Topic: Reading Modern Chinese Political Economy with Roberto Schwarz
Speaker: Prof. Rebecca KARL
Professor of History
New York University
Date: 26 Mar 2025 (Wed)
Time: 4:30 - 6:00 pm
Venue: P309, PolyU Campus
Language: English
Abstract:
What is enabled by reading problems in political economy of mid-20th century China through the Brazilian theorist Roberto Schwarz’s concept of “misplacement” or “misplaced ideas”? My ongoing work on Wang Yanan, whose writings in the 1930s-1950s were central to a certain (non-Communist) Marxist specification of political economics in China, will engage this question as a theoretical-historical problematic. Wang’s imminent critique of “capitalism in China/ Chinese capitalism” proceeded by problematizing the rampant reifications of the categories of capitalism in academic economics and social scientific work in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Reading Wang’s critique through and with Schwarz can benefit from theoretical engagements with the latter’s concerns over colonized knowledges, production of incommensurate temporalities through narrativity, and the ideological embodiments of capital in the commodity form of labor. This talk is an historical-theoretical excavation as well as a critique of the present.
Speaker's Biography:
Rebecca Karl is Professor of History at the New York University, and the author, of China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso, 2020). Her work explores the intersections of Chinese intellectual-cultural history, global change, and conceptual histories so as to understand the ways in which China’s violent integration into the global capitalist world system of economics, culture, and geopolitics transformed China and the world from the late-nineteenth century onwards. She is also the author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke 2002); Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Duke 2010); The Magic of Concepts: Essays on Philosophy, Economics and Culture in Twentieth Century China (Duke 2017). She is co-editor/co-translator of: The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (with L. Liu and D. Ko, Columbia 2013) and co-translated of Cai Xiang, Revolution and its Narratives (with Xueping Zhong, Duke 2016).
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