Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC) at the University of Kansas East Asian Studies Webinars featuring Professor Ban Wang

Hui Faye Xiao Announcement
Location
Kansas, United States
Subject Fields
Asian History / Studies, Chinese History / Studies, Cultural History / Studies, East Asian History / Studies, Literature

Please join the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC) at the University of Kansas for their East Asian Studies Webinars featuring Professor Ban Wang, on Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 4:00 p.m. (Central Standard Time). 

Professor Wang will be speaking on "Ecological Critique of Alienation in Recent Chinese Science Fiction." Capitalist industrialization, wrote Marx, “is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil.” Robbing workers means alienated labor whereby workers have no say over their work and are exploited and exposed to health hazards. Robbing nature refers to the extraction of natural resources for capital accumulation and endless growth. In ecological ecology, humans are an integral part of nature and the alienation of nature is the flipside of the alienation of workers. This dual alienation may offer an insight into recent Chinese SF fiction.  Chinese SF writers have explored environmental crises, alienation of labor, social disintegration, and technologically induced class disparity in the context of globalization, technological advances, and geopolitical competition. This talk will discuss critiques of these anti-ecological trends by Chen Qiufan, Hao Jingfang, and Liu Cixin.

Professor Wang is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History (1997), Illuminations from the Past (2004), History and Memory (Lishi yu jiyi) (2004), and China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision (forthcoming 2021). He has edited and co-edited 8 book on China, trauma, cinema studies, and cultural studies, including the recent anthology Chinese Visions of World Order (2017), Words and Their Stories (2011)­ and Trauma and Cinema (2004). He has taught at SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard, Rutgers, East China Normal University, Yonsei, and Seoul National University.

 

To register for this event, please click the Zoom link here:  https://kansas.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIvdeippjkjHNbbYul-DKR8WhuJQr1de_wM

Contact Information

Faye Xiao, Chair
East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Kansas

 

Contact Email
hxiao@ku.edu