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Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements mines 21st-century media artifacts such as Firefly and House of Cards to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Originating in the US but circulating beyond national boundaries, these “Chimerican media” co-create the figure of “rising China” in American media life. By demonstrating the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state, the book extends a political imagination beyond the ground of the nation and into the space of transpacific media.

Dr. Fan Yang is Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies and a faculty affiliate in Asian Studies, Global Studies, and the Ph.D. program in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the author of Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (2024) and Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016). Yang’s new project, Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South, examines the first Special Economic Zone located in southern China (now envisioned as part of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area) as a media-infrastructural complex that straddles globalizations from “above” and “below.”  An interdisciplinary scholar, Yang works at the intersection of cultural studies, transnational media studies, globalization, postcolonialism/postsocialism, and contemporary China. Her scholarship has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cultural Studies, Environmental Humanities, City, Culture & Society, Theory, Culture & Society, China Perspectives, New Media & Society, Journal of Asian American Studies, Communication+1, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, among others.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema & Media Studies and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.