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SUMMARY:July 14 – Guest Lecture: Racialization as Script: Narrative Permission and Differential Racial Time in INTERIOR CHINATOWN
UID:http://www.obama-institute.com/july-14-guest-lecture-racialization-as-script/
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DTSTAMP:20260714T170000Z
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Guest Lecture by Ren Haiyan (Hunan Normal University, China)
Racialization as Script:Narrative Permission and Differential Racial Time
in Interior Chinatown
July 14, 2026, 5 pm, room P 7 (Philosophicum)
In Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu uses the screenplay form, role lists, and
the conventions of the police procedural to expose racialization as a
script that precedes the individual. Near the end of the novel, his
reconstruction of the history of Chinese exclusion reveals the
institutional foundations of this script while bringing into view the
unequal temporalities produced by the U.S. racial order. Racialized groups
may inhabit the same historical present, yet they inherit different
relations to national memory, bear different burdens of recognition, and
are granted unequal access to futurity. Through the novel, Yu challenges
the power of any racial role to exhaust the person, defending instead the
right to possess a history, sustain relationships, and imagine a future not
predetermined by racial function.
Ren Haiyan is Professor in the Department of English at Hunan Normal
University and Executive Deputy Director of the Humboldt Center for
Transdisciplinary Studies, which she co-founded. She serves on the
editorial board of HiN – Alexander von Humboldt im Netz. Her research
interests encompass travel writing, critical theory, and Humboldtian
studies. Her recent publications include Robinson Crusoe on the Move: The
Knowledge and Imagination of the Modern West (FLTRP, 2023) and the edited
volume Montanhas e pescadores: Crítica cultural chinesa contemporânea
(Autêntica, 2024).You can download the poster for the event here.
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