In the early twentieth century, German-Jewish thinkers converged upon Daoism as a means to criticise state power and the dominance of economic productivity in modern society. Figures like Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin explored how Daoist ideas could inspire alternative ways of organising social and economic life, thereby challenging stereotypes of ‘China’ as passive or non-productive. This talk examines how their engagement with Daoism offered a vision of religion’s role in everyday life that moved beyond racialised notions of activity and inactivity, and the…

Personal narratives such as diaries, letters, memoirs, and autobiographies often capture experiences of migration, exile, and cultural transition that are less visible in other forms of documentation. This conference seeks to explore how ego-documents function as records of transnational experience, linguistic negotiation, and cultural hybridity. Ego-documents allow for what Iriye and Saunier (2009) termed the ‘links and flows’ between states and the history of ‘people, ideas, products, processes and patterns’ to be elucidated. The study of the diary or the letter for example allows the…