When Village Meets Urban Tsunami: Cultivating Space, History and Cultural Belonging in South China
23rd Wertheim Lecture by Prof Helen Siu (Yale University)
Prof Helen Siu (Yale University) will hold the 23rd Wertheim Lecture. Based on archival research and fieldwork, she will focus on village life in a district of Guangzhou that has become a central business district.
Villagers are rapidly absorbed by the thriving city while they cling onto collective rural statuses of a Maoist era. Excluded from city life for decades, they now carry a complicated historical baggage to join China’s fast forward march to modernity. They shrewdly employ a rural legacy to game big time real estate, and create new livelihoods, sociality, and cultural belonging.
The lecture identifies key features in China’s expanding urbanities. It challenges linear categories of development and highlights the use of history and multiple cultural-referencing by local agents as they face global restructuring, embrace nationalist aspirations, and confront state-market interface in their daily lives.
About the Wertheim Lecture
Honoring the legacy of Prof. Wim Wertheim, the founding father of Asian studies at UvA, the annual Wertheim Lecture is co-organized by the Moving Matters programme group of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), and the Graduate School for Social Sciences (GSSS) of the University of Amsterdam.
Registration
There are limited seats available. Please register for the lecture via the link below. You can only attend the lecture when you are registered.
http://aissr.uva.nl/events/item/wertheim-lecture-2014/cpitem-2/link/wertheimlecture-2014.html