The concept of identity is being attacked as well as claimed from many sides, in renewed struggles over the boundaries of human belonging. Literary theory and criticism remain eager to take part, in Joseph North's words, in "a broader project of systematic cultural intervention," but how should it approach the current dangerous intersection of politics, logic, and practice? This panel turns to a similar historical nexus in the development of literary-critical theory: the explosive crossing of Marxism, structuralism, and psycho-analysis with Maoist thought in the 1960s. For a period, after it split from the Soviet policy of humanism, China emerged at the center of an anti-imperial and anti-racist struggle that reconfigured the world of action and of ideas. Its example was studied and emulated in North and South, East and West. Two principles in particular were key: the inseparability of theory from practice, and the elevation of contradiction over identity. The subject of Maoism/post-Maoism allows us to take a new look at culture, identity, ideology; race, capitalism, revolution, the relation of politics to truth; humanism and anti-humanism.

Maoism was a form of intellectual practice or discipline as well as a type of social and political organizing. It served as a global relay and vivid means of connection that transcended geography. It had a substantial influence on major theoretical figures and developments of the 60s and 70s, as Bruno Bosteels, Eleanor Kaufman, Chris Connery, Eric Hayot, Rey Chow, Camille Robcis, and others have shown. The impact of Maoism on Badiou, Kristeva, in 1960s France and Asia has been fruitfully explored by these and other scholars. But its connections to re-Africanization, its continuing status as a subject of debate in contemporary Asia, and its relevance to debates about the post-human and multi-culturalist ideology deserve to be more fully explored. We also see this panel as taking part in the important project of decolonizing or "worlding" theory. At its most vital, theory once fully spanned and articulated not just one or two worlds, but three, as we hope to show.

In "Anti-humanism and Post-humanism: Althusser and Mao," Yoon Sun Lee will reexamine what was at stake in the explicit anti-humanism of Althusser and his Maoist students. Althusser's landmark essay, "Marxism and Humanism," makes a powerful case for "theoretical anti-humanism." Such an analysis, which aims to grasp a given social structure as historically specific, on the one hand, and as a kind of internally asymmetrical structure, on the other hand, is contrasted explicitly with "humanism," which offers only a surface-description of experience. But, influenced by Mao, Althusser also defends the necessity of ideology as the medium of experience itself. Building also on recent work by Tina Mai Chen on "the human-machine continuum in Maoism," Lee will bring this approach into dialogue with current theories of post-humanism as elaborated by Cary Wolfe and others.

In his paper, "Critical Maoism? Culture and Fanon in the Theory of Ayi Kwei Armah, 1967-1984," Aaron Bartels-Swindells will take up a figure not often considered in the context of what Camille Robcis has called "global Maoism." Even as Armah wrestled with the legacy of Frantz Fanon, he also gravitated towards Amilcar Cabral, known to have admired Mao's thought. In the late 1960s, Armah conceptualized culture as the terrain of social reproduction and political struggle, and ultimately advocated a process of "re-Africanization"-- a stance that has affinities with the theoretical components of Maoism. Bartels-Swindells will analyze how Mao and Fanon were related to those beyond Europe who, like Armah, sought to rethink the relationship between theory and praxis, race and class, the particular and the universal. His paper will weigh critical Fanonism against an emerging critical Maoism to reconsider these thinkers' dialogic co-present in literary theory as articulated in the global South.

In “Maoist Literary Theory in Asia,” Petrus Liu reminds us that “Maoism,” as literary scholars have come to understand and practice it, is rooted in the global radical cultures of the 60s but filtered through a distinctive American reception of French theory. Such an approach ironically remains disconnected from the debates that have taken place in the region that it identifies with. Liu's paper will seek to expand the more familiar North American narrative of Maoism’s role in the development of anti-imperial and anti-racist struggles by turning to debates about Maoism as a literary-critical theory in Asia, paying attention to the relations between literary subjectivities and contradictory interpretations of proletarian insurgencies, state-capitalism, and the relations between real and formal subsumption in East Asia.

Colleen Lye will offer a response to these three papers from the perspective of her own current work on social movement politics in the global sixties, and how such politics became institutionalized in the U.S. via multiculturalism and through the form of the Asian American novel.

Since each speaker will have fifteen minutes, we leave twenty minutes for discussion with the audience. In the course of communicating with colleagues as we assembled this proposal, we have uncovered a substantial amount of shared interest in this topic; we anticipate a lively discussion.