724: Nanjing’s Literary Layers: Constructing, Curating, and Recalling the Literary Legacy of the Southern Capital

Organizer(s)

• BR

  Benjamin Ridgway

  Swarthmore College, United States

Chair(s)

• PW

  Ping Wang (she/her/hers)

  University of Washington, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• KD

  Kay Duffy (she/her/hers)

  University of British Columbia, Canada
• BR

  Benjamin Ridgway

  Swarthmore College, United States
• 

  Mengling Wang (she/her/hers)

  Colgate University, United States

Discussant(s)

• AC

  Andrew Chittick (he/him/his)

  Eckerd College, United States

This panel explores the negotiation of time, space, and memory in literary constructions of the city known today as Nanjing from pivotal periods in its history. No southern city has been inscribed in the poetic tradition quite as much, or for so long. Subjected to waves of demolition and reconstruction wrought by the rise and fall of dynasties, Nanjing emerged repeatedly as a center of culture and seat of power from the Six Dynasties to the Southern Tang, from the Southern Song to the early Ming, and from the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace to the Republic of China. As memories, images, and utopian visions of Nanjing and its surrounding region accumulated within the textual tradition, even the most empirically inclined writers had to negotiate, process, and contend with the substantial "textual memory" of earlier inscriptions.



Duffy's paper foregrounds the deployment of symbols of imperial authority within a rhetoric of southern centrality in commemorative writings on festive occasions held in the imperial parks palaces of Southern Dynasties' Jiankang (today's Nanjing). Ridgway's paper explores Ma Guangzu’s curating of a poetic collection in his gazetteer to reassert Jiankang’s central status in the Southern Song, employing the dual temporal criteria of meditating on the city’s monuments and capturing its present moment. Wang's examination of two biji (notebooks) on Nanjing’s Qinhuai courtesan district shows how their compliers’ reconstructions of cultural memory differ based on distinct generic modes and their contrasting goals of expressing collective mourning and advocating for cultural preservation in response to dynastic collapse.

Presentations:

• Being There: Constructing Imperial Legitimacy in the Southern Capital
  

  Presenting Author: Kay Duffy (she/her/hers) – University of British Columbia
• Meditating on the Past and Capturing the Present: Ma Guangzu’s Creation of a Capital Gazetteer Through His Curation of Jiankang’s Literary Layers
  

  Presenting Author: Benjamin Ridgway – Swarthmore College
• Enduring Memory: Literary Genre and Temporal Layers of Nanjing in Banqiao Zaji and Qinhuai Guangji
  

  Presenting Author: Mengling Wang (she/her/hers) – Colgate University