Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WISE (Western Images of the Steppe Empresses. Literary and Film Portraits of Genghisid Women between Fascination and Fear (20th-21st centuries))
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2024-08-31
Since the Middle Ages, the name of Genghis Khan has been associated in the West with the idea of the Apocalypse. In accordance with this negative representation, the women who contributed to the rise of his empire have long been described as sinister witches and warriors, indistinguishable from the men of their horde. However, studies carried out starting in the last century, thanks to the opening of Mongolia to the West and the rediscovery of new local sources, have led Western scholars to a profound revaluation of Genghis Khan, now seen as one of the makers of the modern world. This revaluation has also affected our view of Mongol princesses, who enjoyed a freedom and a consideration unknown to their sedentary neighbours. Wise and resilient, they took part like men in war, politics and trade, and could choose whether and with whom to marry.
WISE is a comparative literature project financed by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and hosted in 2022-2024 by the research units THALIM Théorie et Histoire des Arts et des Littératures de la Modernité (CNRS-Paris 3-ENS) and GSRL Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (CNRS-EPHE-PSL) at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. It analyses the representation of Genghisid queens in American and Anglophone, Francophone and Italophone European literature and cinema. Its objectives are: a) to understand whether the new anthropological, archaeological, historical, and philological studies carried out by mongolists starting in the last century have triggered a change in the Western perception of Mongol female royalty; b) to Identify both elements of unity within the Western tradition and specificities related to the geographical provenance of the texts, to the author, the literary genre, and artistic form; c) to understand the possible cultural reasons for the metamorphosis of the images in question, especially its link with Western feminist claims; d) to explore the possibility of an Oriental influence, linked to the steppe culture, on the model of free, emancipated and combative women, prevalent in the West today.
WISE is a comparative literature project financed by the European Commission under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and hosted in 2022-2024 by the research units THALIM Théorie et Histoire des Arts et des Littératures de la Modernité (CNRS-Paris 3-ENS) and GSRL Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (CNRS-EPHE-PSL) at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. It analyses the representation of Genghisid queens in American and Anglophone, Francophone and Italophone European literature and cinema. Its objectives are: a) to understand whether the new anthropological, archaeological, historical, and philological studies carried out by mongolists starting in the last century have triggered a change in the Western perception of Mongol female royalty; b) to Identify both elements of unity within the Western tradition and specificities related to the geographical provenance of the texts, to the author, the literary genre, and artistic form; c) to understand the possible cultural reasons for the metamorphosis of the images in question, especially its link with Western feminist claims; d) to explore the possibility of an Oriental influence, linked to the steppe culture, on the model of free, emancipated and combative women, prevalent in the West today.
The project involved training at THALIM in Orientalism, gender studies, and film studies, as well as at GSRL on Mongolian civilization. Extensive bibliographic research was conducted in Paris at the Humathèque Condorcet and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, with the goal of compiling the most significant studies by Mongolists from the past two centuries and creating a trilingual corpus (in English, French, and Italian) of literary and cinematic works featuring Genghisid queens as fictional characters. The corpus includes a variety of works – novels, short stories, poems, dramas, librettos, films, and television scripts – all of which were analyzed both individually and comparatively. For artistic forms where the interplay between words and images is crucial, the analysis also examined the iconographic and visual portrayals of Mongol royal women, considering both traditional and innovative representations. Three main lines of inquiry were followed for each category, focusing on distinct types of female depictions: on the one hand, barbarian women, victims, and femme fatales; and on the other, warrior women, influential figures, and powerful leaders.
Previous scholars have focused mainly on the anthropological, archaeological and historical investigation of the female condition under Genghis Khan’s empire. Moreover, historical and literary studies of the European image of the Mongols in medieval, modern and contemporary times have dealt only with the male Tartar figures. With its comparative and interdisciplinary approach, WISE has been the first wide-ranging study of the image of Genghisid queens in Western culture, with the ambitious goals of filling a gap in the state of the art and opening a new research field.