A talk by Michael Berry, Professor, Modern Chinese Literature and Film, UCLA at the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research.

Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang began as a blog which ran for sixty days from January 25 through March 25, 2020, documenting the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. The blog quickly became an online phenomenon, attracting tens of millions of Chinese readers. Wuhan Diary also provided an important portal for Chinese around the world to understand the outbreak, the local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. The diary featured a curious mixture of quotidian details from Fang Fang’s daily routine under quarantine, medical insights from the author’s doctor friends, and brave observations about the official response. Eventually, Fang Fang’s account would become the target of a series of online attacks by “ultra-nationalists,” spawning debate about COVID-19, Sino-US Relations, and nature of civil society in China. As the English translator of Wuhan Diary, this lecture will alternate between first-hand insights from the translation process and broader observations on how the diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate in China, ultimately hinting at the power of writing.

This talk is part of the Center for Historical Research Series, "Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change."

Translation Diary: Disinformation Campaigns, US-China Relations, and COVID19.

A talk by Sarah Muir, Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center for the Center of Historical Research at Ohio State University. This talk is part of the Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change Series.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina seemed to embody the hopeful promise of modernity: a fast-growing and democratizing country of immigrants where anyone could find work and build a prosperous future. Over the next hundred years, repeated political-economic crises rendered that promise more and more outdated, a process of obsolescence that culminated with a massive financial crisis in 2001-2002. In those years, half the population plunged beneath the poverty line, there were deaths from malnutrition in one of the most agriculturally productive nations on earth, the country declared the largest sovereign default in world history, and the value of its currency declined overnight by three-quarters. A seemingly endless stream of historical research has sought to explain this dramatic, century-long transformation by attributing causation to factors such as populist politics, international finance, oligarchic monopolies, mistaken monetary policies, and cultural predilections, just to name a few. Whatever its causes, one result has been that, in the aftermath of 2001-2002, a wide range of Argentines took up the paradoxical historical stance of routine crisis, in which crisis is unsettling and unmooring but utterly unsurprising, and in which the future is not one of assured progress but of inevitable decline. Building on an engagement with the past twenty years in Argentina, this talk considers how the concept of routine crisis can offer analytical purchase on the political impasses and obsolete commitments that inhere within other contexts—a continually evolving pandemic, a looming climate catastrophe, a rising tide of neofascism, perhaps—in which the capacity to imagine the future is structured by the grim sense that, as bad as things may be, something worse is on the horizon.

This talk was sponsored by the Department of History, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Anthropology.

A video version of this talk is viewable at https://youtu.be/UUFoV19gi2g

When Crisis Becomes Routine: Notes from Argentina, 2001-2022

Presented by Serhy Yekelchyk at the Ohio State University Department of History Center for Historical Research. This talk discusses the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations and its  representation in both countries following the Soviet collapse in 1991. It demonstrates how Putin’s nostalgia for the tsarist empire made Ukraine the likeliest target of Russian aggression and how Russia’s rejection of democracy determined the timing of the invasion.

Born and educated in Ukraine, Serhy Yekelchyk received a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta. He is the author of seven books on modern Ukrainian history and Russo-Ukrainian relations including the award-winning "Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War" (Oxford University Press, 2014). A professor of History and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Yekelchyk is current president of the Canadian Association for Ukrainian Studies.

This talk was sponsored by the Center for Historical Research, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Department of Political Science.

The Long Prehistory of Russia’s War against Ukraine

"The Unrepresentativeness of American Elections: How the United States Developed Electoral Structures that Defeat the Preferences of the Electorate," Featuring Edward Foley, Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University. Moderator: John Brooke, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of History; Warner Woodring Chair in American History; Professor of Anthropology

Despite the expectation that elections are designed to identify the preferences of voters, American elections have evolved in ways that distort the translation of inputs into outputs, so that the results of which candidates win no longer match the candidates that the voters would most prefer to win. Gerrymandering is one practice that has developed with increasing intensity over recent decades to magnify the disparity between the electorate’s preferences and winning candidates. Equally important, but less well understood, is the way that primary elections cause the defeat of candidates whom the general election voters would most prefer to win. Once the distorting features of America’s election procedures are understood, it is possible to consider procedural reforms that would enable elections to produce results that voters actually want.

Edward Foley is author of Presidential Elections and Majority Rule (2020), Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (2016) drafted Principles of Law: Non-Precinct Voting and Resolution of Ballot-Counting Disputes, and co-author of Election Law and Litigation: The Judicial Regulation of Politics (2014).

This talk is part of the Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change series by the Department of History's Center for Historical Research (CHR) at The Ohio State University. To learn more about CHR, please visit https://chr.osu.edu.

Unrepresentativeness of American Elections

Featuring Dorothy Noyes, Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. 

Volodymyr Zelensky is not the first actor to have come to the rescue of liberal principles in a time of crisis. Indeed, a charismatic gesture of self-sacrifice is the inevitable turning point in liberalism’s formulaic narrative of decadence and recovery. In accounts built on this formula, the personal performance serves as a general call to order, an example that not only validates neglected norms but inspires both active emulation and mimetic identification. A year on from the Russian invasion and Ukraine’s remarkable response, I will examine the Western uptake of Ukraine’s and Zelensky’s astute self-presentation as exemplars of liberal democracy. While this well-coordinated performance complex has served the immediate purpose of garnering Western resources for the war effort, the chain of emulations prompted by it has generated its own logic. The exemplary lineage claimed in Zelensky’s performances has arguably encouraged a Zeitenwende straight back to the twentieth century. In contrast, Ukraine’s earlier involvement in another chain of emulation, the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring, evoked the forward-moving, foundational episodes of the liberal order rather than its subsequent defense. This second exemplary network became highly consequential for Ukraine’s relationship with Russia, but was insufficient to garner meaningful Western support.

Dorothy Noyes is Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of English, Professor of Comparative Studies, and Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University. Noyes studies political performance and the traditional public sphere in Europe, with an emphasis on how shared symbolic forms and indirect communication mediate coexistence in situations of endemic social conflict. She also writes on folklore theory and the international policy careers of culture concepts. Among her books are Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics After Franco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life  (Indiana University Press, 2016); and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: A Guide for the Academy, co-authored with Regina F. Bendix and Kilian Bizer (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Her current book projects are Exemplary Failures: Gesture and Emulation in Liberal Politics and, co-edited with Tobias Wille, The Global Politics of Exemplarity.

Presented by the Ohio State University Department of History Center for Historical Research (CHR). Find out more about CHR at chr.osu.edu.

Exemplary rescue? Volodymyr Zelensky and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order

Featuring Professor Ling Zhang from the Department of History at Boston College. 

This talk introduces part of my new book entitled 108 Meters. The Xin’an river valley in east China historically sustained an affluent society with a dense human population. When a major dam was installed in the river in the mid-twentieth century, the valley experienced a dramatic transformation. The transformation was first and foremost geological. Following that was the changes to the physical, socioeconomic, and emotional relationships between people and the land that went under water. Seventy years have gone by. Mourning of the lost land has passed on across three generations. It has evolved into diverse forms and prompted different actions. The various earthly memories those men and women have made and continue making, as my oral history and ethnography reveal, are reshaping that watery world, especially in the new historical context of environmental degradation, resource shortage, and climate change.

About Ling Zhang: Born and raised in a river town in east China, Ling Zhang studied literature, philosophy, and history at Peking University in China and economic and environmental history at University of Cambridge. Her first book The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) received the 2017 George Perkins Marsh Prize for the Best Book in Environmental History by the American Society for Environmental History. Ling is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Shanxi University in China. With John McNeill, she co-edits the “Studies in Environment and History” book series published by Cambridge University Press. As an associate researcher at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, she convenes a research series called “Environment in Asia.”

This Ohio State University Center for Historical Research (CHR) presentation was co-sponsored by the Institute for Chinese Studies, the East Asian Studies Center, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Find out more about CHR at https://chr.osu.edu.

Seventy Meters Below Is My Home: Geotrauma and Earthly Memories of East China

Presented by Xin Fan of the University of Cambridge as part of the Anger in History series at the Ohio State University Department of History's Center for Historical Research.

The vast distance between the Far East and the Far West is not only a gap in geography but also one in feelings. As early modern European thinkers failed to emotionally connect themselves to the Chinese body, they were debating the hypothetical question of killing a mandarin (Ginzburg, 1994; Hayot, 2009). This lack of sympathy continued to exist in the twentieth century, and it became a root of the Western bewilderment of the Chinese anger. To many, this anger seems to register an irrational, xenophobic aspect of Chinese nationalism engineered by the party state. Chinese propaganda further reinforces this stereotype, according to which Chinese people are always angry and their feelings are so easily hurt by foreign countries (King, 2017). Yet the making of the angry Chinese is more than just a state project. In this paper, I attempt to contextualize and humanize the Chinese anger by historicizing this emotional feeling to the live-or-die experience during the War of Resistance against Japan. As the case study on Ping-ti Ho’s critique of New Qing History shows, the cultural memory of the war and the emotional attachment to one’s culture together contributed to Chinese educated elite’s growing resentment against Western perspectives on China. The Chinese anger is not just a far cry of nationalist emotions but also a bodily experience of war and national survival.

About Xin Fan: Xin Fan is a Teaching Associate in Modern Chinese History at the University of Cambridge. His most recent publication is "World History and National Identity in China: The Twentieth Century" (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He also co-edited "Receptions of Greek and Roman Antiquity in East Asia" (Brill, 2018) with Professor Almut-Barbara Renger at the Free University Berlin. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, “The Right to Talk about China: The Rise of Emotional Politics, 1900 to 1949,” as well as collaborating with scholars in Europe, America, and Asia on several projects on nationalism, historiography, and conceptual history.

Co-sponsors of this talk are the Institute for Chinese Studies, the Department of Political Science, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Mershon Center.

Making of the Angry Chinese: Colonial Gaze, Anti-Colonial Sentiments & Rise of Chinese Nationalism

This talk is part of the Anger in History Series at the Center for Historical Research at The Ohio State University Department of History. Presented by Owen Flanagan, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Duke University.

We live in what the novelist Pankaj Mishra calls "The Age of Anger.”   In everyday life, we hear that we are entitled to our anger, that anger is an authentic expression of the self, and that we need to vent our anger.  Is this true? Meanwhile, politics is increasingly a zone in which angry dismissive performance battles opposing angry dismissive performance. Can the humanities help?  In this talk, I explore findings from emotion science and cross-cultural philosophy and offer ways to think critically about how we do anger in personal relations, commercial relations, and in political life.   I make some suggestions for how we might do anger in more sensible and productive ways to increase both well-being and social justice.  

About Owen Flanagan
Owen Flanagan is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Duke University. His work is in Philosophy of Mind and Psychiatry, Ethics, Moral Psychology, Cross-Cultural Philosophy.

His recent works related to the topic of anger are The Moral Psychology of Anger (Rowman & Littlefield) and How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures (Princeton University Press, 2021). Some of his recent books are: The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility (Oxford University Press, 2016); The Bodhissattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (MIT Press, 2011); and The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (MIT Press, 2007). He has lectured on every continent except Antarctica.

Co-sponsors of the talk: Center for Ethics and Human Values and the Department of Philosophy at the Ohio State University

Our Angry Times: Can the Humanities Help?

In 2020, Thomas Dixon in an essay entitled “What Is the History of Anger a History of?” argued that the modern English word, anger, is “without a stable transhistorical referent.”1 A range of historical and ethnographic examples will be presented, and the extent to which they support Dixon’s thesis will be examined. While subscribing to Dixon’s methodological caveats, I suspect there may be some discernible transhistorical patterns: (1) The meanings of anger and its local equivalents across time and space exhibit uniformities common to emotion terms in many languages. Emotion terms are usually vague or multivocal and suggest multiple possible courses of action. (2) The emotional states designated by anger terms, as with most emotion terms, are subjects of effortful attempts at “regulation,” or “management” aimed not at faking but at transforming a genuine, if ambivalent, emotional response into a preferred (and often unambivalent) one. (3) Expressions of anger generally imply claims to a status of honor or authority higher than that of the person or persons targeted by these expressions, and are often closely associated with local concepts of humiliation and vengeance.

About William Reddy:
William Reddy is the William T. Laprade Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University. Some of his recent books include: The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia and Japan, 900-1200 CE (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001). His current research investigates the relationship between reason and emotion in the seventeenth century.

Conceptual and Performative Variations in Practices of Anger: Are There Common Threads?

From the Revolution’s earliest days, crowds were pivotal. A Parisian crowd toppled the symbol of the Old Regime’s despotism: the Bastille. A crowd led by Parisian market women brought the revolutionary National Assembly and the royal family away from the palace at Versailles and into the heart of the capital of Paris. Throughout the decade that followed, the Revolutionary crowd remained a significant political force—one to which the elected leaders in the National Assembly listened.

Understanding the formation, psychology, communication, and political aims of the revolutionary crowd has been a subject of scholarly study for at least fifty years. Recent work has made clear that peaceful collective action was a hallmark of the Revolution. Nevertheless, the specter of political violence remains in the ways that the Revolution is remembered—the linking of political violence and crowds so vividly rendered by early critics, such as Charles Dickens and Edmund Burke, has continued to resonate. Moreover, collective action remains an important locus of political communication and activity today. 

The French Revolutionary crowd is an especially rich case for considering up close the connections between collective action, democracy, and the power of emotion.

Featuring David Andress, Principal Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth, Katie Jarvis, Carl E. Koch Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, and Moderator Margaret Newell, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University.

This is an Ohio State University Center for Historical Research presentation. For more info about CHR, please visit CHR.osu.edu

Anger & the Crowd:  Emotion, contentious politics & collective action in age of French Revolution

For Zulu ngoma performers, responsible manhood entails crafting anger into eloquence. In so doing, performers blur the lines between pain and styling, violence and its performance. When song and dance are limned by violence, how might we think about histories of anger acting upon the world through art? Living with the legacies of apartheid, ngoma performers’ anger (“ulaka”) is an expressive resource and a necessary though ambiguous response to injustice. This Center for Historical Research talk was presented by Professor Louise Meintjes. It is part of the “Anger in History” series.

Louise Meintjes is the Marcellor Lotti Professor of Music and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Some of her recent publications include: Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2017) and Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in the South African Studio (Duke University Press, 2003).

The Eloquence of Anger: Zulu Ngoma Men’s Song and Dance

The Ohio State University Center for Historical Research provides a stimulating intellectual environment for studying important historical issues around the world.  Each year the Center brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine issues of broad contemporary relevance in historical perspective.

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