Taiwan at Brown University. She works on displacement and emplacement; the social and political roles of the living and the dead in times of disruption; and the relationship of transitional justice and historical consciousness. Her book Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity looked at the modern categorization of religious practice and its social and political ramifications. Her next book. War Being, is on the making and unmaking of community among people displaced by conflict across China and Taiwan from the 1930s through the 1950s. More broadly, she is interested in ritual studies, critical archive studies, digital ontologies, and historic preservation. She is faculty director of the Choices program, and was previously Visiting Chair of Taiwan Studies at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) and Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS).