Comparative Literature

Tianren is a second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research delves into the questions of racial capitalism, financialization, and extraction as means of accumulation. His project seeks to challenge the dominant popular imagination of “high” finance by thinking through how financialization, as a planetary process, necessarily operates in tandem with so-called “primitive” modes of accumulation—dispossession, expropriation, and extraction. Foregrounding Afro-Asia as both a key axis of contemporary imperial formation and a frontier of transnational resistance, his work examines how finance capital is embedded in racial, colonial, and extractive matrices of power. He is particularly interested in how these relations are materialized and territorialized through global infrastructures of circulation, computation, extraction, policing, and incarceration, and in how the latter’s reconfiguration of space, information, and energy is contested and disrupted by plural forms of resistance across the globe.

Tianren’s research has explored these ecologies of contemporary capitalism from multiple angles, engaging with topics from the history of environmental markets to data extraction and the infrastructure of surveillance capitalism. He works across a wide array of materials, including archives, technical objects, activist writings, contemporary art, and speculative fiction. He is organizing a study group on “remapping extractive capitalism” at the Cogut Institute for the coming year.
 

Education:

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

Languages:

English, Mandarin Chinese, French, Japanese