Christopher J. Foster: "Unearthing Literacies: From the Medieval Silk Road to the Modern Archive"

About This Event

Manuscripts unearthed from the remote Silk Road outpost of Dunhuang, China, offer fascinating insights into the multifaceted life of the written word in the premodern world. Among these manuscripts are fragments of the long-lost Chinese primer, the Cang Jie Volumes. In the first part of my talk, I take the Cang Jie Volumes as a case study, narrating how it vacillated between textual mainstream and margin. From bureaucratic scribes to peasant soldiers, from Confucian scholars to Buddhist monks, different communities adapted the Cang Jie Volumes to cultivate unique literacies. Today, invaluable old Chinese books and manuscripts await “unearthing” in the modern archive as well. In the second part of my talk, I survey the history of collecting Chinese books in the United States and address the potential othering of East Asian language materials in American cultural institutions, particularly among special collections.

Featured Guests

• Christopher J. Foster, Library of Congress

Co-sponsors

• Rossell Hope Robbins Library