Afterlives of Colonial Socialism

About this event

This public conversation, hosted by SFU faculty member Darren Byler, will consider the conceptual utility of a colonial or “settler socialist” framework for understanding the structure of dispossession, domination and occupation embedded in Chinese and Russian state socialism and the capitalist formations that followed. It will reflect on resistance to using this framework in China Studies and Russian/Soviet Studies scholarship; and the role it might play in reconceptualizing a revolutionary politics.

Speaker Bios

Shu-mei Shih, Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, is the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities at UCLA. She was the inaugural holder of the Edward W. Said Professorship in Comparative Literature (2019-2022) and the past President of the American Comparative Literature Association (2021-2022). Among other works, her book, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007), has been attributed as having inaugurated a new field of study called Sinophone Studies which reconceptualizes (among other things) experiences of coloniality, racialization, and transnationalism in East and Southeast Asia.

Svitlana Matviyenko is an Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication and Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute at SFU. Her research and teaching, informed by science & technology studies and history of science, are focused on information and cyberwar, media and environment, critical infrastructure studies and postcolonial theory. Matviyenko co-leads a working group on “Technologies of [Russian] Colonialism” where her current focus is on the practices of nuclear terror, weaponization of pollution and technogenic catastrophes during the Russian war in Ukraine.

Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at SFU. He is the award-winning author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. His current research examines the legacies of Chinese state socialism and infrastructural power in contemporary colonial institutions in the Uyghur and Kazakh homelands in Northwest China.