Racial Capitalism and the National Question in the Early People's Republic of China | Audio Recording Available

Racial Capitalism and the National Question in the Early People's Republic of China | Audio Recording Available

February 3, 2022

EVENT DESCRIPTION

In recent decades, quite a few scholars have noted how scholarship on race and racialization has remained limited in Asian studies because of the deep-seated disciplinary divide between area studies and ethnic studies. Building on these discussions focusing on divisions in the American academy, this talk turns to the ways that certain conventions in the People's Republic of China have also foreclosed considerations of race in the Chine field, even as it is home to a significant body of scholarship on nationalism and ethnicity. In particular, I am interested how the concepts of race (zhongzu) and nation/ethnicity (minzu) became disarticulated in the early People's Republic of China within a discursive field shaped not only by historical materialism, but also Cold War politics. I consider how internationalist critiques of racial capitalism were separated from discussions of domestic ethnopolitics, and the legacies of this conceptual distinction within the archive of actually existing socialism.

SPEAKER
JEREMY TAI

Jeremy Tai is assistant professor of modern Chinese history at McGill University. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2015. He is currently completing a book manuscript that examines how the history of Xi'an has been shaped over the past century by state programs of redistribution that channeled investment, industry, and population from coastal to inland China in moments of territorial and capitalist crisis. His second project considers socialist critiques of racial capitalism and their legacies in contemporary China.

This virtual talk is organized by Michelle Cho (East Asian Studies, University of Toronto).

This virtual event is co-presented by the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University, which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS), the East Asian Library at University of Toronto, and the Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto.