Historians and literary scholars have struggled with the ideas of world history and world literature, but their efforts have largely run parallel with each other. Taking cue from discussions of world history and world literature, how might we conceive of world art and the place of Asian feminist art within it? What new geographies are possible when we consider Asian feminist art on the world scale? Shu-mei Shih explores these questions in her 2012 Katz Distinguished lecture. Her lecture is also the keynote address for New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia, and the World, an international conference that reconsiders the practice, circulation, and cross-cultural significance of feminist art from Asia.

Shih is Professor of Comparative Literature, Asian Languages & Cultures, and Asian American Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, where she holds the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities. She is the author of Against Diaspora: Discourses on Sinophone Studies published in 2017, Keywords of Taiwan Theory 2019, and Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007). She is also the editor of a special issue of PMLA on “Comparative Racialization” (2008). She was awarded a Yu-Shan Scholar Prize from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education for 2022-2025.

The 2023-2024 season of Going Public features select Katz Distinguished Lectures from our archive. Learn more about the lecture series and peruse the archive:

https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures.