Toboggan Lodge, Cornell University
Petrus Liu (Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature, Cornell University)
What exactly constitutes a peripheral literature? This talk explores realist fiction from 1970s Taiwan/China as a peripheralist reflection on capitalism’s desynchronization effects. The historical creation of two Chinas provided a formative stage for vibrant literary writings on the dissonant relations between novelistic subjectivities and historical circumstances. Time and again, characters from this body of literature ask what it means to be part of a spatially and temporally fragmented world as they embody and engage capitalism’s social contradiction. The libidinalization of capitalism’s structural principles serves as the primary device of this realism, which is not an unmediated reflection of global commodification, but a locally grounded effort at achieving a historical understanding of human sociality under intense economic modernization, inter-Asian intercolonization, and political upheavals.
Petrus Liu is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His book, Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History, is forthcoming from Cornell East Asia Series in October this year. He has published on queer Chinese studies, film, the aesthetics of Cold War cultures, Marxism and humanism, and gaming in China.
