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China and Inner Asia
Organized Panel Session
For over two decades Dai Jinhua has brought her feminist Marxism—framed through film theory, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and cultural studies—to bear as a prescient public intellectual of and for our times. This panel discusses the arc of her writings, from her earliest feminist analyses to her most recent collection of essays on history, memory and historical revisionism of the new millennium, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Dai Jinhua has played a key role in the development of post-Mao critical thought, with her insights into the enormous transformations in contemporary life—and the injustices and ills they have wrought. While she locates herself in China, Dai is equally in dialogue with cultural theorists from both the global north and the global south. Dai has participated in numerous activist organizations, including the Third World Forum, World Social Forum, the South-South Global Forum on Sustainability, and Peace/Woman, the initiative to nominate one thousand women for the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as rural women’s groups in China. These panel papers will address contemporary nationalism among intellectuals as the context for Dai’s own work on radical critical thought in China; the oblique but vital presence of feminism in Dai’s current work; Dai’s critique about the disappearance of history in the new millennium and with it, the disappearance of hope for a better future; and finally, the challenges of translating Dai’s work, given the density of her theoretical work.
Lisa Rofel
University of California, Santa Cruz
Christopher Connery
University of California, Santa Cruz
Yajun Mo
Boston College
Lisa Rofel
University of California, Santa Cruz
Jinhua Dai
Beijing University, China