Presentation at University of Wisconsin-Madison: The Fracturing of a Textual Double: Religious Transformations and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia

Just returned from Wisconsin-Madison and presented a paper in which I used Yinyuan as an example of the authenticity crisis in early modern East Asia.

Global Reformations: Religion and the Making of the Modern World
May 6 & 7
8:30 am - 5:00 pm
University Club Building
​University of Wisconsin-Madison

Jiang Wu, University of Arizona

The Fracturing of a Textual Double: Religious Transformations and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract: This paper investigates religious transformations in early modern East Asia by examining how East Asia’s religious and intellectual traditions, notably Confucianism and Buddhism, coped with what I have characterized in my previous studies as the seventeenth-century “authenticity crisis.” In order to reinterpret the profound changes that led to the emergence of East Asian modernities, I will focus on a common approach of religious revival within these early-modern East Asian traditions, which is to project the future onto the past by resurrecting a “textual double,” an imagined reality based on constantly reinterpreting an enormous mass of Sinographic literature in order to deal with contemporary issues in the real world. Although this “textual double” had been reestablished as the ideal of authenticity in early modern East Asia, the inherent contradictions within it precipitated its fracturing and eventual collapse amid the massive “invasion” of Western knowledge in the late nineteenth century. Cases from religious and intellectual traditions in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Ryukyu Kingdom will be discussed in this paper.