Jon Solomon
I work in a field where social relations are deeply invested in the fantasy of a geographical border that corresponds with scholars' self-identity and relation to linguistic and translational labor. I spent a huge amount of my own resources early in my career to learn to exit the West without entering another parallel Area that would prolong in a negative fashion the fantasy of the West. I forced myself, even at the cost of going downwards in the rankings tables and payscales, to work professionally with and in Chinese language, actively, not just passively, writing, teaching, applying for grants, socializing in Chinese, without ever ethnicizing Chinese or refusing to read contemporary thought. I consciously chose to leave a tenure track position in a top 30 global ranked university to pursue my career in a way that would marry an intervention into what are still today the extremely asymmetric social relations around translational and linguistic labor that characterize international knowledge production about China (not to mention the glaringly obvious class and racial exclusions that mark the field) to an elaborate intellectual critique of bordering processes in the composition of knowledge. Working in Taiwan, I didn't either position myself linguistically as an expatriate (teaching/writing/working in English) nor start wearing traditional clothes to adopt a "native" identity. Additionally, I began from the outset to incorporate a critique of area studies and the imperial-colonial cartography of areas into the heart of my intellectual project.
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Books by Jon Solomon
Foreword by Naoki Sakai
This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, American studies, black studies, and so forth.
序言一 楊凱麟 著
碎裂、喧囂、觸底與逆亂
序言二 何式凝、黎明 著
香港女性主義的敗北
香港反送中左翼敗北的系譜：翻譯、轉型與邊界 蘇哲安 著
第一章：邊界與敗北
一道前線
「超越邊界」真的就是進步嗎？
是不是左派沒那麼重要？
資本的外部性
文化研究與去馬的過程
歷史成見、外部性與世界圖式
左派的敗北
第二章：香港界址
運動的翻譯：回歸邊界
題外話：國際團結與現代性翻譯體制
定居殖民主義與「香港界址」
香港藝術創作中的邊界
第三章：翻譯的生命政治
回歸邊界與翻譯的生命政治
語言、解殖與「中文運動」
第四章：聲音、收編與左翼的失語
主權慾望
宗教戰爭
「顏色革命」
新自由主義
數位轉型
詮釋學侷限與失語問題的再思考
性別與失語
結語：一場加速主義的政治運動？轉型之後呢？
整體性與橫向自主
「牆」國與核心問題意識
非轉型主張
雙重國家
中文書寫
資本主義下一轉型：朝向武裝、私有化超級生命體的誕生
附錄：轉型、翻譯與區域布署
轉型，翻譯與區域佈署
連續性的梯度
轉型學與西方的意義
Papers by Jon Solomon
https://secession.at/ausstellung_chen_chieh_jen_en
ISBN 976-3-7533-0472-4
In this new essay, I finally had a chance to express this realization in a positive form in terms of the figure of "black communism".
Organized around "areas" that are supposed to correspond to anthropological types (such as "Chinese"), the Humanities as they have developed under Pax Americana are essentially apparatuses for the management of anticommunism and antiblackness. The Prime Directive for these fields is to prevent, and when necessary eradicate, the emergence of a new figure, black communism, and a new heretical knowledge.
The ideology that organizes and reproduces these founding exclusions is that of "conversion" (both economic and secular religious) and "transition" (both historical and metaphysical). Conversion and transition are encoded in the practices of the Modern Regime of Translation that governs the schema of internationality in the (post)colonial-(post)imperial world.
As disciplines overtly devoted to the regime of translation, those parts of the Humanities known as area studies are essential to the political labor of conversion and transition, i.e., "translation".
The Left has historically overlooked the importance of the labor of translation for capitalist reproduction. Thanks to the work of a group of Marxists inspired by the Japanese Marxist historian Uno Kozo, it is possible to theorize this deficiency in a way that reveals just how important the ostensibly "marginal" fields of knowledge production known as area studies really are.
Text commissioned for the catalogue to the exhibition "Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World" October 23 - December 30, 2022, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Exhibition page link: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2022/ceremony/start.php#:~:text=Ceremony%20(Burial%20of%20an%20Undead%20World)%20is%20an%20exhibition%20that,and%20its%20place%20in%20history.
Foreword by Naoki Sakai
This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, American studies, black studies, and so forth.
序言一 楊凱麟 著
碎裂、喧囂、觸底與逆亂
序言二 何式凝、黎明 著
香港女性主義的敗北
香港反送中左翼敗北的系譜：翻譯、轉型與邊界 蘇哲安 著
第一章：邊界與敗北
一道前線
「超越邊界」真的就是進步嗎？
是不是左派沒那麼重要？
資本的外部性
文化研究與去馬的過程
歷史成見、外部性與世界圖式
左派的敗北
第二章：香港界址
運動的翻譯：回歸邊界
題外話：國際團結與現代性翻譯體制
定居殖民主義與「香港界址」
香港藝術創作中的邊界
第三章：翻譯的生命政治
回歸邊界與翻譯的生命政治
語言、解殖與「中文運動」
第四章：聲音、收編與左翼的失語
主權慾望
宗教戰爭
「顏色革命」
新自由主義
數位轉型
詮釋學侷限與失語問題的再思考
性別與失語
結語：一場加速主義的政治運動？轉型之後呢？
整體性與橫向自主
「牆」國與核心問題意識
非轉型主張
雙重國家
中文書寫
資本主義下一轉型：朝向武裝、私有化超級生命體的誕生
附錄：轉型、翻譯與區域布署
轉型，翻譯與區域佈署
連續性的梯度
轉型學與西方的意義
https://secession.at/ausstellung_chen_chieh_jen_en
ISBN 976-3-7533-0472-4
In this new essay, I finally had a chance to express this realization in a positive form in terms of the figure of "black communism".
Organized around "areas" that are supposed to correspond to anthropological types (such as "Chinese"), the Humanities as they have developed under Pax Americana are essentially apparatuses for the management of anticommunism and antiblackness. The Prime Directive for these fields is to prevent, and when necessary eradicate, the emergence of a new figure, black communism, and a new heretical knowledge.
The ideology that organizes and reproduces these founding exclusions is that of "conversion" (both economic and secular religious) and "transition" (both historical and metaphysical). Conversion and transition are encoded in the practices of the Modern Regime of Translation that governs the schema of internationality in the (post)colonial-(post)imperial world.
As disciplines overtly devoted to the regime of translation, those parts of the Humanities known as area studies are essential to the political labor of conversion and transition, i.e., "translation".
The Left has historically overlooked the importance of the labor of translation for capitalist reproduction. Thanks to the work of a group of Marxists inspired by the Japanese Marxist historian Uno Kozo, it is possible to theorize this deficiency in a way that reveals just how important the ostensibly "marginal" fields of knowledge production known as area studies really are.
Text commissioned for the catalogue to the exhibition "Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World" October 23 - December 30, 2022, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Exhibition page link: https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2022/ceremony/start.php#:~:text=Ceremony%20(Burial%20of%20an%20Undead%20World)%20is%20an%20exhibition%20that,and%20its%20place%20in%20history.
In Achin Chakraborty, Anjan Chakrabarti, Byasdep Dasgupta and Samita Sen, eds.
‘Capital’ In the East: Reflections on Marx. Singapore: Springer, 2019.