“Remote and High Are the Forest Mountains”: A Way of Reading Agricultural Infrastructural Reconstruction at the Loess Plateau in the 1950s

Date(s)： 2019/05/28

Time： 10:00~12:00

Venue： Research 1st Meeting Room

Speaker：Prof. Yue Meng, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto)

Organizer： Western Learning and China Research Group

Abstract：”Remote and High Are the Forest Mountains” is a stanza taken from a poem written by an Mizhi county official at Shaanxi province in 1958. The poem contains the blueprint of a new village landscape mapped by the principle of soil and water conservation in order to deal with the daunting environmental crisis at the Loess Plateau. In fact, a village of Mizhi country, Gaoxigou, emerged as a successful example of agricultural development before Dazhai became the model of the nation. Through “thick readings” of the stories of the village, I seek to take eco-infrastructure as the method of reading documents, hoping to bring to light a possible obscured ecohistory.

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