- This event has passed.
Lecture: Post – Orientalist Perceptions of Tibet between China and the West: Essentialization, Geopolitics and Topophilia
June 2014 @ 0:00 - 14:00
Event Navigation
Lecture: Post – Orientalist Perceptions of Tibet between China and the West: Essentialization, Geopolitics and Topophilia
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
12pm, VG. Room 2.101
Dr. Dan Smyer Yu
The appearance of Tibet is unprecedentedly frequent in global discourses of humanitarian issues, climate changes, environmental conservation, peace-building, religion-science dialogue, social engagement of Buddhism, creative arts, and New Age Spiritualty in the twenty-first century. It continues to spark imaginations of all sorts globe-wise. Scholarly critiques of “the imagined Tibet” as a popular cultural trend were initiated in the 1990s to de-essentialize the idealized image of Tibet and Tibetans. Since then a body of critical literature has quickly grown, examining the causes and the nature of such popular fixation on things Tibetan. It undoubtedly has critical impact on the public understanding of Tibet in the modern context; however, it is also noticeable that the initially intended de-essentializing effort is evolving into a recognizable essentialization of those who have strong interest in Tibetan culture, religion, and environment. This paper is intended to critique how the power-representation discourse adopted from Edward Said’s Orientalism is utilized in the context of modern Tibetan studies. Through case studies of perceptions of Tibet in China and the West, it proposes a post-Orientalist perspective from which the unique landscape of Tibet is understood as the foundation for a type of topophilia, which antecedently triggers what scholars characterize as “imagination,” “fantasy,” or “hallucination.”