TrAIN

Visiting Fellow - Visiting Fellow - Tate/Train Visiting Fellow - Fullbright Visiting Distinguished Chair

David Leiwei Li is a native son of Shanghai and a naturalized American. He is Professor of English, and the Collins Professor of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. Besides scholarly articles, he is the author of Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford UP, 1998), the editor of Globalization & the Humanities (HK UP, 2004), and Asian American Literature, a 4 volume 2240 pages collection of criticism (Routledge, 2012

Project: China: The Second Coming of Capitalism and the Spontaneous Combustion of the World
For his tenure from January through June of 2013, he plans to finish his on-going monograph, Globalization on Speed: Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Contemporary Chinese Cinema and start a collection of photo essays, tentatively entitled, The Second Coming of Capitalism in China. Central to both is his persistent preoccupation with “culture” and “capitalism.” Li approaches “culture” anthropologically, as a way of life emanating from the everyday, and aesthetically, as imaginative forms and creative expressions. He considers industrial “capitalism” not only as a historical economic system originated from 18th c Europe, which has since gone viral, but also a constitutive cultural dynamic of transnational social practices today. Although China is the ostensible object of both projects, its mirage like development compressed in a span of three decades what has taken Western Europe three centuries to accomplish poses fascinating questions for our inalienable world historical destiny. If China were to fulfil the full potential of limitless capital, surpassing its partial realization in the British empire of the 19th century and American empire of the 20th, would we indeed reach “the end of history” in the 21st century when the world is stripped bare not by “locusts,” as Gandhi once metaphorically cautions against India’s development “in the manner of the West,” but by a new species of homo economicus beyond the conception of Adam Smith?

Reading exemplary films from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China, Professor Li shows how Sino-phone cinema illuminates capital’s radical transformation of individual subject and society, and how the filmic media simultaneously discovers, recovers, and imagines ways of countering capitalist corrosion. As this book’s argument was moving progressively towards the recuperation of emotional and ethical resources against “the time/space of creative destruction,” he happened to visit “Shanghai EXPO 2010: Better City, Better Life.” The event prompted his critical coupling of capital’s economic logic with environmental devastation and occasioned his new project, a series of photo essays which will challenge his skill both as an ethnographic photographer and a critic of culture. With an eye towards urban developments and renewals, the essays shall analyse architectural practices and advance an eco-critical argument in favor of cultivating “the time/space of sustenance.”