Friday, October 15th, 2010 Is Imperial Violence Always Legible? The Question of Moral Reasoning in Colonial History

Description

One of the difficulties we face while trying to develop new theoretical work on imperial violence, past and present, lies in the temporalities and competing modes of reasoning we adopt against violence. Such reasoning makes perfect sense in some discursive traditions but would not make sense in other traditions. We often proceed as if people share the same fundamental ideas about the value of human life, property, and territories. But that is not always true. Nor can we be certain that our critique of imperialism automatically renders the nature of its violence legible. Lydia Liu’s lecture will reflect on these problems and try to shed some light on the peculiar mode of imperial violence in modern times.
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Professor Liu’s research has focused on cross-cultural exchange in recent history; the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries; and the evolution of writing, textuality, and technology. Her new book titled The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious is published by the University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2010. Her most recent articles include “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Lacan, Poe, and French Theory” in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2010); “The Pictorial Uncanny” in Culture, Theory and Critique; and “Life as Form: How Biomimesis Encountered Buddhism in Lu Xun,” Journal of Asian Studies(2009). She has also contributed a chapter on “Writing” to W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (2010) and an essay “Injury: Incriminating Words and Imperial Power” to Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Words in Motion: Toward A Global Lexicon (2009). She is the guest-editor of a special issue on new media in the spring 2010 number of Jintian TODAY (in Chinese) published by Oxford University Press (HK).

Professor Liu’s other books include Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity (1995); The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (2004); Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (edited 1999); and Writing and Materiality in China (co-edited with Judith Zeitlin, 2003. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997–1998) and a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2004–2005).