In this study, Sabahattin Ali’s theatre play Esirler (2020) and Nihal Atsız’s novel Bozkurtların Ölümü (2010) are examined. The two works comparatively examine how the Chinese philosophical thought tradition is represented on the axes of wisdom, governance and death. The study brings together the approaches of comparative literature, imagology, philosophical hermeneutics and close reading. Thus, it discusses how the Chinese hetero-image and the Turkish self-image are constructed in the two texts. The figure of wisdom, wu-wei/inaction, symbolic governance, the perception of death as transformation, suggestive expression and the relationship between language/translation have been determined as the main categories of analysis. The findings show that Chinese thought is used more extensively in the play Esirler. Issues of wisdom, death and governance produce an ethical–political awakening and intellectual depth. In Bozkurtların Ölümü, however, Chinese thought is more limited. It becomes visible especially through the opposition established with the Chinese sage, language, intrigue and the Turkish warrior identity. Thus, a similar historical ground is reshaped through different ideological and aesthetic orientations. In this respect, the study opens an original field of discussion regarding the reception of Chinese thought in Turkish literature. As a result, the study reveals that China functions in Turkish literature not only as a historical rival or cultural other, but also as an intellectual field of contact.
This article reconsiders a recurrent interpretation of human–nature relations in premodern China: the claim that Chinese discourses emphasizing harmony or consonance with the natural world stood in fundamental tension with historical practices of agricultural and environmental transformation. I describe this interpretation as the “mismatch thesis” and trace its explicit formulation in Chinese environmental history and its more implicit presence in scholarship on early Chinese cosmology and religion. I argue that the thesis rests upon a deeper harmony/exploitation dichotomy in which harmony is associated with leaving nature substantially untouched, whereas cultivation, domestication, hydraulic intervention, and other forms of purposeful transformation are treated as evidence of exploitation. Drawing on William Cronon and Richard White, the article historicizes this opposition as a specifically modern formation indebted to Romantic aesthetics and later preservationist conceptions of wilderness. It then turns to neglected premodern Chinese materials concerned directly with environmental transformation, including traditions surrounding Yǔ the Great and agronomic works such as the Qímín Yàoshù, Sìshí Zuǎnyào, Wáng Zhēn Nóngshū, Biànmín Túzuǎn, Tiāngōng Kāiwù, and Qūtiánbiān. These sources articulate a different conceptual configuration in which human intervention may follow, assist, supplement, and bring to completion tendencies already operative within the natural world. The article thus proposes a preliminary conceptual rearrangement in the English-language reception of premodern Chinese environmental thought: harmony need not imply non-intervention, nor must environmental transformation necessarily be conceptualized as exploitation.
A prominent study of the founding journals of Chinese folkloristics after 1949 argued that Zhong Jingwen’s definition of folk literature as the “oral creation of the laboring people” served both to establish political legitimacy and to exclude traditional Chinese opera (xiqu 戏曲) and professional storytelling (shuochang 说唱) from the discipline. Because that argument rested primarily on inaugural editorials, prefaces, and debates published in journals, it leaves open whether the same boundary-making operated through other forms of disciplinary production. This article addresses that question by shifting the corpus from journals to anthologies and adding a brief comparison with Taiwan, where the mainland’s political context did not directly apply. Examining the mainland’s Three Collections (Santao jicheng 三套集成) of folk stories, folk songs, and proverbs (1984–2009), the Ten Collections of Ethnic and Folk Literature and Arts (Shi tao minzu minjian wenyi jicheng zhishu 十套民族民间文艺集成志书; hereafter Ten Collections) project of which they formed a part, and, more briefly, Taiwan’s traditions of folklore anthologies alongside the Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore (Minsu quyi 民俗曲艺, founded in 1980), this article argues that anthologies preserved disciplinary boundaries more durably than journals, while different components of the same national projects relaxed those boundaries at different rates. These findings situate Chinese folkloristics within a broader historical pattern of drawing and redrawing disciplinary boundaries, in which expansive inquiry gives way to consolidation and exclusion, followed by renewed negotiation of the field’s scope, with the pace and durability of these shifts shaped by the institutional forms through which knowledge is organized and transmitted.
Much of the existing literature on the Rwandan post-genocide diaspora has rightly emphasised trauma, testimony and remembrance as central to preserving historical truth and honouring the victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Yet an exclusive focus on mourning risks overlooking the cultural practices through which diasporic communities also sustain collective life, transmit identity and imagine futures beyond violence. This article argues that Rwandan Cultural Days in the United Kingdom illuminate a complementary mode of remembrance in which joy functions not as the opposite of memory but as one of its most enduring cultural expressions. Through music, dance, language, storytelling, food and intergenerational participation, these annual gatherings create spaces where cultural continuity and historical remembrance become mutually reinforcing. Drawing on reflections gathered during the Second Rwandan Cultural Day held in Nottingham in 2025, the article interprets participants’ accounts as cultural narratives through which memory, identity and belonging are continually negotiated within the post-genocide diaspora. Rather than treating Cultural Days simply as community festivals, it conceptualises them as forms of diasporic infrastructure: recurring cultural practices that renew relationships, sustain collective memory and enable dispersed communities to recreate Rwanda as a living cultural presence beyond its territorial borders. In doing so, the article demonstrates how everyday cultural practices transform remembrance into an active and participatory process that extends across generations. By bringing memory studies, diaspora studies and postcolonial scholarship into conversation, the article advances the concept of joy as cultural resistance. It argues that collective celebration constitutes an ethical and political response to the legacies of genocide and colonialism by affirming the language, traditions and cultural practices that violence sought to erase. Remembering through joy, the article concludes, is not a departure from mourning but a way of ensuring that remembrance remains a living practice of belonging, resilience and cultural continuity.
This article reads René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy as both a sequence of philosophical arguments and a narrative performance of subject-formation. It asks how changes in the meditator’s epistemic and ontological configuration reorganize the form of the six Meditations, and what becomes of this epistemic-narrative configuration when skeptical scenarios recur in cinema. Combining close reading with a limited use of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative configuration, Constantin Noica’s processual understanding of consciousness, and scholarship on Cartesian rhetoric and first-person discourse, the analysis traces a movement from the situated but unexamined self, through the doubting subject and the Cogito as a turning point and provisional foundation, toward res cogitans, finite and relational subjectivity, responsible judgment, intelligible material structure, and finally an embodied composite restored under qualified conditions to body and world. The article argues that narrative transformation follows subject transformation: each new configuration of the meditator requires a different discursive operation. In this interpretation, Meditation VI supplies the sequence’s structural closure by reconstructing, without rendering infallible, the relations among embodiment, sensation, memory, judgment, and worldly continuity. A comparison with The Matrix and The Truman Show then identifies a transmedial recurrence of the skeptical configuration and examines its media-specific reconfiguration as technological captivity, institutional surveillance, bodily awakening, and struggles for agency. The films are treated neither as adaptations nor as evidence of direct reception history. The article contributes an integrated account of philosophical inquiry, subject transformation, narrative form, and selected cinematic reconfigurations.
