Thursday, December 10, 2026 |
12:30 PM - 1:45 PM CT
720 University Place, 2nd Floor Reading Room, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Join us for lunch and a conversation with Viola Bao. Viola is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies, whose dissertation project "Diasporic Cultural Revolutions" examines the circulation of ideas, people, and aesthetic forms during the decolonizing era (ca 1950s-80s). She specifically analyzes the cultural and political impact of the Chinese Revolution and Global Maoism across transnational networks of art-making and anti-colonial thought in the wake of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung. Her project asks why Maoism and the Chinese Revolution became powerful imaginative forces for art movements, liberation struggles, and diasporic politics in the "long 1960s".