The intersection between local and global in the Humanities in Asia and the Pacific 

Emeritus Professor Louise Edwards
School of Humanities & Languages
The University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney)

Abstract:  

In public discourse, it is commonplace to see the ‘local’ conflated with ‘tradition’ and the ‘global’ with ‘modernity’. The terms are frequently implicitly or explicitly presented as binary pairs. The capacity for change is credited to ‘foreign-ness’, while the ‘local’ remains comparatively static and subject to influences from outside, that it either adopts or repels. Local traditions are appraised for their degree of purity—how far they have resisted change by external influences—and graded on their ‘authenticity’.  

This lecture advocates for the importance of promoting broader appreciation of ‘local traditions’ as dynamic, evolving and actively ‘influencing the foreign’. The local, I argue, is inherently global. Tradition is inherently dynamic. And the global has multiple historical traditions that can be tracked backwards in time even while it directs our attention to future connectedness and integration. Narratives that juxtapose the local and the global against the other, and credit one with passivity and stasis and the other with dynamism are powerful ideologies with concrete political implications for how we see the world and how we conduct research as scholars of the humanities in and on Asia and the Pacific. 

Biography: 

Louise Edwards is Emeritus Scientia Professor of Chinese History at UNSW, Sydney. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the University of Technology of Sydney’s Australia-China Research Institute and a Senior Advisor to Asialink at Melbourne University. In 2022 she was appointed as Chair of the Board to the ANU’s China in the World Centre. Her most recent sole-authored books include Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China (Washington University Press, 2020), Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China (Cambridge University Press 2016), and Women Politics and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford University Press 2008). Edwards is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.