Abstract

Barbara Foley teaches in the English Department at Rutgers University, Newark Campus. She has written extensively on U. S. literary radicalism and serves on the S&S Editorial Board and Manuscript Collective. She has traveled and lectured widely in China. Fengzhen Wang is a scholar of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and also a distinguished professor at the Southwest University of Science and Technology, in Mianyang, Sichuan Province. He has published widely on critical theory and cultural studies. He is now working on a collective multi-volume project on World Civilizations. Shaobo Xie is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at University of Calgary. He is Review Editor of ARIEL. He has published on literary theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, globalization, comparative literature, translation, and Chinese modernity. His works include Cultural Politics of Resistance, Globalization and Indigenous Cultures (ARIEL special issue co-edited with Fengzhen Wang), and Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics (co-edited with Fengzhen Wang). He is currently working on a book-length research project on postcolonial modernity. The interview took place electronically in July-August 2008. The project arose, somewhat ironically, during a conversation in Shanghai's "new town," a now highly commercialized entertainment zone located a block from the building where the CPC was founded in 1921