This panel focuses on the interplay between epochal events and mobility. How have transformative events and developments such as modern transport revolution, urbanization, wars, and disasters shaped channels of and imaginations on mobility? The panel discusses both religious and secular actors who encountered various social worlds and idealized spaces, and produced meanings out of their relocations. Attention to travelers and sojourners, which necessarily requires contextualization across regions, potentially offers alternative, global modes of periodization that center on actors, one that is grounded in China but transcends it.

Date:

June 16, 2023, 11:30 – 13:00

Program:

Chair: Barbara Mittler (University of Heidelberg)

Wang Shengyu (Soochow University / Fellow Heidelberg) Disknowing the Globe: Steam Navigation, Maritime Disaster, and Terra Incognita in Wang Tao’s Late-Nineteenth Century Marvel Tales

Li Fupeng(China University of Political Science and Law / Fellow Berlin) Translingual Making of Worlds through Chinese Global Travels (1905–1906)

Janice H. Jeong (University of Göttingen) From Heavenly Square to Arabian Mecca: Modern Travels and Spatio-Temporal Returns to the Home of Islam

Wai-Yip Ho (Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter / Fellow Göttingen) Global Ismaili in China: Dawoodi Bohra Diaspora from Gujarat to Hong Kong