Speaker: Prof. Rebecca Karl, New York University

Moderator: Prof. Xiaolu Ma, HKUST

Venue: Room 3401 (Lift 2 / Lift 17-18), HKUST

Abstract

Revolution is a time of history, and it is thus a narrated time. This talk attempts to explore historical temporality and revolutionary narrative as central problems in modern Chinese history. It derives from two separate sources. One is a dialogue held a couple of years ago with the Taiwan-based historian, Yang Rubin, whose mode of conventional conservative history is methodologically useful for thinking about texts and history. The second source is the speaker's 2020 Verso book, China's Revolutions in the Modern World, which re-centers the radicalism of revolution in China's and the world's modern history. The talk interweaves narrative concerns with paradigmatic questions.

Bio

Professor Rebecca Karl is Professor of History at New York University, and the author, most recently, 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).