Beyond imperial aporia: Taiwan and the Inter-Asia work in global transformations
Date
2025-01-28
Authors
Wang, Andy Chih-Ming
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Abstract
If colonialism is what made modernity, the American empire is the infrastructure of the present, the conditions of possibility that frame and organize the world and our knowledge of it. However, with the re-election of Donald Trump as the next American president who pledges to expel undocumented migrants, to erect a “tariff wall,” and to demand “protection money” from its allies, the American empire is now facing the possibility of its dismantling, a situation that while intellectually willing and jubilantly welcomed by some (the Arab World for instance), may sound like a bad news to others (such as Taiwan), given their worry about the other empire—China. The possibility of a dismantled American empire, and the threat of another emerging empire, creates an intellectual aporia, a political conundrum and a state of puzzlement, that constrains our understanding of the present and imagination of the future. How should critical humanities help us deal with this futurity by envisioning global transformation beyond the age of empire? Or is there room to reconfigure the meaning of empire for survival in the present?
This lecture will address this weighty question by first offering a critical reflection on the political and intellectual conditions in Taiwan, as the island nation is gaslighted by both the threat of Chinese invasion and the worry of US abandonment so much so that the discussion of peace becomes unutterable. This “imperial aporia,” the inability to think beyond the terms of empire, particularly about and beyond China, is a serious problem in East Asia, but one not as heeded in the Asian studies of North America. The Inter-Asia cultural studies (IACS), a translocal intellectual movement and network that emerged since the 1990s, is an effort to address this problem. Reflecting on the work of the IACS collective in the last two decades, the lecture intends to explicate how it envisions global transformations through inter-referential methodology as a form of relational thinking and connective history, and how its translocal, translational alliance may generate solidarity and a new subjectivity against empire.
Andy Chih-ming WANG currently holds the position of Research Fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica (Taiwan). Additionally, he serves as the Chair of the Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Society. He is a prominent thinker in the Inter-Asian tradition, which spearheads placed-based collaborative research on interconnected questions of knowledge production, decolonization, the Cold War, and political movements in Asia. His articles have been published in renowned journals such as Contemporary Literature, Geopolitics, boundary 2, Amerasia, and positions, as well as in edited volumes, and translations. Currently, he is engaged in writing his second book titled Multiple Returning: Asian American Literature and Post/Cold War Entanglements.