This interdisciplinary conversation bringing together specialists in Chinese history, literature and politics will move from the year of the Boxers through the time of Tiananmen. The focus will be on the politics of memory and the different ways that contested events have been brought into or left out of narratives about China's past circulating inside that country and in other parts of the world.

This paper draws upon Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson to trace the shifting coordinates of social and spatial experience through novels set in Karachi (Pakistan). I bring Lefebvre's understanding of the “concrete abstraction” of space under capitalism together with Jameson's insights on the content and form of narratives to develop an understanding of “space” as constitutive to literary fiction.