Looking for 2-3 Additional Panelists
Proposed Panel Title: Framing Chaos and Devastation in Chinese History
Working Panel Abstract
As the country with perhaps the world’s most extensive and richly documented military history, China witnessed the early emergence of specific vocabularies and discourses pertaining to the devastation, trauma, and chaos caused by warfare. Such discourses were deployed over the centuries to provide a common frame of reference for rulers and policy makers and to detail the evils of warfare and the lapse of governing institution. While certain tropes became recurrent and were probably more symbolic than anything, particularly vivid and frank depictions of warfare, famine, epidemics and the like also emerge in a wide range of materials from the standard dynastic histories to private diaries and memoirs. This panel seeks to compare and contrast accounts of chaos and devastation associated with war throughout Chinese history.
Panelists & Paper Titles
“The Rhetoric of Catastrophe in the Ming-Qing Transition” by Kenneth M. Swope (University of Southern Mississippi)
If you are interested in joining this panel, contact Ken Swope at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.