Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
Archiving TAZARA: Racial Politics and Infrastructural Imaginaries of Global China
Dr. Huang discusses the TAZARA Railway, a Cold War-era symbol of China-Africa friendship. She explores racial discourses in its history, and further expands on the significance of the TAZARA railway.
When:
January 17, 2024 5:00pm
PST
January 17, 2023, 5-6:30 pm
Doheny Memorial Library (DML) 240
University of Southern California
We cordially invite you to join us for "Archiving TAZARA: Racial Politics and Infrastructural Imaginaries of Global China," a research talk by Dr. Kun Huang, USC Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Literature. Snacks and light refreshments will be served.
Dr. Huang's talk examines the Chinese infrastructural imaginaries that anchor the TAZARA Railway as a fantastic object of China-Africa friendship. Built in newly independent Tanzania and Zambia at the height of the Cold War (1970-1975), the Chinese-sponsored “freedom railway” was tasked with materializing an alternative vision of development aid distinct from colonial and liberal paradigms.
Asking what kinds of racial specters haunt the archiving impulse of global China, and how thinking through the “unthought” of China-Africa race-making invite new visions of South-South decoloniality, Dr. Huang identifies the racial discourses that trouble this utopic origin story. Reading across historical, literary, and visual accounts of TAZARA construction, she uncovers a Sinocentric aesthetics of sacrifice that reproduces spatial-temporal modes of African underdevelopment. As TAZARA’s transmedial afterlives continue to generate symbolic capital in the Belt-and-Road era, this talk calls for an expansive critique of the entangled genealogies of anti-Blackness, infrastructural brutalism, and Cold War Afro-Asia.
Kun Huang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative race theory, global Blackness, and Chinese and Sinophone cultures. She is working on a book manuscript that examines the racial discourse of Blackness in modern China. She has published on Cold War Afro-Asian literary exchanges, diasporic anti-racist activism, and gendered anti-Blackness in contemporary China. She is also a translator of Toni Morrison’s and Saidiya Hartman’s creative works and critical essays.
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October 20, 2024
October 20, 2024
Please join us for the Grad Mixer! Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, Enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow students across USC Annenberg. Graduate students from any field are welcome to join, so it is a great opportunity to meet fellow students with IR/foreign policy-related research topics and interests.
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Events
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 - 3:00pm
Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow international students.
Thursday, November 7, 2024 - 4:00pm
Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author David M. Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.