Project: East Asian Uses of the European Past: Tracing Braided Chronotypes
The birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Holocaust: such emblematic historical moments are regarded as the building blocks of a quintessentially European past. But how "European" is this past if many in the non-European world have claimed competing representations of it as their own, and if many in the European world, in turn, have appropriated non-European claims to bolster their own sense of identity? This CRP argues that, far from being Europe's exclusive property, the pasts constructed through such emblematic moments were shaped in global circulations of meaning, and that their ongoing significance is the result of situated co-productions in Europe and East Asia. Our aim is to trace how intellectual entanglements across the Eurasian region from 1600 to the present shaped the conceptualization of historical temporalities, or "chronotypes." To substantiate this hypothesis, we examine four such chronotypes, those of "awakening and rebirth, "recurrence and return," "decline and fall, and "timelessness and permanence." Through academic works, exhibitions, teaching modules, public lectures and discussions, produced by an advanced postdoctoral team, the CRP will impact both scholars and non-academic stakeholders by piercing culturalist myths of nationally-owned "pasts" in Europe and East Asia.
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