Censorship and Silence: A Global Historical Approach with Michel Hockx and La Donna L. Forsgren

‘The Only Good Chinese Writers Live Outside China’ and Other Myths: On the Transnational Censorship of Chinese Writers

Michel Hockx is Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literary and cultural communities, their publications, their values, their relationship to the state, and their representation in history. His most recent book publications are Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century (co-edited with Joan Judge and Barbara Mittler, Cambridge UP, 2018) and Internet Literature in China (monograph, Columbia UP, 2015).

Sistahood is Powerful: Recovering Black Women Intellectuals of the Black Arts and Black Power Movements

La Donna L. Forsgren is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her research reclaims black women’s intellectual, artistic, and activist traditions within US theatre and society. She is the author of In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Northwestern University Press, 2018) and Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theater and Performance (Northwestern University Press, 2020).

This conversation will be moderated by Nan Z. Da, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Nan Z. Da is an assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She works on Chinese and American literature from the nineteenth-century, as well as literary and social theory, to address the truth-telling capacities of literary criticism, and its uses for understanding counterintuitive social dynamics behind our cross-cultural encounters. This work also extends into methodological inquiries into the relationship between literary interpretation and data science. She is the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-US Literature and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2018) and edits, with Professor Anahid Nersessian, the Thinking Literature series housed at the University of Chicago Press.

Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters and the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched Initiative on Race and Resilience, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.