Public Talk by Prof Rebecca Karl: In the Realm of Comrades? Scattered Thoughts on Revolution and Hope

This talk engages with the history of the word/concept “comrade” from its revolutionary origins in the late nineteenth century to its more recent LGBTQ+ Chinese usages to think about the range of possibilities for hope in our present day.

Professor Rebecca Karl is Professor of History at New York University, and the author, most recently, of China's Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso, 2020). Her work explores the intersections of Chinese intellectual-cultural history, global change, and conceptual histories so as to understand the ways in which China’s violent integration into the global capitalist world system of economics, culture, and geopolitics transformed China and the world from the late-nineteenth century onwards. She is also the author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Duke 2002); Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Duke 2010); The Magic of Concepts: Essays on Philosophy, Economics and Culture in Twentieth Century China (Duke 2017). She is co-editor/co-translator of: The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (with L. Liu and D. Ko, Columbia 2013) and co-translated of Cai Xiang, Revolution and its Narratives (with Xueping Zhong, Duke 2016).