China is everywhere in the news for its astounding economic development and its equally astonishing human rights abuses. Beginning with this curiously inverse relationship between economic success and political rights and freedom, the relationship of China and the human begs to be explored. Bringing together editors and contributors to Social Text‘s newly published double issue on “China and the Human” (coedited by David L. Eng, Teemu Ruskola, and Shuang Shen) this interdisciplinary symposium seeks to question the self-evident nature of both “China” and “human” by examining the long career of the human in Chinese culture and thought, reaching back to ancient traditions and exploring the radical transformations under Maoism and in the current socialist-capitalist era. Join us for a series of panel discussions and conversations.
PROGRAM
Rooms C201/C202
12:00-12:30pm Opening Remarks
Teemu Ruskola (Emory Law)
Tavia Nyong’o(Social Text)
12:30-2:15pm Panel 1
Chair Shuang Shen (Comparative Literature, Penn State University)
Ackbar Abbas (Comparative Literature, University of California at Irvine), “China and the Human: A Visual Dossier”
Michael Dutton (Politics, Goldsmiths), “Fragments of the Political, or How We Dispose of Wonder”
Camille Robcis (History, Cornell), “‘China in Our Heads’: Althusser, Maoism, and Structuralism”
Mei Zhan (Anthropology, University of California at Irvine), “Worlding Oneness: Daoism, Heidegger, and Possibilities for Treating the Human”
CommentatorsPeter Hitchcock (English, Graduate Center, CUNY)
2:45-4:30pm Panel 2
ChairDavid Eng (English, University of Pennsylvania)
Eric Hayot (Comparative Literature, Penn State University), “Cosmologies, Globalization, and Their Humans”
Petrus Liu (Comparative Literature, Cornell), “Queer Human Rights in and against China: Marxism and the Figuration of the Human”
Shu-mei Shih (Comparative Literature, University of California at Los Angeles), “Is the Post- in Postsocialism the Post- in Posthumanism?”
Commentators Brent Edwards (English, Columbia)
5:00-6:00 Roundtable Discussion
Chair Teemu Ruskola (Emory Law)
Tani Barlow (History, Rice)
David Harvey (Anthropology and Geography, Graduate Center, CUNY)
Haun Saussy (Comparative Literature, Chicago)