HICCS 2025

This panel examines the intersections of heritage, identity, and literature.

Timothy Thurston
University of Leeds, Associate Professor in the Study of Contemporary China

Title:
From Bards to Bearers: How the inspired tellers of the Gesar epic experience heritage recognition in China

Abstract:
The Tibetan Gesar epic, sometimes promoted as the longest epic in the world, was inscribed on the UNESCO list of the representative ICH of humanity’ in 2009. Since then, a tremendous amount of human and financial capital has been devoted to ‘safeguarding’ the tradition with particular emphasis on the divinely inspired bards who perform it. A significant part of this is the official identification of ‘authentic’ bards. In the process, these men—and they are almost all men—have changed from being drungken ‘bards’ to jyundzinpa ‘bearers’ or ‘inheritors’ (Ch. Chuanchengren 传承人). The identification comes with new responsibilities, restrictions, expectations, and benefits. Based on conversations and interviews conducted in Qinghai Province’s Yushu (玉树) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture collected between 2018 and 2024, this paper examines efforts to “safeguard” (保护) the epic of King Gesar. Using inspiration narratives of bards, and the personal narratives of government workers tasked with identifying “authentic” bards, this paper examines the process used to identify the divinely inspired bards in Yushu, and the consequences and effects of recognizing them as “bearers” or “inheritors” of the world’s longest epic. I begin by introducing the inspiration narratives that these bards tell about how they came to perform the epic. These narratives are based in traditional Tibetan ways of understanding human interactions with a world inhabited by a variety of natural and supernatural beings. With careful use of quoted speech and intertextual links with other narratives of supernatural encounters, these narratives become the basis for their reputation as a bab drung, an inspired bard, and help to attest to a bard’s authenticity to a Tibetan audience. Next, I examine how these same narratives are used as part of the process of recognizing bards as ‘bearers.’ I show how this seemingly minor discursive shift bringing these bards into ontact with competing ways of understanding authenticity, and with new discourses of preservation and transmission. Some bards have gained government jobs and stipends and have been able to reach new audiences. But the focus on inspiration also limits the sorts of interventions that government workers have sought to implement. Together these discourses, and interventions, shape the presents and futures of these bards individually, the communities that traditionally formed their audiences, and their epic itself.

Jue Liang
Case Western Reserve University, Assistant Professor of Religious Studiesn and Severance Professor in the History of Religion

Title:
Diasporic Dilemmas: Conflicting Ideals and Identities in the Writings of Baimanazhen

Abstract:
Contemporary Tibetan literature was forced to engage with the themes of movements and diaspora, after a significant percentage of Tibetans left their homeland to seek freedom in exile. Nevertheless, the majority of Tibetans remain in the People’s Republic of China, and have experienced alienation from their own culture in a land to which they claim heritage, effectively creating a diaspora in situ.
This complexity in place and displacement gave rise to a new generation of Tibetan writers who alternately utilize and trouble, play and mock, the notion of diaspora. This essay focuses on the writings of Baimanazhen (1967-), a Tibetan writer who was educated in Chinese schools and writes in Chinese about Tibetan subjects. Her essay, “Dekyi, Who Left Home,” negotiates a set of conflicting ideals and identities between the “modern” Han Chinese and the “traditional” Tibetan culture, as well as the “secular” identity of the writer herself and the Buddhist faith of her female monastic friends to which she (sometimes) aspires. In this paper, I juxtapose Baimanazhen with the writings of two other prominent women writers who write in Tibetan, Nyimatso (1985-), who writes in exile in India, and Tsering Yangkyi, in Tibet proper in PRC. The comparison reveals a complex sense of ironic reverence in Baimanazhen’s writings that complicates the direct expressions of displacement and nostalgia by Nyimatso and Tsering Yangkyi and resists the dichotomy of “good” and “bad” diasporic identities.

Bou-Chin Tan
National Cheng Kung University, Assistant Professor

Title:
Taiwanese Literature from the 1950s to the 1960s —with Books in Romanized Taiwanese as the Scope

Abstract:
‘Romanized Taiwanese’ (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) is the written language of Taiwanese (Tâi-gí). From 1885 to 1969, it was mainly promoted by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan in churches, and a large number of rich and precious documents, including religious, linguistic, literary, historical, medical and other documents were left. In May 2020, the Bureau of Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Culture Taiwan registered "Romanized Taiwanese" in the second Memory of the World Programme National Registry of Taiwan. As a result, the historical position and cultural value of Romanized Taiwanese in carrying the memory of Taiwanese people was officially affirmed. The purpose of this study is to explore the development, achievements and characteristic content of Taiwanese literature in the post-war period. The setting for the research is the period between 1950s and 1960s, since this period of time was when a large number of Romanized Taiwanese periodicals and books were published, and also the end of the period when Romanized Taiwanese was banned by the government in 1969. The research scope focuses on books in Romanized Taiwanese, and explores Romanized Taiwanese literary works in collections, the background of their publication, writers' works and literary features. The purpose of this study is to re-examine the significance of ‘Romanized Taiwanese’ to the history of Taiwanese literature from the 1950s to the 1960s after the war through the historical materials of Romanized Taiwanese during this period.