This dissertation examines a range of durational cinematic experiments in post-1980s China and Taiwan, arguing that the contemporary period in reform-era China and post-martial law era Taiwan is better explained through the framework of durational temporality than chronological time. Challenging linear, progressive temporalities that dispense with the past too quickly in favor of idealized futures, durational temporality allows for contradictions such as the coexistence of socialism and neoliberalism, the co-presence of nostalgia and amnesia, and the reinvention of tradition alongside modernity. Through attention to the interruptions of untimeliness in cinematic and literary texts, this dissertation demonstrates that the search for a distinctly Chinese identity in the contemporary era resurrects the signs of tradition, rurality, and spirituality not to essentialize an ahistorical Chinese identity, but rather point out the historical erasures and disjunctures constitutive of the modern Chinese identity. My case studies include durational films by Jia Zhangke, Wang Bing, Wu Wenguang, Tsai Ming-Liang, Edward Yang, and Zhang Mengqi as well as the long-term oral history projects conducted by Liang Hong and the Folk Memory Project.

This dissertation analyzes literary and filmic works to point to the post-national and post-catastrophic nature of diaspora Armenian culture in or involving the Western Armenian language. After the 1915 Catastrophe, Western Armenian survivors were forced into exile from their ancestral lands, carrying with them a modern national literary language. By analyzing the works of Shahan Shahnour, Nigoghos Sarafian, Gariné Torossian, Vahé Oshagan and Krikor Beledian, this study traces the various forms in which the emergence of a diasporic Armenian culture is inscribed at the limits of realist and positivist practices of representation informing modern notions of national literature and history. It then theorizes multilingual diasporic culture on the basis of such analyses and positions the latter as a critique of post-colonial multiculturalism.

...By examining the cinema of Hong Kong’s commercial crime film director Johnnie To, this dissertation explains how film aesthetics offers a profound understanding of the geopolitical status of the city. In particular, this study concerns, in To’s aesthetic practice, the shift from the modern man’s ocular-phono-logocentric perception to a postmodern type of film viewing experience, which is not only ocular-phonic, but also corporeal. Using To’s post-1997 cinema as a frame of reference, this study observes that in order for Hong Kong’s film audience to comprehend the city, besides using only what the camera or the characters see or hear, they have begun to use what the characters appear to feel with their skin and internal organs. These transitions from sight and sound to haptic perceptions are signs of the skin and inner body taking over as the dominant layers of onscreen perception and cultural memory in post-1997 Hong Kong. This study brings to awareness a historical shift around 1997 in Hong Kong’s crime films from the ocular-phonic perceptual tradition to a corporeal aesthetic, what I call the “haptic turn” of the cinema. This suggests a sensory-visceral-affective film viewing experience that symptomatically informs some unsolvable dilemmas under Hong Kong’s “One Country, Two Systems” geopolitical framework.

Documentation as Transmedial Relay examines the rise of different documentary media in Chinese digital media landscapes to intervene in drastic sociopolitical changes between the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. I build a conceptual framework of relay to discuss how digitally-mediated visual, audio, and textual cultures were interrelated to capture shifting realities of ideological change, media fragmentation, political polarization, and economic precarity. Drawing on conceptions of a relay game, a group task of passing the baton from one to another to carry forward the activity, I consider the relay of documentation as a creative, open, and collective mode of social participation within and across media. Four chapters discuss how Chinese cultural producers took up documentary film, podcast, digital video, and social media posting in different moments of urgency to document volatile social changes and transmit their critical consciousness. By showing how they devised new strategies of storytelling to communicate their lived experience in a changing world, I theorize documentation as a critical method for building affective communities across media systems and cultivating new grounds of relatedness during precarious times.

Documentation as Transmedial Relay builds on media ethnography, cultural analysis, and media and political theories to bridge critical area studies, media studies, and studies on contemporary global politics. Anatomizing China’s implicated position within the structural crisis of neoliberal globalization, I take China as a critical site for understanding the shifting global social and media landscapes during this period of accumulated crises and radical uncertainties. Through extensive ethnographies on Chinese digital media platforms such as WeChat, Bilibili, and Little Universe, I examine how geopolitical changes affected real people and their use of media for social engagement. I consider the Chinese experience of transmedial documentation not as an anomaly in the fractured global media ecology, but as a globally-relevant case for testing the limits of response-ability and critical consciousness of ordinary media users and producers within conditions of crisis, precarity, and political constraints. With a focus on the diverse social imaginations and creative strategies of documentation generated by them, this project highlights their shared commitment to living up to radical social changes and inventing alternative futures of ethical cohabitation.

Wounded Language/Time: History, the Novel, and the Filipino-American Relation studies the traumatic intertwining of Filipino and American histories and the resurfacing of this relation in contemporary novels. In analyses of Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, Tony Perez’s Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, Edgar Calabia Samar’s Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog, and Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, I explore how literature functions as the working through of US-Philippines relations, which are founded on the Philippine-American War, the monumentally violent and monumentally forgotten event that led to the US colonization of the Philippines. I argue that the Filipino-American relation is traumatic, based on an overwhelming event only subsequently processed that renders relation and temporality queer. Linking Filipino American studies to trauma, race, and sexuality studies while tracing trauma theory back to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, I trace the history of this relation in way that is consistent with, while also queering, trauma. I provide a spectral and contrapuntal genealogy of the Philippine-American War that shows how history on the part of both the US and the Philippines is, symptomatic of trauma, defined by forgetting and repetition. I then follow these traumatic symptoms through the other means by which the war continues, in Filipino and American novels, creative narratives attached to the intertwined identities and the nation, the historical form at stake in the imperial dynamic that defines the Filipino-American relation, comparison between the two traditions allowing clarification of each other and of the history that binds them. Focusing on the repetition of history through its forgetting, this screening leading to experimentation in literature through which writing doubles, thereby processing, trauma and the reclamation of new/native “failures” that deconstruct Western ontology, I show how Filipino and American novels are sublimations of history in which trauma manifests and is processed in another form after some delay. Providing a theoretical frame for Filipino American studies and the study of American with other literatures and of the Filipino as part of new American studies, the dissertation links the metropolitan and colonial constituents of empire through trauma to pursue humanistic inquiry into power, desire, language, identity, temporality, and justice.

Although hermeneutics continues to predominate in humanities departments wherever semantic claims about phenomena are advanced (and not solely where `the hermeneutical' is explicitly invoked), its destiny remains unwritten. Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Gilles Deleuze conceptualized reading as a more retorse movement than the circular totalization that hermeneutics traces. Following their leads, this thesis advances the potential for an act of reading which no longer serves the behest of discourse [Redesinn], articulation or recognition. The first chapter, "Derrida's Afterlife of Reading: the Paris 1981 Gadamer Encounter," frames the intervention by elucidating the points of contention between hermeneutics and deconstruction. It demonstrates the logic of conciliation by which Gadamerian hermeneutics seeks to integrate deconstruction within the positioning of living discourse [Redesinn]. Derrida's afterlife of reading, in contradistinction, conceives of a positioning of textuality after it has been prescribed according to discourse. In the second chapter, "The Precise Illegibility of de Man," interpretive precision is re-conceived outside the province of mimetic representation. In tracing de Man's return to an etymology of precision as "cutting off," a praxis of reading outside models of equivalence and understanding finds its quintessential expression in the de Manian allegory. Finally, in the third chapter, "Reading with Pause and Muscles: Deleuze's Theatre of Sensation," a nascent Deleuzian concept is developed and its broad implications are considered. Best emblematized by the entr'expression of the Leibnizian Baroque, Deleuze's `reading' breaks with a phenomenological hermeneutics, and its model of recognition, for a line of flight at the threshold between the faculties. This dissertation addresses those for whom the destiny of reading remains yet unwritten.

This dissertation consists of two historico-theoretical investigations and theorizations. The first part concerns a comprehensive theorization of a leftist and Marxist concept of political strategy, what I term a leftist realpolitik. Here I review the history of modern Western realpolitik from the 17th century onward, and I trace and theorize the historical origins of a modernized and Marxist realpolitik that arises in response to the dominant realpolitik of the era.

The second part concerns a comprehensive retheorization of a leftist and Marxist concept of a strategic political fiction, what I term a leftist folkloric. Here I review the history of Western political fiction from the Greek tragedy to the television dramas of the present era, in order to trace the operations of a strategic current and rationale throughout this literature. I then use this historical lineage as a means to envisioning and prescribing a modernized strategic fiction of the left, one that is concerned with influencing and transforming practices of realpolitik here and now.

My methodology throughout this work is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s own method in his study of the origins of the German tragic drama. It is as such neither simply historicistic nor dialectical, but rather a historical study of transitions and transformations in politics and aesthetics with the intent of glimpsing the political will and imaginary of such transitions and transformations. As such, the literature review is focused on studying period of volatility and transition, and theorization is carried out not only to explicate and elucidate formations in politics and aesthetics here and now, but also with a mind to transforming the here and now through prescriptive concepts that function as theoretical latches and levers of practical transitions.