New Books in East Asian Literature: China in Loops-Signals from 1900 and 2018, with Shaoling Ma (March 18, 2022)
The BU Center for the Humanities, the BU Center for the Study of Asia, and the Dept. of World Languages and Literatures’ New Books in East Asian Literature lecture series, as part of its 2021-2022 theme “New Directions in East Asian Literary Studies,” are pleased to present
China in Loops: Signals from 1900 and 2018
Shaoling MA (Yale-NUS College, Singapore)
Friday, March 18, 2022
8:00 pm ET
This event will be held virtually over Zoom Please register for the event through the following link: https://tinyurl.com/Chinainloops
Abstract: The project of knowing China finds itself in varying loops. Around the turn of the twentieth century, new communicative technologies’ contention with existing print media provided both the material infrastructure and the discursive content for science and technology to encroach upon notions of tradition and culture that had typically defined the late Qing. Well into the twenty-first century, the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly automated governance embody the cybernetic principles of recursivity and self-organization when computational processes both control and help proliferate new and indeterminate forms of social texts worldwide. This talk gives an overview of Prof. Ma’s recently published book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1896-1906, and focuses on telegraphy’s mediation of a global, oscillating Chineseness around the time of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. She then discusses her second book project in progress, provisionally titled Outsmarting: A Little Red Manual, which examines the role of the uncomputable in contemporary PRC’s smart designs. By tracking an arc between the first binary signaling system and planetary-scale remote-sensing technologies, her effort to understand “China” in loops can hopefully open up new directions for Asian Studies more generally.
About the Speaker:
Shaoling Ma is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Singapore, and spent ten years in the United States where she obtained her PhD (University of Southern California, Comparative Literature), and subsequently taught at Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Configurations, Mediations, and positions.