Anticolonial Praxes In and Beyond Global Asias

Conceptual frameworks such as “Inter-Asia,” “the Asian Sixties,” “Afro-Asia,” and “Global Maoism”—with their distinct genealogies, possibilities, and limitations—emerged to remediate the assumption of Asia as a bounded unit, shared in both Orientalist and Cold War paradigms of Asian studies. Not only do they understand Asia relationally, connecting divergent locations of differing scales within and outside of “Asia” – or more accurately, “Global Asias,” but they also concern worldmaking political praxes and imaginaries that orient towards internationalism, decolonization, and socialism. This event further probes the political work of these conceptual frames in the current conjuncture of the Chimerica antagonistic cooperation. It seeks to address hitherto understudied and possibly more rigorous ways to articulate anticolonial praxes in and beyond global Asias by being attentive to internationalist solidarity-making efforts that seriously consider race, gender, and indigeneity. This roundtable brings together emerging and established scholars to discuss these timely questions in the Global Asian humanities, reflect on the state of the field, and propose preliminary future research directions.

This event is done in collaboration with The University of Victoria and David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), Hong Kong Baptist University.

Thiti Jamkajornkeiat is Assistant Professor of Global Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Victoria, where he teaches courses on activism, human rights, public humanities, and anticolonialism in 20th and 21st century Asia. He serves as a board member of the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Society and is an editorial member of positions: asia critique collective. His essays and interviews appeared in Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, Spectre, Haymarket Books, positions:politics, and Verge. He works at the intersection of Marxism, anticolonial theories, and Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia and Thailand. His first book project charts an intellectual history of and develops a political theory from left internationalism in Indonesia during the Bandung era through the intertwined circuits of third worldism and minor communism.

Zifeng Liu is Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is an intellectual historian of the twentieth-century Africana world with specialisations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. His current book project traces a history of African American women radicals’ engagements with China in the age of Bandung. His ongoing research has been featured by The Economist and CGTN News, and his essays and reviews in English and Chinese on Black radicalism and African American political culture have been published in the Journal of Intersectionality, Journal of African American History, Journal of Beihang University, The Paper, Initium Media, SINA News, and Sixth Tone.

Ruodi Duan is Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures. She is a historian of modern China, with research and teaching interests in social and political history, comparative ethnic studies, China-Africa relations, and international histories of the Cold War. Her current book project concerns how twentieth-century Chinese conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nation have been formulated in conversation with developments in Africa and the African Diaspora. Her recent works have been published in Made in China and Modern Asian Studies.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She also is associate dean of research, faculty development, and public engagement in the School of Humanities, the director of the Humanities Center, and the founding director of the Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism, and Belonging (C-LAB). She specializes in Asian American, immigration, comparative racialization, women's, gender, and sexuality histories. She authored Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (2005) and Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (2013). Her latest book, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (2022), is a collaboration with political scientist Gwendolyn Mink. Wu is currently working on a book that focuses on Asian American and Pacific Islander Women who attended the 1977 National Women’s Conference and co-editing Unequal Sisters, 5th edition and Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.

Fabio Lanza is Professor of Modern Chinese History in the Departments of History and East Asian Studies of the University of Arizona. He is the author of Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press 2010) and The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press 2017). He also co-edited, with Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney, De-Centering Cold War History: Local and Global Change (Routledge 2012). He is currently finishing a manuscript on urban collectivization during the Great Leap Forward, tentatively titled “Bridge to Heaven.”

Host or Publisher SFU David Lam Centre