Siyu Xie: Nature’s Orientalism versus Productive Ambiguity
Saturday | June 21, 2025 | 9:30-10:15
Lounge in the University Library, Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
This paper examines the contested terrain of "nature" in 20th and 21st centuries’ China scholarships. Why has nature become a suspect of orientalism? A generation of scholars have positioned nature as central to Chinese art, poetry, and philosophy, with François Jullien emerging as the most influential figure, advancing the ideal of humans and nature in harmony. However, the 1990s witnessed a scholarly pushback against these interpretations. Zhang Longxi's critique argues that Jullien's conceptualization over-emphasizes differences and undermines commensurability, thus providing a skewed view of "nature" in Chinese tradition. Simultaneously, historians like Craig Clunas challenged these representations as monolithic, timeless, and decontextualized. Critiques ask if the promotion of nature in certain contexts potentially reinforces orientalist frameworks. These pushbacks decentered scholarly attention from the abstract nature to historical agencies, socio-economic and cultural specificities. By mapping these scholarly debates across the 20th and 21st centuries, this paper interrogates why the concept of nature in Chinese contexts continues to be revisited and remains intellectually productive despite, or perhaps because of, its contested status.