The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China 1896 – 1906 (03/18)

Shaoling Ma

Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College

This lecture will be held virtually over Zoom. Please register for the event here:

https://bostonu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwscuGgpzorHNU_9HSgM4FFC0ykW3fUo8f0

Abstract: The project of knowing China finds itself in varying loops. Around the turn of the twentieth century, new communicative technologies’ contention with existing print media provided both the material infrastructure and the discursive content for science and technology to encroach upon notions of tradition and culture that had typically defined the late Qing. Well into the twenty-first century, the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly automated governance embody the cybernetic principles of recursivity and self-organization when computational processes both control and help proliferate new and indeterminate forms of social texts worldwide. My talk gives an overview of my recently published book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1896-1906, and focuses on telegraphy’s mediation of a global, oscillating Chineseness around the time of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. I then discuss my second book project in progress, provisionally titled Outsmarting: A Little Red Manual, which examines the role of the uncomputable in contemporary PRC’s smart designs. By tracking an arc between the first binary signaling system and planetary-scale remote-sensing technologies, my effort to understand “China” in loops can hopefully open up new directions for Asian Studies more generally.

Speaker:

Shaoling Ma is an Assistant Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College. Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Configurations, Mediations, and positions.