The Magic of Concepts: A Book Talk with Author and NYU Professor Rebecca Karl

Join us for a book talk with author Rebecca E. Karl, Associate Professor of History at New York University, about her new book, The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China.

Thursday, January 19, 2017

10:00 – 11:30 a.m.

Geisel Library, Seuss Room

In The Magic of Concepts, Rebecca E. Karl interrogates “the economic” as concept and practice as it was construed historically in China in the 1930s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Separated by the Chinese Revolution and Mao’s socialist experiments, each era witnessed urgent discussions about how to think about economic concepts derived from capitalism in modern China. Both eras were highly cosmopolitan and each faced its own global crisis in economic and historical philosophy: in the 1930s, capitalism’s failures suggested that socialism offered a plausible solution, while the abandonment of socialism five decades later provoked a rethinking of the relationship between history and the economic as social practice. Interweaving a critical historiography of modern China with the work of the Marxist-trained economist Wang Yanan, Karl shows how “magical concepts” based on dehistoricized Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of historical activity that purport to exist outside lived experiences have erased much of the critical import of China’s twentieth-century history. In this volume, Karl retrieves the economic to argue for a more nuanced and critical account of twentieth-century Chinese and global historical practice.rebecca-photo

Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History and Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and co-translator (with Xueping Zhong) of Cai Xiang’s Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966, all also published by Duke University Press. She co-translated and coedited (with Lydia H. Liu and Dorothy Ko) The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory.
This event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the UC San Diego Library, the UC San Diego History Department, the UC San Diego Literature Department, the Japanese Studies Program, the UC-Fudan Center.
For questions or more information, please contact Jinn Moon at jinmoon@ucsd.edu.