AfroAsianist Readings of Marx

media release: This event with Professor Colleen Lye (UC Berkeley) is presented by the UW-Madison Department of History, the Asian American Studies Program, the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, and the Center for the Humanities.

The 1960s represented a conjuncture that gave rise to new readings of Capital and to identity-based epistemologies, or modes of critique that presented themselves antagonistically to each other. The 2010s presented another conjuncture. This time there were efforts at their unification or reconnection through ideas of racial capitalism which entailed a reopening of 60s thought, but one shorn of its AfroAsianist global context and, concomitantly, historical possibility. Through a reconstruction of the efforts of Grace Lee Boggs and Harry Chang to ply Marx’s critique of political economy toward a historical materialist account of race, Colleen Lye proposes a way of connecting race and value that retains the utopian potential of the value form.

Colleen Lye (Ph.D., Columbia) is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on marxism and critical theory, Asian American Studies, and 20th and 21st century literature. She is affiliated with the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Department of Rhetoric. She is Chair of the Asian American Research Center (AARC), and a founding and executive committee member of the UC systemwide Marxist Institute for Research (MIR). Lye currently serves on the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Postmodern Culture. Besides these venues, her writing has appeared in Modern Languages Quarterly, PMLA, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Literature, American Literary History, Interventions, Novel, Positions, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Public Books and Commune.

Lye is the coeditor of After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century (with Christopher Nealon, Cambridge 2022). Her book America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton 2005) received the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies, and was named a finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She has coedited numerous special journal issues on the topics of peripheral realism, Asian racial form, financialization, and the humanities and university struggles. The dossier The Struggle for Public Education in California (coedited with Christopher Newfield) appeared in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly that won MLA’s Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Award for Best Special Issue of 2011.

Lye is writing a book on Asian American literary and theoretical contributions to marxism in the United States in the global sixties.