Talk by Kun Huang, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Bunche Hall 10383
What kind of racial specters haunt the media archive of global China? How does Blackness articulate the contested impulses of Chinese modernity? Drawing on the speaker’s current book project, this talk analyzes the transmedia formation of racial Blackness in Chinese cultural imaginaries of the long twentieth century. It identifies key figures and narratives at major historical junctures—from the liberation struggle of the enslaved in the late Qing to infrastructure projects in the Belt-and-Road age—that rendered Africa and the African diaspora legible and indispensable to the shifting visions of global China. Evolving across literary genres, art forms, and creative mediums, Blackness channeled the desires and anxieties of palimpsestic modernization projects, and modulated global racial regimes with the unresolved tensions of becoming modern in the “non-West.” The works of Chinese thinkers, writers, and artists became implicated in antiblackness even—or precisely—as they sought to challenge existing orders. The disavowed entanglements between Chinese modernity and global racial formations show why race theory needs China, and why Chinese Studies needs race theory.
Kun Huang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Her research examines the cultural formations of global China through the lens of race theory, Global South translations, and Afro-Asian intimacies. She has published on Sino-African literary connections, digital racism in contemporary media culture, gendered anti-Blackness in China, and transnational racial justice movements. Her works have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies (forthcoming), Journal of World Literature, Made in China, positions politics, and won awards from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Mellon Foundation. She is also a translator of Toni Morrison’s and Saidiya Hartman’s critical essays and an organizer of anti-racist initiatives.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies