The Contemporary China Centre presents

Through Time and Space with Chairman Mao:
The Afterlife and Global Impact of the Great Helmsman

a panel discussion with

Pankaj Mishra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom

moderated by

Harriet Evans

How is Mao thought about in contemporary China and in other parts of Asia? In what ways have debates about his legacy and posthumous uses of his image paralleled or diverged from those of other larger-than-life figures associated with independence movements from Nehru to Nasser and from Ho to Che? What should we make of the “red song” movement sweeping through the PRC, which can be treated as fueled by nostalgic yearning or attributed to political maneuvering? These are the kinds of issues that will be taken up in a session moderated by the University of Westminster’s Harriet Evans, the curator of the exhibition ‘Poster Power: Images of Mao’s China, Then and Now’, and featuring the writer Pankaj Mishra and historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics: A Novel, which won the LA Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, and Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. He contributes essays and reviews to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times. His new book The Rise of Asia and the Remaking of the Modern World, will be published next year.

JeffreyWasserstrom is Professor of History and Chair of the Department at UC Irvine, where he also serves as the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. His books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, 1991), China’s Brave New World (Indiana, 2007), Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (Routledge, 2009), and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (OUP, 2011). He often writes for newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Taipei Times, and magazines such as the Nation, Outlook India, Time and Newsweek. He blogs regularly for the Huffington Post, andis a co-founder of the “China Beat” blog/electronic magazine.

Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster. Her books include Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Polity, 1997), and The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). She co-edited (with Stephanie Donald) Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and is curator of the exhibition ‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now.’

All welcome

www.westminster.ac.uk/asian-studies

For enquiries about the Contemporary China Centre, please contact

Professor Harriet Evans
T: 020 7911 5000 ext 7603
E: evansh@westminster.ac.uk