The Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs hosts running colloquia for graduate students to present their research to globally engaged faculty and fellow students. In April's first graduate colloquium, Comparative Literary Studies PhD candidate Connie Kang will present on "Martyrdom as Humanism: Notes Toward an Anthropogenic Pessimism in Post-Mao Sino-Muslim Fiction." Q&A and discussion will follow; lunch will be served.
Kang’s dissertation project explores how Sinophone ethnic minority literature renegotiates the relationship between the Chinese Revolution and ethnic and indigenous experiences of revolutionary subjectivation and subjection. This talk examines Hui Muslim author and pro-Palestine activist Zhang Chengzhi’s novel History of the Soul (1991), in which he fabulates the Sino-Sufi order of the Jahriyya’s history of martyrdom as a pedagogy of the oppressed, a pessimistic means of being and becoming human capable of resisting the cultural disavowal of revolution in post-Mao China. Thinking with anticolonial and Black theorists of violence and martyrdom, Marxist humanism debates in the Chinese ‘80s, and contemporary critics of Chinese settler colonialism, it offers a theorization of pessimism as both a hegemonic post-revolutionary affect and a revived imaginary of minor anthropogenesis that remains troubled by the “irony of the anti-imperialist empire” (Kuzuoğlu, 2023).
Learn more about the Buffett Institute's programming for graduate students >>
Aaron Darrisaw
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