Please join the Department of Comparative Literature, with support from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, for a talk with Professor Shaoling Ma, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, Cornell University titled "China in Loops." Shaoling Ma is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese history, literature, and media. At the broadest level, she is drawn to historical periods when geopolitical, socio-economic, and technological developments appear to provide external vantage points from which to navigate the landscape of cultural production, while, in fact, being resolutely embedded in the latter. Ma is the author of The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021). Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies; Critical Inquiry; and positions; asia critique. She is currently working on a second book China in Loops that examines techno-cultural recursions in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapore from the 1960s to the contemporary period.
CHINA IN LOOPS
Prof. Shaoling Ma (Cornell University)
Friday November 10th 4pm—6pm
015 Rosenwald Hall
Reception to Follow
China in Loops explores how studies of relationality inevitably reproduce and multiply the terms of the relations—cultural or techno-materialist; subjective, collective, or planetary-ecological—that are assumed in the first place. My working diagram has thus been variations upon the recursive loop, whereby recursion refers to the process of repeating a function such that a thing comes to be defined in terms of itself. The loop form helps me to analyze seemingly disparate but co-entangled phenomena from the cinematic zoom-out’s unlikely modelling of computational-assisted macro-economic analysis in 1960s-70s Taiwan to contemporary Chinese video art’s self-reflexive adaptation of the Chinese Party-State’s 2009 adoption of the Circular Economy Promotion Law. But recursion also names the algorithmic operation undergirding our economic infrastructure, and its fantasy that everything belongs to the same, flattened, networked connectivity. As a critical, comparative Asianist retooling the schema that increasingly dominate finance capital, machine learning, and data governance today, how can we treat our areas of specialization and individual case studies themselves as loops, while asserting criticism and culture’s autonomy?