China Studies Research Centre, La Trobe University
6:00-7:30pm Tuesday 27 March
Boardroom, La Trobe University City Campus, Level 20, 360 Collins Street, Melbourne
Based on his 2015 publication, The Sage and the People, this lecture explores the popular revival of Confucianism that has taken place in China since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The research focuses primarily on the reappropriation and reinvention of popular practices in society. Analyzing case studies and narratives of activists involved in this “revival,” the research attempts to understand their motivations, aspirations, difficulties, and achievements, as well as their ambiguous relation to Chinese politics. The Confucian revival is studied within the broader context of emerging challenges to Western categories (religion, philosophy, science, etc.) and great modernization narratives that prevailed throughout the twentieth century. Finally, by means of a comparison between state cults carried out in both Mainland China and Taiwan the book discusses the articulation of the political and the religious and, beyond that, the contemporary fate of the Chinese cosmological tradition.
For more information please visit The Popular Revival of Confucianism in Contemporary China
About the Speaker
Sébastien Billioud is Professor of Chinese studies at University Paris-Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité and the current Head (2017-19) of the Taipei branch of the French Center for Research on Contemporary China located at Academia Sinica. Publications include Thinking through Confucian Modernity: A Study of Mou Zongsan’s Moral Metaphysics (Brill, 2012), in collaboration with Joël Thoraval, The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in China (Oxford University Press, 2015 and CNRS Editions, 2014) and, as editor, The Varieties of Confucian Experience (Brill, 2018, forthcoming). He is currently completing a new monograph entitled Reclaiming the Wilderness, Contemporary Dynamics of the Yiguandao. Professor Billioud is currently a visiting scholar in the China Studies Research Centre of La Trobe University.