Comparative Literature

Tianren Luo is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature. An interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and activist, they work at the intersections of racial capitalism, extractivism, decolonial theory, and contemporary art criticism, with a focus on postcolonial Africa and Asia. Tianren’s project examines the entanglement among extractivism, transoceanic logistics and racial capitalism across Africa and Asia in post-1980s global capitalism. Working transcontinentally with experimental films, novels, photography, and archives from various port cities, their project rethinks the concepts of “zones” and “zonal capitalism” and revisits critiques of the “offshore” by foregrounding an Afro-Asian relational geography as a site of ongoing imperial formation and a frontier of transnational resistance and decolonial knowledge production. Tianren has also written against data capitalism, including critical studies on surveillance state infrastructure and the racial-colonial logistics of AI extractivism. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including Cultural Politics, positions politics, Theory, Culture & Society, ASAP/Review, and Critical Asian Studies, among others.
 

Education:

B.A. in Philosophy (with highest distinction), Fudan University, 2024

Languages:

English, Mandarin Chinese, French, Japanese