Special Seminar by Dr. Shu-mei Shih on March 3rd

Date and Time: March 3rd, 2016 16:00 – 18:00
Place: Tonan tei (Room No. 201), CSEAS, Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, Kyoto University

Speaker: Dr. Shu-mei Shih, Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian
Language and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA

Title: Race and Relation: the Global Sixties in the South of the South

Abstract:
This essay deploys “relational comparison” to address the ways in which texts from different parts of the world are related to each other through their partaking of and representation of world historicalevents. It constructs an arc of literary texts that are not distinguished by their presumed canonicity, whether Eurocentric or otherwise, but by their worldliness. It turns to the global, decolonial moment of the 1960s to read that world historical event as a world literary event. By framing the racial, national, and imperial formations that resonate out from Bandung and China, the essay seeks to offer a more nuanced interpretation of the global sixties from those perspectives situated farther south, whether in terms of actual or symbolic geographies, of the so-called Global South. In doing so it connects Paris, Bandung, and Beijing to Saigon, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Surabaya.

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About the speaker:
Shu-mei Shih is professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Language and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her major research involves the study of Sinophone cultures and communities in the global frame from transnational, minority, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives. Her single-authored and edited books include: The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China (2001), Minor Transnationalism (2005), Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), The Creolization of Theory (2009), Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (2013), and Comparatizing Taiwan (2015). She is currently working on two monographs entitled, respectively, From World History to World Literature, and Empires of the Sinophone. This lecture is drawn from the first monograph project.

Moderator: Hau Caroline and Lisandro Claudio (CSEAS)