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History, Ritualization, And The Rhetoric Of Legitimacy In Decem Libri Historiarum And Wei Shu, Bo Wen (Kent) Zheng

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Historical scholarship since the Second World War has, in general, successfully challenged the nationalist notion that ethnic identities are essential and stable markers of self-hood. One of the most influential entries from this bibliography is Benedict Anderson’s seminal study on the “horizontal” affect of the nation-state, Imagined Communities(1983), wherein the author identifies print capitalism and mass literacy as key contributors to the birth of “national communities” in the modern parlance. Less well defined in Anderson’s story of the nation, however, is the potential effect of pre-modern historical experiences on trajectories of modern state-formation. In response, this thesis explores the …