Humanities Forum with Fan Yang

Race, Politics, and Rising China through Chimerican Media
Drawing on her forthcoming book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements, Fan Yang mines 21st-century media artifacts such as Firefly and House of Cards to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. She demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state.
Fan Yang (杨帆) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at UMBC. An interdisciplinary scholar, Yang works at the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, and contemporary China. She is the author of Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (Indiana University Press, 2016), as well as the forthcoming book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (University of Michigan, June 2024). Yang is also at work on a new project, “Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South,” which examines the first Special Economic Zone located in southern China as a media-infrastructural complex that straddles globalizations from “above” and “below.”