Guest Speaker: “Kublai Khan’s Body: Marco Polo and the Making of History”, Margaret Kim (National Tsing Hua University)
Kaplan Hall 348Abstract: Marco Polo and his father and uncle spent seventeen years in China, and because of his personal history there, Sinologists have long scrutinized and debated his connection to the larger history of China and his status as a historical writer of China. In response to biographical discussions about Polo in Sinology, this talk investigates the way history informs the study of Le Devisement du monde. I compare Polo’s work to Chinese historiography, a genre centered on the theorization of political authority and the body politic. While Medievalists locate Polo in the European Middle Ages as a Christian European who...