Thursday, November 1 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM
Educated in Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, Shu-mei Shih works at the forefront of a new generation of Asian and Asian American scholars who track and critique the geopolitics of Asia/Paciic transnational flows, gender dynamics, and national situations in literary, theoretical, and filimic genres. She has just published a thickly descriptive work in this mode called The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China 1917-1937 (University of California 2001). She is presently editing a collection of essays on “Hong Kong After 1997” and completing a book on “Visuality and Identity: Cultural Transactions Across the Chinese Pacific.” Her work has appeared in the journals Signs, positons, Public Culture, and New Formations. She is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA, where she directs a research program called Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia and co-directs (with Francoise Lionnet) a multicampus research group on Transational and Transcolonial Studies. Her talk will interrogate the valuecodings of temprality (“when”), ehtnicity (“Chinese”) and gendered subjectivity (“feminist”) in transnational encounters and representations.
Sponsored by the Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster.