The Political Unconscious of Global China Studies "The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies: Spectral Transitions"
Join us for the next edition of the Fireside Peace Chats event series, titled "The Political Unconcious of Global China Studies," in which we will discuss his recent work The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies: Spectral Transitions.
The reason why consideration of the political unconscious in relation to transitions is essential to the discussion of Global China Studies is that the “apparatus of area” in which Global China Studies participates and of which it is an exemplary instance is ultimately a means for “managing,” in a rather large and abstract sense, both the meaning and the process of transition. The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies: Spectral Transitions constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism.
This Edition's Guest Speaker
Jon Douglas Solomon is a professor in the Department of Chinese Literature, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and a researcher attached to the Centre de Recherches Plurilingues et Multidisciplinaires, Université Paris Nanterre. His publications have focused on the biopolitics of translation, developing a critique of the disciplinary divisions of the Humanities in their relation to the economic and political divisions of the postcolonial world. Recent publications include a book in Chinese about the 2019 Hong Kong anti-ELAB movement, A Genealogy of Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in the anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong, and an article in English titled Logistical Species and Translational Process: A Critique of the Colonial—Imperial Modernity that appeared in the Montreal-based journal Intermédialités. More information about his 2023 book The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies: Spectral Transitions is available here.
More About Fireside Peace Chats
The Fireside Peace Chats series is an event series consisting of informal, intimate chats with peacebuilders who have either lived in for an extended period of time or are from conflict-affected environments. Fireside Peace Chats are a joint initiative of Leiden University College The Hague (LUC), Knowledge Platform for Security and Rule of the Law (KPSRL), and The Hague Humanity Hub (THHH), with an aim to open a space where practice, research and policy in peacebuilding come together in an informal way, through experience of people on the ground. This initiative aims to contribute to a locally informed paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding.
Leiden University College Room 3.06