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Tainan, City Pluriferent

David Liu event poster
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
David Liu
Wednesdays at the Center

Visitors to Taiwan never miss Taipei, its capital for over a century, but the older counterpart Tainan gets unjustly missed as a global city. This talk is a Sebaldian exercise in narrating Professor Liu's native city "from the outside." Playing with Gilles Deleuze's notions of the virtual/actual and exo-/endo-consistency, Liu will weave a diegetical tapestry of that city through its wealth of (trans)historical vectors to/from all over the world. These vectors also give occasions for tangents and excursuses by which to meditate on the porous MULTIPLICITY of such a locale as its myriad relations equally external and internal. This is what Professor Liu wants to show of Tainan's "pluriference."
David Liu is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Religious Studies, where he also received his PhD before teaching at NCSU and back at Duke. Before coming to Durham, David also spent time learning and researching in Tokyo, Rome and Jerusalem. His work ranges from theory of religion, Continental and transcultural philosophy, to aesthetics and critical new media studies. As a social entrepreneur, David is also starting a new institute in Rome called Mangroves. Long "exiled" from his hometown of Tainan, Taiwan, he is personally interested in thinking about that city "from the outside."

This event is presented by the John Hope Franklin Center, and the Duke University Center for International and Global Studies. A light lunch will be served.