Weihsin Gui | University of California, Riverside (original) (raw)

Weihsin Gui

I am Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside campus. While my research and teaching focus on global anglophone literatures, postcolonial writing, and contemporary British fiction, I am also interested in cultural theories of nationalism, diaspora, and globalization, neoliberalism and cognitive capitalism, and approaches to new formalism and genre theory.

I am currently working on two book-length projects:

_Literary Aesthetics and Narratives of Rising Asia_. This book examines financial and ethnographic studies of India, China, and other Southeast Asian countries that foreground the trope of "Rising Asia." I suggest that contemporary fiction about "Rising Asia" both maps and critiques it through an aesthetic dimension that frames neoliberalism's subjective technologies through the formal iterations of philosophical aesthetics by thinkers such as Adorno, Marcuse, and Ranciere.
_The Book That Came In From the Cold: The Cold War and the Cultural Politics of British and Commonwealth Literature_. This book argues that mid-20th-century British fiction and the establishment of "Commonwealth Literature" are literary responses to the cultural politics of the Cold War, and that their liberal outlook serves as an important precursor to the formation of postcolonial literature and studies. Even though these literary and scholarly texts may not appear to be radical by today's standards, the cultural problematics they work out offer critical perspectives that contemporary postcolonial writers and theorists have missed.
Address: Riverside, California, United States of America

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Papers by Weihsin Gui

Forthcoming chapter in _The Cambridge Companion to Post-1945 British Fiction_.

Essay under review with _Interventions: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies_

_The Global South_ Volume 7 Issue 2, pp. 173-190

_Pacific Coast Philology_ Volume 49 Issue 2, pp. 153-166, 2014

$Research paper thumbnail of Refractions from a Managed Life: Adorno and Neoliberalism$

Essay in _Adorno Now_ edited by Tania Roy, under review with Polity Press

Essay in _Common Lines and City Spaces: A Critical Anthology on Arthur Yap_, 2014

Forthcoming in _LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory_ 25.4 (Winter 2014), 2014

_Journal of Commonwealth Literature_, Volume 47 Issue 1, pp. 73-89, 2012

_Journal of Postcolonial Writing_ Volume 43 Issue 3, pp. 264-277, 2007

Books by Weihsin Gui

A collection of essays on the work of the late Singaporean poet and painter Arthur Yap. Forthcomi... more A collection of essays on the work of the late Singaporean poet and painter Arthur Yap. Forthcoming March 2014 from the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore

This book argues that postcolonial literature written within a framework of globalization still t... more This book argues that postcolonial literature written within a framework of globalization still takes nationalism seriously rather than dismissing it as obsolete. Authors and texts often regarded as cosmopolitan, diasporic, or migrant actually challenge globalization’s tendency to treat nations as absolute and homogenous sociocultural entities.

While social scientific theories of globalization after 1945 represent nationalism as antithetical to transnational economic and cultural flows, National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics contends that postcolonial literature represents nationalism as a form of cosmopolitical engagement with what lies beyond the nation’s borders. Postcolonial literature never gave up on anticolonial nationalism but rather revised its meaning, extending the idea of the nation beyond an identity position into an interrogation of globalization and the neocolonial state through political consciousness and cultural critique.

The literary cosmopolitics evident in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Derek Walcott, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Preeta Samarasan, and Twan Eng Tan distinguish between an instrumental national identity and a critical nationality that negates the subordination of nationalism by neocolonial regimes and global capitalism. Through their formal innovations, these writers represent nationalism not as a monolithic or essentialized identity or body of people but as a cosmopolitical constellation of political, social, and cultural forces.