CURRENTS: Fan Yang and Tim Phin

Fan Yang, Assistant Professor, Media and Communication Studies

I’m working to adapt part of the conclusion of my book, Faked in China, into a chapter for an edited volume titled Commercial Nationalism. My plan is to examine the discursive formation of the “Chinese Dream” (zhongguomeng, 中国) under the cultural conditions of neoliberal globalization. Installed in 2012 by China’s newly inaugurated president Xi Jinping as a new catchphrase for his administration, the “Chinese Dream” has taken the Chinese media by storm and garnered global media attention in turn. While Xi understands modern China’s “greatest dream” as the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” which embodies “the integrated well-being” of the country and its people, observers in both China and the West are quick to notice the slogan’s semantic affinity to its American counterpart; after all, the “American Dream” remains the only “dream” that is globally recognized. It would be interesting, therefore, to explore the rise of this discourse as a global-national ideological formation, a concept that I’ve developed in my book to account for the reconfiguration of China’s state apparatus amidst the myriad forces of contemporary globalization.

Tim Phin, Assistant Professor, Ancient Studies

The assassination of the emperor Domitian in 96 CE brought an end to Flavian rule in Rome. An elated Roman senate damned the emperor’s memory. Subsequent Roman authors, Tacitus and Pliny, would write of the horrors and indignities of Domitian’s reign. This narrative juxtaposed terrible Domitian with the glorious reigns of Nerva and Trajan. My current research looks closely at that narrative, asking why and how it formed, and what it obscured. My present focus is the poet Martial, whose career began during Flavian rule and continued after Domitian’s death. Martial’s poetry provides the best example of an author struggling to reconcile the reality of regime change in the Roman empire. For my talk, I will discuss a series of emotional, ecphrastic poems written during Martial’s ‘exile’ from Rome. These poems reveal a man deeply concerned with his identity as a Roman; an identity complicated and unsettled by Domitian’s assassination.