Racial Capitalism and the National Question in the Early People's Republic of China
The Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library cordially invites you to join us for a lecture on "Racial Capitalism and the National Question in the Early People's Republic of China" with 2021 Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library Resources Access Grant Program grantee Professor Jeremy Tai. Professor Tai will discuss his research on conceptualizations of race (zhongzu) and ethnicity (minzu) in the People's Republic of China and the outcomes of his research with the Resources Access Grant Program.
This virtual event is co-organized by the Cheng Yu Tung East Asian Library and Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto and the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University, which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies.
Watch a recording of the event on YouTube or MyMedia. Captions are available in English.
Speaker: Professor Jeremy Tai
Date: Thursday, February 3, 2022 at 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EST
Location: Zoom
About the lecture: 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 China field, even as it is home to a significant body of scholarship on nationalism and ethnicity. In particular, I am interested in 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.
About the speaker: 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.