Ariel Fox

My project centers around a group of influential yet understudied playwrights active in the commercial and cultural center of Suzhou during the second half of the seventeenth century. In a departure from the norms of elite drama, the plays attributed to the Suzhou playwrights take merchants and shopkeepers as their protagonists, construct plots around broken contracts and property disputes, and map the circulations of copper coins and silver ingots. Through the recasting of the merchant and his money as moral agents and the recuperation of commerce as a socially generative act, these plays make manifest an economic imaginary that links Suzhou playwrights, actors, and audiences with their counterparts in increasingly interconnected urban centers across the world. I argue that it is through this transformation of the stage into a self-consciously productive space that the early modern theater provided a framework for conceptualizing the global, the universal, and the infinite.

This conference will bring scholars of medieval and late imperial China into dialogue with scholars working on the cultures traditionally associated with the Silk Road in order to theorize premodern representations of the transregional circulation of commodities and concepts. Our aim is to uncover how people imagined these exchanges prior to the conceptualization of the Silk Road in the nineteenth century. What kinds of narratives were constructed around these exchanges and how did they vary across time, space, genre, and media? How were these exchanges invested with symbolic meaning, integrated into existing cosmologies, or marshaled for political ends? And was there ever a sense that these exchanges were part of a coherent system comparable to the modern concept of a Silk Road?