Through Ports of No Return: Entrances of the African into China
Monday, November 18th, 2024 from 4:00-5:00 pm ET
Virtual Event via Zoom
About the event:
Given that Chinese geographical knowledge of Africa is attested to in sources dated as early as the ninth century of the Common Era, our assumption that there might well have been an African presence in China extending back more than a millennium seems hardly overestimated. However, this supposition will likely remain forever theoretical because of the linguistic indiscriminateness—at least prior to and right up until relatively modern times—evinced by Chinese references to encounters with peoples they themselves deemed to be black. This talk focuses on the crucial transitional moment leading to when a preponderance of these blacks entering China could only have been Africans. Moreover, being intended to provide insights regarding the consequential ramifications of this understudied occurrence in world history, this talk also addresses the vital questions of how and why these Africans had come to reside in China at all, before concluding with some informed speculation on their eventual collective fate.
About the Speaker
Don J. Wyatt (A.B. Beloit; A.M., Ph.D. Harvard), Distinguished Professor since 2010, has taught both history and philosophy at Middlebury College since 1986. He specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research most currently focused on the intersections between identity and violence and the nexuses between ethnicity and slavery. He is the author of The Blacks of Premodern China (2009) and Slavery in East Asia (2023), with the latter being a contribution to the Cambridge Elements Global Middle Ages series. He is editor for the forthcoming four-volume set on ethnicity and race in Bloomsbury Publishing’s The Medieval World series. He is a co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, immediate past chair of the newly established Diversity and Equity Committee of the Association for Asian Studies, and an incoming member of the Inclusivity and Diversity Committee of the Medieval Academy of America..
The Sigur Center for Asian Studies and GW Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS) together received the highly regarded designation of National Resource Center (NRC) for East Asian Studies. The designation — the first time these two centers have received NRC status — enhances the institutes’ ability to engage the broader public community, including students, K-12 educators, HBCUs, policymakers, military veterans, journalists and the general public on regional and global issues of importance. With this award, GW joins a handful of other world-leading universities with this honor, including Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. Additionally, the Sigur Center and GWIKS have been awarded funding for Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships which support undergraduate and graduate students studying modern foreign languages and related area or international studies.
