The Elif Life: Imperialism Edition

A talk from Rome

Hi, everyone! So the plan for today is to walk you through the presentation of my work that I recently gave at the American Academy in Rome. The format is, they put you in pairs, and you each talk for 20 minutes about complementary aspects of your basic life problem. My co-presenter, John Delury, is the author of this book about the CIA in China, and is also a global expert on Korea (I think he’s actually in Sweden right now, solving world peace), and at first I was worried we wouldn’t find any points of overlap, but it turns out that his project in Rome involves returning to his PhD dissertation on the sixteenth-century Confucian thinker Gu Yanwu… and therefore our shared main activity for the past few years has involved (a) being in our 40s and (b) returning to subjects we wrote and thought about 20 years ago, at a time when the terms of the discourse were really different.

In John’s case, this has involved rethinking Gu’s use of the term tianxia (天下), literally “all under Heaven,” which I have helpfully Wikipedia-ed for you:

In ancient China and imperial China, tianxia denoted the lands, space, and area divinely appointed to the Chinese sovereign by universal and well-defined principles of order. The center of this land was directly apportioned to the Chinese court, forming the center of a world view that centered on the Chinese court and went concentrically outward to major and minor officials and then the common subjects, tributary states, and finally ending with fringe “barbarians.”

As a grad student, John didn’t translate tianxia as “empire,” or think of it as empire—but he does now, so his current project involves rethinking the meaning of empire. Which is also something I’ve been doing! So the title we gave our presentation was “Just A Historian and a Novelist Rethinking Empire, In Rome”—because also how remarkable to be doing this kind of work in a building that was built for J. P. Morgan by McKim, Mead & White, and feels like architectural manifestation of the ideals of the Grand Tour—and we wanted the place to feel like part of it.

My talk was basically a run-through of the story of my life, with an imeprialism focus. Then John talked about Gu Yanwu and insistently did not tell the story of his life (except to repeatedly assure the audience that he isn’t a spy and doesn’t work for the CIA—you know, the kind of thing non-spies are always talking about), and then we had a discussion and QA. I’m still thinking about the discussion, so I wanted to write about that—and I also wanted to fill out my presentation a little bit with all the quotes I had to leave out so it would fit in 20 minutes. So that’s what’s happening after the paywall.

Thanks for reading!

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