History, Temporality, and the Interdynastic Experience: Yu Binshuo’s Survey of Nanjing (ca. 1672)

Abstract

In this article, I examine the place of second-generation “remnant subjects” in the struggle to reconstruct Han literati collective identity following the traumatic Ming–Qing transition. The work of one such figure—Yu Binshuo (d. 1722), son of the better-known Yu Huai (1616–1696)—can be read as a response to inherited cultural trauma. Temporally removed from the Ming past, Yu’s Survey of the Ancient Sites of Jinling presents a subtly different kind of engagement with Ming cultural heritage than works of the eyewitness generation, yet Yu’s reimagining of Nanjing’s spatial order represents a discursive coping strategy that attempts to reclaim subjectivity in a time of loss. Understanding that loss as cultural trauma—a threat to both past and future identity—helps us to make sense of people’s experience of the extended cultural transition from Ming to Qing, as well as the operation and transmission of trauma more generally.