Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the fourth, and final, speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, April 19 at 2 pm ET in the UK AA Alumni Auditorium at the William T. Young Library with Dr. Tansen Sen! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Dr. Charlie Yi Zhang.

Title: A Global Asia Travelogue: Gita Bandyopadhyay and Her Travels in China in 1949–50

Lecture Abstract:
Gita Bandyopadhyay was the first Indian and most likely also the first woman from independent India to pen a travelogue on recently liberated China. Entitled Moskow theke Chin (From Moscow to China), the travelogue, written in Bengali, recounts Bandyopadhyay’s visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to attend the 1949 Conference of Women of Asia held in Beijing. The details about the conference, her meetings with various Chinese women, and her visits to other Chinese cities provide unique perspectives on the PRC. The travelogue also presents Bandyopadhyay’s critical views on the newly established Nehru government and demonstrates the brewing relationship between the PRC government and the leftist movement in India. This presentation examines the importance of this neglected travelogue to underscore the contributions of women to China–India interactions, the role of non-state actors in these exchanges, and the state of China–India relations prior to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. It also examines Bandyopadhyay's global connections with members of the feminist movement in Europe and the United States of America.

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the second speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, March 1 at 2 pm ET in B&E Room 191 in the Gatton Business School with Dr. Arnika Fuhrmann! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

What does it mean to imagine “Asia” beyond the reductive visions of contemporary policy? This
talk explores the contemporary visual culture of Chinese pasts and colonial modernities, revived
in the cinemas, new media, hospitality venues, and other material sites of Bangkok. Examining
the doubling of Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Shanghai across these sites, it investigates how a
transregional Chinese modernity that emerged under but always exceeded conditions of colonial
and national governance informs the present. As film directors such as Wong Kar-wai and hotels,
bars, and clubs revive 1930s Shanghai and 1960s Hong Kong modernities—and exploit the
Chinese past of Bangkok’s old European trading quarters—this redeployment of (semi-)colonial
histories and Chinese urban pasts is emerging as a primary signifier of the good life and
understandings of Asia in the present. The deployment of this twentieth century translocal
modernity points to enduring regional imaginaries that diverge from global notions of “China
Rising,” the People’s Republic’s own Belt and Road Initiative, or the policies of the Association
for Southeast Asian Nations. Bangkok—as a Chinese city—stands at the center of these
prominent, transregional revivals in which media and urban design projects speak of radically
different desires than those of current policy.

Please join the Committee on Social Theory for the first speaker in our Spring 2024 Speaker Series on the theme of Global Asias happening on Friday, February 16 at 2 pm ET in the UK AA Alumni Auditorium at the William T. Young Library with Dr. Matthew Kohrman! 

This series will be featuring guest speakers engaging with interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences to address the intensified contestation about Asia in light of the shifting geopolitical dynamics in the Asia-Pacific area and globally. The framing seminar which incorporates these guest speakers, ST 690/ MCL 525/ GWS 595: Global Asias, is co-taught by Dr. Liang Luo and Charlie Yi Zhang. 

Lecture Abstract

Michel Foucault died in 1984 at age 57. Since his untimely demise, an array of scholars have developed his notions regarding the cross pollination of sovereignty and biopower, with a new wave of publications triggered by Covid-19 (Murray 2022, Rouse 2021). Amidst this vibrant theory building, large blind spots have remained, including two perennials of human experience: patriarchy and easily cultivated psychoactive drugs. In this talk, I chronicle that a specific psychoactive botanical, native to the Americas, has had an oversized role in sovereignty’s shapeshifting amidst biopower. I trace how, from the Columbian Exchange onset, tobacco came to be regularly coded a prerogative of male dominance, placing it ‘in the room’ at the birth of sovereignty-biopower synergies. And I track how such synergies, from North America to China, have regularly piggybacked on a distinctive doubling inherent to tobacco, it being something which people have long characterized as life ending and life enhancing, even medicinal. I dub this pharmakonism: processes wherein regimes, notably patriarchal, accrue power by reconciling and leveraging a commonplace thing's shifting attributes, good and bad, tonic and toxin. I develop this concept vis-a-vis tobacco with the hope it'll aid more than abstract biopolitical musing. May it also help clarify why – despite much condemnation over the last century, despite ouster from many quarters of polite society – tobacco is smoked by more people today worldwide than ever before, it remains the number cause of preventable human death, and why, if you wish, you can lawfully purchase cigarettes in nearly every country you visit. 

New media and technology present us with an overwhelming bounty of tools for connection, creativity, collaboration, and knowledge creation - a true "Age of Whatever" where anything seems possible. But any enthusiasm about these remarkable possibilities is immediately tempered by that other "Age of Whatever" - an age in which people feel increasingly disconnected, disempowered, tuned out, and alienated. Such problems are especially prevalent in education, where the Internet often enters our classrooms as a distraction device rather than a tool for learning.

What is needed more than ever is to inspire our students to wonder, to nurture their appetite for curiosity, exploration, and contemplation. It is our responsibility to help them attain an insatiable appetite and pursue big, authentic, and relevant questions so that they can harness and leverage the bounty of possibility, rediscover the "end" or purpose of wonder, and stave off the historical end of wonder.