This panel explores the diverse and pervasive ways in which the dynamics of memory inform the meanings of place and social identity in pre-14^th century Chinese literature. While memory is often understood in popular culture to be an individual, internal, mental phenomenon that is largely inaccessible or invisible to outside observers, the three papers on this panel each draw on different strains of contemporary memory studies to reveal the collective, public, and social nature of memory. In different ways, each paper shows how collective frameworks shape and structure individual writers’ memories and make visible the often public fashion in which memorial practices and performances create and sustain the identity of a place or social group over time.

In the first paper, Yiyi Luo delves into the intertwined themes of funerary rituals, contemplations of mortality, and memory of the past in poetry written on Mount Beimang, a significant burial ground north of Luoyang for both nobles and commoners from the Han (202 BCE-220 CE) to Tang (618-907) dynasties. Luo’s paper tracks diverse themes associated with Mount Beimang by medieval Chinese poets, from expressions of joy and a carpe diem spirit in the face of life’s brevity, to stark depictions of tombs and a haunting underworld, to more philosophical reflections on the world’s fleeting nature that align with medieval Buddhist understandings of existence. Luo unearths and brings to light the way a succession of different social and religious groups reflected on this site, each responding to earlier layers of memorial texts on the mountain. By viewing the poetic layers on Mount Beimang as a polyphonic literary debate on the meaning of the mountain over the long durée, Luo’s paper enables us to better understand the evolving identity of this iconic place.

The second paper, by Benjamin Ridgway, applies Mariam Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to analyze and explain the combined use of dense intertextuality and agonistic subjective voice in the song lyrics (ci 詞) of Xin Qiji (1140-1270). Born after the “Jingkang disaster” of 1126-1127 which saw the occupation of the northern half of the Song dynasty empire by the armies of the Jurchen nomadic people, Xin was a northern militia leader who fled south to serve as an official for the restored Southern Song (1127-1279) court. Significantly, Xin’s song lyrics clearly show that he carried on and wrestled with many of the same traumatic feelings of displacement and longing for landscape expressed by the prior generation of Chinese literati poets who had experienced the “Jingkang disaster” first hand, known in literary history as the “Crossing-South” song lyricists (nandu ciren 南渡詞人). Yet, received scholarship tends to praise the imitable nature of Xin’s unique poetic style, either by depicting him as a model Confucian “patriot” poet or by emphasizing his arrogant wildness. Ridgway argues that postmemory makes visible again the neglected dynamics of intergenerational poetic transmission and transformation that are at the heart of Xin’s literary innovations.

In the third paper, Hanqi Zhou turns to the political upheaval at the transition from the late Southern Song to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and focuses on how a cohort of Song literati dedicated themselves to the writing of song lyrics as a means to define themselves as loyalists to a fallen dynasty. Centered around Lin'an, the former capital, these poets formed a significant social network anchored in their collective memories of the Song Dynasty and the war against the Yuan army. Zhou contends that these poets formed a social network through their frequent exchange of song lyrics on nostalgic longing for the bygone era of life in the former capital. Zhou concludes that these often public group poetic exchanges on memory were not merely expressions of melancholy; they also affirmed the poets' identities as remnant subjects (yimin 遺民) of the Song Dynasty.