Hosted by the Humanities Center and graduate fellow, YuHao Chen. Respondents include Yasmine Anderson (English) & Andrea Bachner (Comparative Literature, Cornell). This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

In this colloquium, we turn to late-nineteenth-century phonetic transcriptions of the Chinese language to tell stories about sound-based sinographs. As material artifacts, these transcriptions not only conveyed perspectives on inscription and sound, but also animated a poetics of the body beyond the seat of the ear. The primary source base for this colloquium tentatively comprises a group of braille texts produced for the blind in Formosa and Peking in the 1890s. The image accompanying this written description shows an extreme close-up of a page from one such braille artifact. The old, blackened edges of the braille paper, stained with late-arriving fingers, coincidentally open a charcoaled eye to one of the embossed dots on the page. This colloquium will gather around this incidental eyemark to pursue a sensory ethnography of early Chinese braille and to consider how one might corporeally archive (the impossibility of archiving) linguistic sound.

Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two weeks prior and up to the event.