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China Made: the tecno-politics, materialities, and legacies of infrastructure development

Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 10:00 – 11:30 AM (US EST) 8am MST

The China Made project seeks to build an innovative research agenda for an infrastructural approach in the China Studies field. We approach infrastructure as both an empirically rich material object of research and an analytical strategy for framing research questions and approaches that help us explore more nuanced realms of techno-politics, everyday life, and spatio-temporal change in contemporary and historical China. In this panel, we focus on four key arenas of inquiry: the infrastructural state, infrastructure space, temporalities of infrastructure, and the everyday. Overall, we draw from two broad strands of inquiry in developing our approach. These include, first, recent efforts to rethink the materiality of infrastructures not as an inert or relatively stable basis upon which more dynamic social processes emerge and develop, but rather as unstable assemblages of human and nonhuman agencies. Second, we draw on work that explores the often hidden (techno)political dimensions of infrastructures, through which certain intended and unintended outcomes emerge less from the realms of “policy” and “implementation” and more from the material dispositions and effects of infrastructural formations themselves. These strands of inquiry are brought together as part of our effort to recognize that the infrastructural basis of China’s approach to development and statecraft deserves a more concerted theorizing of infrastructure than what we have seen in the China Studies field thus far.

Co-Sponsored by India China Institute at The New School, The Henry Luce Foundation, and The China Made Project

Seeing/Unseeing the ‘Chinese’: visuality, race, and contemporary art in Indonesia

Thursday, February 11 at 12pm MST

This paper examines recent work by contemporary Indonesian artists in order to think through the visual politics by which “Chineseness” has become both hypervisible and invisible in different ways and at different moments in Indonesian history. My aim is to trace a historically shifting “distribution of the visible” integral to the social process of racializing the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia, and to ask how these interlocking forms of seeing and unseeing “Chineseness” both enable and occlude violence. At the same time that they offer critical insights into histories of racialized violence, the artists whose work I examine also critically and reparatively intervene in the visual figuration of the Chinese in Indonesia, seeking to open up new ways of seeing.

Karen Strassler is Professor of Anthropology at CUNY’s Queens College and the Graduate Center. Her research interests include photography, visual and media culture, violence and historical memory. She is the author of Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Duke UP, 2010), a study of the role of everyday photography in the making of Indonesian national identity. Her recent book,  (Duke UP, 2020), explores the political work of images in post-authoritarian Indonesia. A recent article, “Zones of Refuge” (2018), examines the work of artist FX Harsono in confronting occluded histories of violence against Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority. The latter is part of a new research project that investigates images and the politics of visibility in relation to Chinese Indonesians.