'Home in a Global Landscape'

The Global Studies Seminar welcomes Catherine Stuer, assistant professor of Asian Art History, presenting "Home in a Global Landscape: pictorial self-writing in early 19th Century China." The talk focuses on an expansive pictorial autobiography designed and self-published by a painter from Nanjing in 1832. In this widely circulated production, the author appropriates landscapes of hometown, region, and the world in novel and crafted strategies of self-representation. I see his case as part and parcel of a broader phenomenon of self-representational interests in 19th-century China, articulating a world-consciousness in which the global and personal were intimately related. Apart from their attraction as highly inventive autobiographical projects, individual productions such as these invite us to rethink China’s perceived cultural insularity at the threshold of its confrontation with colonial modernity.