The Geographers at UCI research cluster brings together faculty, students, and other community members to explore questions pertaining to how the organization, creation, and destruction of space and spatial relationships constitute a history of the present. As a fundamentally cross-disciplinary endeavor, our participants make use of geographical approaches to inflect their own methodologies and objects of study. While our participants come from a diverse array of disciplinary positions—from anthropology and urban planning, to history and cultural studies—our work overlaps in two areas: political economy and transnational frameworks.
Presenting a forthcoming co-edited volume of Taiwanese eco-literature in translation, this talk considers Taiwan’s contested statehood and fecund yet fragile natural environment as geopolitical affordances that subtend institutional and financial support for literary projects. Casting light on the production and circulation of multilingual texts, this auto-ethnographic examination of a transnational project affords a novel ecological view of ethnogenesis, nationalism, conflict, and cooperation in Taiwan and beyond.
Workshop: “Capitalist Surrealism, Cold War Fever Dreams, and Chinese Burning Man’s Nomadic Re-Enchantment of Global Exchange” Friday, 11/22, 12:30-2PM, HIB 137
Playground of bohemians and billionaires alike, Burning Man’s Black Rock City is to the world of today what London was to that of Karl Marx: A dazzling epicenter of global culture and commerce, a veritable capital of the world economy, a place to prophecy the future. A nomadic desert urban form framed by paid and volunteer labor and filled with the gifts of participants, it temporarily centers a nomadic network of regional events and copycat projects that span the planet. In this workshop, we will consider it in relation with San Francisco, a fixed center of the global tech economy to which Burning Man serves as a cultural infrastructure, and Beijing, a party-state-corporate capital where Burning Man’s imagined economic and cultural value has attracted attention from high echelons of the Chinese Communist Party.
Following Kojin Karatani’s radical emphasis on modes of exchange, we will examine flows of spaces between Black Rock City’s gift economies, China’s nominal communist party-state and supposed 關係 (guanxi , relationship) culture, and the US’s nominal liberal capitalism. We will consider whether these modes of exchange constitute a novel aesthetic that might be named as “capitalist surrealism” in the midst of geopolitical conflict, and explore how they may refract, amplify, and resolve contradictions of capital and culture.
Ian Rowen is Associate Professor of the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. He is the author of One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell University Press, 2023), the editor of Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror (Cambria Press, 2021), and the lead translator of Tibetan Environmentalists in China: The King of Dzi (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). He has served as the Burning Man Project’s Taiwan and China Regional Contact, and continues to serve as an international Metaregional contact. Starting in March 2025, he will be Associate Professor and Inamori Frontier Fellow of the Kyushu University Institute for Advanced Study.
