Speaker Series: China in the World

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BCICS China in the World :: Thu 10/25 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Roderick Macfarquhar, Departments of History and Political Science, Harvard
“Mao's Last Revolution”
BCICS Seminar Room, 1902 Sheridan Road

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"The Work of Injury as an Imperial Legacy"
Lydia Liu, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature , Columbia University
February 28, 4:00 p.m. - Harris Hall 108, 1881 Sheridan Road

In this paper, Professor Liu will suggest a need to shift the focus of postcolonial studies from colonial trauma to a critical interrogation of the work of injury as a central imperial legacy in modern history. She does so by first tracing the legal notion of injury in natural law to a sixteenth-century theological debate on the natural rights of American Indians and then analyzing the role of injury in British self-fashioning as an imperial power. It should be added that the presentation will touch on India and China and will be connected to the discussion with the current U.S. led war on terror and the U.S. claims of injury

Lydia Liu, specializes in modern Chinese literature and culture, critical translation theory, postcolonial empire studies, as well as semiotics and media studies. Professor Liu received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University (1990) and has taught at UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan before joining Columbia University in 2006. Her work has focused on literary modernity in translation, the movement of words, ideas, and artifacts across cultures, sovereign thinking in the nineteenth century, and the evolution of writing, textuality, and technology. Her current research focuses on the relationship between literature and science in general and the interaction between modernism and technology in particular. She has published a number of books in English and Chinese. Her English publications include Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995), The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004), Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (edited, 1999), and Writing and Materiality in China (co-edited with Judith Zeitlin, 2003). Her published research in the field of English literature includes “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot” in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History (ed., Noah Heringman) and a recent article titled “iSpace: Printed English After Joyce, Shannon, and Derrida” in Critical Inquiry (spring 2006). She is currently finishing a book on literary theory and New Media.

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