Thursday, March 9, 2023 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM EST
Online Location
This talk draws on my on-going research to rethink a cultural studies approach to the study of media and politics amidst the rhetoric and reality of “de-globalization.” My current book manuscript, Disorienting Politics: China, Media, and Transpacific Entanglements, examines the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and America in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This era, which gave rise to the coinage of Chimerica – referencing the economic symbiosis of the two superpowers – also produced a set of transpacific media artifacts and processes that I call Chimerican media. Conjuring a communicative space beyond the place of the nation, these media not only make visible myriad transpacific entanglements but also generate competing visions of state and citizenship. But the pervasive ideological framing of the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life, which culminated in the rhetoric of “China virus” during the global pandemic in 2020, eclipses the possibility to engage these entanglements as a basis for imagining politics anew. The talk therefore explores a relational approach that attends to the asymmetry of power that helps shape the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.
Dr. Fan Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies and a faculty affiliate in Asian Studies, Global Studies, and the Ph.D. program in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2016). Yang’s work intersecting cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonial studies, and contemporary China has appeared in journals such as Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, positions: asia critique, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and Environmental Humanities.
Zoom link: https://gmu.zoom.us/j/5515439923
