About the Lecture

Due to personal reason of the speaker(s), this event is canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience this might bring to you.

Malaysian-Chinese writer HUANG Jinshu has often coined the phrase “a boat sailing slowly back to China” in his novels, as a metaphor for understanding the identity of Malaysian-Chinese. For the Malaysian-Chinese community, China is both a homeland and a faraway place, with this “boat”, about to sail but has not set off yet, coming to symbolize their foreign-born Chinese identity, as it rocks and sways somewhere in the sea between Malaysia and China. To be sure, the Chinese have been migrating abroad since before the state of Malaysia was even established, and one can find traces of Chinese immigration in Southeast Asia, the Americas, Europe and even Africa. Their Chinese roots may have been deliberately concealed during assimilation, or they may have been preserved in the local culture and customs, or they may have gradually become a sensitive subject due to changes in geopolitics, as they shift, transform and are reconstructed in the journeys to and from China. One could say that the history of foreign-born Chinese is also the history of “China” within these geopolitical changes — a China that is cultural, historical, and also political.

Our dialogue at RAM will begin with changes in the identity of foreign-born Chinese, and will revolve around how developments in geopolitics have affected this identity. Focusing on the experiences of North American and Southeast Asian Chinese, we will investigate how changes in China in the past century have influenced the identities of foreign-born Chinese around the world, and how the Chinese diaspora is responding to the rapid development of present-day China. With China’s recent rise, what does it mean now to be a Chinese or a foreign-born Chinese? And how do their views towards their own identities help us in contemplating the symbol and significance that is “China”?

About the Speakers

WANG Chih-ming, PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Presently an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies in Taiwan, associate professor at both Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology and Jiaotong University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as chief editor of the academic journal Cultural Studies. Recipient of Academia Sinica’s 2014 Junior Research Investigators Award, the National Science Council’s 2009 Wu Ta-You Memorial Award, and the American Studies Association (ASA) 2008 Yasuo Sakakibara Prize. Author of the book Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawaii Press, 2013); publications co-edited include Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism (with WU Peisong, published by Rowman and Littlefield International), The Diaoyu Islands within the Network of Southeast Asia: From Inheritance, Transformation, to Progress (with LIU Rongsheng and CHEN Guangxing, published by Tsinghua University Press, 2012), and Initiation, Revolution, Reflection: Forty Years of the Diaoyu Islands Movement (with XIE Xiaoqin and LIU Rongsheng, published by Tsinghua University Press, 2010). Wang’s research interests include Asian-American literature, cultural studies, as well as the history of ideas and academic disciplines. He is currently researching the history of the academic discipline of foreign literature.

CHEN Yun, graduated in 2004 from Fudan University’s School of Journalism, then in 2006 received her Master of Philosophy in Communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communication. Worked from 2007-2009 at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Since 2010 Chenyun has managed the art and culture exchange initiative “West Heavens”(westheavens.net), and has helped to facilitate more than a hundred events including lectures, screenings, forums, exhibitions and workshops. She has also supervised the editing and publication of over twenty books. In 2014 she won first prize in the first edition of the Emerging Curators Project in Shanghai, for Dinghai Qiao: Art Practice into History, and later curated an exhibition of the same name (October, 2014 to March, 2015). In 2015 she established the Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society, based in a migrant and working-class neighborhood in Shanghai’s Yangpu district, and has organized over a hundred community events from 2015 to 2018. Chenyun was also a member of the curatorial team for the 11th Shanghai Biennale, and participated in the planning and execution of the Biennale’s 51 Personae project. The project still continues through the independent publication of materials.