Fireside Peace Chats
- Date
- Thursday 8 May 2025
- Time
- Location
- LUC
Anna van Buerenplein 301
2595DH Den Haag - Room
- LUC, room 3.06
What's the talk about
Title of the talk: The Political Unconscious of Global China Studies. The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies: Spectral Transitions
The “political unconscious” is a term that was developed by the Marxist American critic Fredric Jameson in an eponymously titled work from 1981. Solomon points out that Jameson’s identification of the temporality of narrative as a crucial political act is ultimately connected to the fundamental nature of modernity as the age of transition. While there is much to say about Jameson’s own understanding of transition, the key point that I would like to emphasize is that transitions are problematic and cannot be conceived according to the model of a punctual moment in a linear temporal progression.
The reason why consideration of the political unconscious in relation to transitions is essential to the discussion of Global China Studies is that the “apparatus of area” in which Global China Studies participates and of which it is an exemplary instance is ultimately a means for “managing,” in a rather large and abstract sense, both the meaning and the process of transition. The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies: Spectral Transitions constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism.
Bio of the speaker
Jon Douglas Solomon is a professor in the Department of Chinese Literature, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and a researcher attached to the Centre de Recherches Plurilingues et Multidisciplinaires, Université Paris Nanterre. His publications have focused on the biopolitics of translation, developing a critique of the disciplinary divisions of the Humanities in their relation to the economic and political divisions of the postcolonial world. Recent publications include a book in Chinese about the 2019 Hong Kong anti-ELAB movement, A Genealogy of Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in the anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong, and an article in English titled Logistical Species and Translational Process: A Critique of the Colonial—Imperial Modernity that appeared in the Montreal-based journal Intermédialités.
Registration
Attendance is free, but registration is required. Please register here.