Abstract:
Examining Ha Jin’s immigrant novels in the crossfires of US-China competition, this talk proposes post/Cold War entanglements as a critical frame for reconsidering Asian American studies today. It argues that attention to Chineseness as a political, rather than cultural, construct is more urgent than ever. Ha Jin’s emphasis on immigration as freedom in his novels offers an opportune occasion for examining how Cold War geopolitics persists in and through Chinese America, and how the Chinese American immigrant subjectivity may be politicized to fuel anti-China politics today, especially in the context of US-China rivalry. His rearticulation of diasporic Chineseness based on the principle of freedom and individualism in the shadow of Global China encourages us to grapple with the poignancy of identity as a form of coercion and to reexamine the Cold War legacy of Asian America.

Speaker Bio:

Chih-ming Wang is associate research fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute (2021-22) and a visiting research fellow at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He works in both transpacific American literature and inter-Asia cultural studies, concerned with the interplay of literature and geopolitics, and the colonial modernity of knowledge production in East Asia. He is the chief-editor of Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies and the author of two books:Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (UHP, 2013) and Re-Articulation: Trajectories of Foreign Literature Studies in Taiwan (Linking, 2021).  He also co-edited with Yu-Fang Cho a special issue on “The Chinese Factor” for American Quarterly (2017). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Multiple Returning: Post/Cold War Entanglements and Asian American Literature.”

Date: November 1, 2022

Time: 4-6PM

Location: Humanities 1, Room 210.

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How did Hong Kong transform itself from a “shoppers’ and capitalists’ paradise” into a “city of protests” at the frontline of an anti-China global backlash in 2019? Most analysts interpret the recent turmoil in Hong Kong as a political and ideological struggle between a liberal, capitalist democratizing city and its Communist authoritarian sovereign. This talk broadens the plane of analysis to argue that the Hong Kong saga is part of a larger phenomenon called “global China,” conceptualized as a double movement. On the one hand, Beijing deploys a bundle of power mechanisms — economic statecraft, patron-clientelism and symbolic domination – around the world, including Hong Kong. On the other, this Chinese power project triggers a variety of countermovements from Asia to Africa, ranging from acquiescence and adaptation to appropriation and resistance.

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA. She is the author of three award-winning monographs on contemporary China’s turn to capitalism: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt  (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her latest publication is Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier (2022), an open access book from Cambridge University Press. She is working on an ethnographic and historical monograph about Hong Kong’s decolonization struggle, with a particular focus on the 2019 uprising.

We will be convening on zoom on October 18, 5.30-6.30pm to discuss Professor Ching Kwan Lee’s book The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago, 2017). This discussion will be led by history PhD candidate Sarah Chang. All UCSC faculty, students, staff, and members of the community are welcome! Sign up for the lecture and reading group here.