Event

Yan Lianke's 2004 novel Shouhuo revolves around a scheme by a local Chinese official to purchase Lenin's embalmed corpse from Russia and bring it back to China, where he will use it to attract tourists (and, more importantly, tourism revenue) from around the world. To raise the necessary money, he convinces the deformed and disabled residents of a remote village under his authority to organize into "special skills performance troupes" and tour the country. In this way, Shouhuo uses bodies to interrogate contemporary China's transition from socialism to capitalism, together with the biopolitical logic on which that transition is predicated. Drawing from sources ranging from contemporary zombie flicks to Derrida's notion of hauntology, this talk will examine the implications of Yan Lianke's new twist on the century-old notion of China as the "sick man of Asia."

* CEAS Humanities Colloquium, Modern China Seminar