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A
firestorm of human rights critiques often greets the opening of an
exhibit of plastinated cadavers in Europe and North America, obscuring
any attempts to critique the notion of the human (and indeed of
“rights”) in the smoke from its blaze. My talk asks what a comparative
examination of Chinese-language discourse on the plastinated human
cadaver exhibits might reveal about the political economics of race and
capital distribution that inform them.
Part of the
Comparative Literature Seminar Series 2017-2018, "Area Impossible:
Sexuality & Geopolitics." This event is cosponsored by the UCLA Taiwan Studies Lectureship. Other
cosponsors include: UCLA Division of Humanities; International
Institute; Promise Institute; Departments of English and History; LGBTQ
Studies Program; Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
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(RSVPs
only guarantee seats for guests who arrive by 7:00 p.m.)
Raise the Umbrellas explores the origin and impact of Hong Kong’s 2014
Umbrella Movement through the inter-generational lenses of three post
Tiananmen democratic activists – Martin Lee, founder of the Hong Kong
Democratic party; Benny Tai, Occupy Central initiator; and Joshua Wong,
the sprightly student leader. Other voices include the “umbrella
mothers,” student occupiers, star politicians, prominent media
professionals , international scholars, and activist Canton-pop icons
Denise Ho and Anthony Wong. Comprehensive and intimate, driven by
stirring on-site footage in a major Asian metropolis riven by protest,
Umbrellas reveals the Movement’s eco-awareness, gay activism, and
burgeoning localism. Various anti-Occupy views, underscored by an
interview with the pro-Beijing heavyweight Jasper Tsang, lays bare the
sheer political risk for post-colonial Hong Kong’s universal-suffragist
striving to define its autonomy within China.
There will be a Q&A session featuring:
Evans Chan | Director
Michael Berry | UCLA Asian Languages and Cultures
Robert Chi | UCLA Asian Languages and Cultures
Alex Wang | UCLA Law School
Moderated by: C.K. Lee | UCLA Sociology
Cosponsored by UCLA
Graduate Students Association, Melnitz Movies, Center for Social Theory
and Comparative History, Promise Institute for Human Rights
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A new
wave of polity-seeking nationalisms has emerged in recent years in the
contiguous maritime peripheral areas of Northeast Asia—the overlapping
“spheres of influence” of three contending imperial centers: Taiwan,
Okinawa and Hong Kong. The nearly simultaneous rise of nationalism in
these three geopolitical peripheries should be understood as a
macro-historical sociological phenomenon caused by both the short-term
penetration from centralizing colonial and geopolitical center(s) which
triggered nationalist mobilization in the periphery and the long-term
process of peripheral nation-formation which created the social basis
for mobilization. The three cases also demonstrate some other traits of
anti-center peripheral nationalism: they all adopted a similar
ideological strategy of indigeneity, and all developed a
differentiation between radical and pragmatic lines characteristic of
minority or peripheral nationalisms. While the geopolitics of states in
the region has been powerfully shaping the development of the three
nationalisms, the interactions on the societal levels over time may
create some kind of counter force from below. Wary of their subversive
potential, the centers have been seeking to contain the peripheral
nationalisms through various strategies. Subsided for the time being,
the structural conflict between the three maritime peripheries and the
centers persists and could be reignited by newer favorable conditions.
Rwei-Ren Wu,
a scholar-activist from Taiwan, received his Ph.D. in Political Science
from the University of Chicago, and is an associate research fellow of
the Institute of Taiwan History at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has
published extensively in both Chinese and Japanese on the modern
political and intellectual histories of Taiwan and Japan, with emphases
on themes such as nationalism, state-formation, colonialism,
postcolonial critique and left-wing movements. Some of these essays
were included in his book Prometheus
Unbound: Formosa reclaims the world (受困的思想：臺灣重返世界) (Taipei: Acropolis, 2017), which is being translated
into Japanese and due to be published by Misuzu Shobo. He had been
actively involved in the social movements of Taiwan during the past decade
that culminated in the outbreak of the Sunflower Movement of 2014. As
one of the authors of the Discourse
on Hong Kong Nationalism (香港民族論, 2014), he has been banned by the HKSAR from entering
Hong Kong since 2017. Besides his many articles in English and Chinese,
he is also known for having translated Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism into Chinese
(China Times Publishing Co., 1999, 2010).
Cosponsored by
Center for Chinese Studies and
Center for Social Theory and Comparative
History
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The UCLA Taiwan Studies
Lectureship is a joint program of the UCLA Asia Pacific
Center and the Dean of Humanities and is made possible with funding
from the Department of International and Cross-Strait Education,
Ministry of Education, Taiwan, represented by the Education Division,
Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles.
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