Presentation and workshop with Jon Solomon (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3), moderated by Gavin Walker (Cornell University), around Prof. Solomon’s new book The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana: Spectral Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), prefaced by Naoki Sakai (Cornell University).

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, and that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debates about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, and American studies, black studies, among others.

Recommended and pre-circulated readings are Naoki Sakai’s preface & Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 8 of the book.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature. A mini-reception will follow the talk. The event is free and open to the public, no registration is required.

Jon Solomon is a professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and a researcher attached to the Centre de Recherches Plurilingues et Multidisciplinaires, Université Paris Nanterre. His publications have focused on the biopolitics of translation, developing a critique of the disciplinary divisions of the Humanities in their relation to the economic and political divisions of the postcolonial world. His recent works include a book in Chinese about the 2019 Hong Kong anti-ELAB movement, A Genealogy of Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in the anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong (Tonsan, 2022), Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana (Routledge, 2024), which he co-edited with Naoki Sakai and Peter Button; and many articles in English, such as “Logistical Species and Translational Process: A Critique of the Colonial-Imperial Modernity” in the Montreal-based journal Intermédialités; “Wynter is Coming: Black Communism, Translation, and Technics” in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Catalogue.

Gavin Walker is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Prior to coming to Cornell, he taught for 11 years at McGill University in Montréal, Québec. His research and teaching focuses on contemporary theory in its intersections with global intellectual history, continental philosophy and world literature, politics and aesthetics. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016) and Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux Éditeur, 2022), the editor of The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke, Fall 2022), and ‘Ronsō’ no buntai (Hōsei University Press, 2023, with Yutaka Nagahara) as well as editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). His new book, The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject is forthcoming from Verso next year.