CURRENTS: Corbin Jones (TTL) and Christopher Tong (MLLI)

Corbin Jones, M.A. Candidate in the Text, Technologies, and Literatures Program; Fall 2019 Graduate Student Research Fellow

The 13th century Maghrebi judge and consummate scholar ibn Battuta can be known as witty, pious, cosmopolitan, and a bit egotistical through his travel writings, among them A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling. Much of this image of the man comes from his own attempts to rhetorically define himself. The fascinating thing is that the self-image of the traveler is also fashioned by the people and things he encounters on his journey. As he seeks to display for his reader the breadth of his experience, what he truly represents is himself.

AND

Christopher Tong, Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication and Asian Studies

We compare and contrast. We connect with others and respect their boundaries. We learn about nature and acknowledge our limited knowledge. Such claims assume certain ideas of the self and other, of humankind and nature, and of representation itself. Conceived originally as a project in comparative literature, Christopher Tong's presentation will discuss the unexpected intersection of European and Chinese aesthetic thought and investigate how contemporary discourses of nature and environment, otherness, and intersectionality contribute to understandings of representation, artistic as well as political.