The physical salvation of the world is becoming the transcendent goal of our times, but this goal must transcend national sovereignty. Professor Prasenjit Duara (杜赞奇) will present a viable foundation for sustainability that might be found in the traditions of Asia, which offer different ways of understanding the relationship between the personal, ecological and universal. As revealed in his book, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge 2015)  [中文版], these traditions must be understood through the ways they have historically circulated and converged with contemporary developments. 

Participants include Joanna Waley-Cohen, Tansen Sen, Celina Hung, Lena Scheen, Li Tiangang (Fudan University).

Prasenjit Duara is Raffles Professor of Humanities at the National University of Singapore, where he also directs the Asia Research Institute. An eminent historian of China, he works on Asia in the twentieth century and issues of historical thought and historiography. Duara’s book, Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in the US.  Among his other books are: Rescuing History from the Nation (1995); Sovereignty and Authenticity (2003);  Decolonization: Now and Then (2004); and A Companion to Global Historical Thought (2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and several European languages.

This talk is co-sponsored by Cross Currents in the Humanities, a year-round lectures series from the Humanities program. The series invites distinguished international scholars to share cutting-edge scholarship and creative work on cross-cultural encounters and other pressing issues of our time.