Episode
Ting Hui Lau, "Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism" (Stanford UP, 2026)
- Podcast
- New Books in Critical Theory
- Published
- Aug 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3830
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK7971754853.mp3
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-critical-theory-962622/episodes/ting-hui-lau-decolonial-endurance-lisu-worldmaking-against-chinese-settler-colonialism-stanford-up-2026/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-critical-theory-962622/ting-hui-lau-decolonial-endurance-lisu-worldmaking-against-chinese-settler-colonialism-stanford-up-2026.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
A series of questions have been sparked by the indigenous urgency of the moment: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2026) explores these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and Tibet. Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands, this mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state power. Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has been compelling the Lisu to give up their subsistence lifeways, move into urban settlements, and send their children to government boarding schools. In exchange for the so-called gifts of development—healthcare, income, and education—they suffer environmental and social catastrophes such as mass landslides, strange new illnesses, and toxic food. Drawing on over a decade of engagement with the Lisu, Ting Hui Lau takes readers into the world of ex-shamans, heart-pained mothers, restless spirits, and demon-mad migrants as they grapple with the fallout from state development, which Lau argues is the latest phase in a centuries-long project of settler colonialism along China's Southwest frontier. At once a portrayal of loss and an ethnography of hope, Lau chronicles Lisu worldmaking amid this destruction, centering their quiet resistance through everyday acts of communal caretaking. In a time of escalating geopolitical and ecological crisis, this book calls for a new decolonial politics rooted in the transformative power of endurance. Ting Hui Lau (email address: [email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the National Un…