CEAS Colloquium Series
Highlighting major shortcomings of the traditional models of civil religion, Professor Lee’s talk will introduce the religious thought of Ham Sok Hon (1901-1989), arguably the most influential religious-political activist in modern Korea and a two-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. He attempts to continue the conversation of civil religion of the world, which Robert Bellah expressed despondently in his 1967 essay by saying “flickering flame of the United Nations.” Lee points out that the popular frameworks by classical theorists such as Durkheim and Rousseau have long shaped the general...
This talk will introduce some novelists around 1930 as Showa modan literature to examine the historical meaning of Japanese modernism. What was Japanese modernism? I have been thinking about this question. In 2005, I published my doctoral dissertation on Japanese avant-garde as a monograph. Around the same time, several monographs on Japanese modernism were published in the United States. Their analyses from the perspective of gender, mass culture, and colonialism still show me the way to the future of research on modernist literature. What does a researcher from Japan think about Japanese...
The King’s Road offers a new interpretation of the history of the Silk Road, emphasizing its importance as a diplomatic route, rather than a commercial one. Tracing the arduous journeys of diplomatic envoys, Xin Wen presents a rich social history of long-distance travel that played out in deserts, post stations, palaces, and polo fields. The book tells the story of the everyday lives of diplomatic travelers on the Silk Road—what they ate and drank, the gifts they carried, and the animals that accompanied them—and how they navigated a complex web of geographic, cultural, and linguistic...
Our perception of Chinese engagement with “exotic” maritime commodities is strongly colored by the work of Edward Schafer (Golden Peaches of Samarkand; Vermilion Bird), who focused on the experience of connoisseurs during the Tang Empire. Though Schafer’s work was groundbreaking for its time, it has left us with some misperceptions. The system of maritime commodity trade was in fact developed under the Jiankang Empire (a.k.a. the Chinese southern dynasties, 3rd-6th centuries CE), whose ruling class had much closer ties to the Southeast Asian traders who actually built and operated the network...
The past several years have witnessed a shift in Chinese state policy regarding religion and the gradual diminishment of the state’s relative lenience towards religion In the early reform era. Much of the change is focused on visibility and public spaces, including the removal of crosses, the remodeling of mosques and the destruction of large Buddhist and Daoist statues. Based on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of state space production, this lecture is an attempt to examine the changes of the past decade focusing primarily on Christianity and Islam and the ways in which Chinese...
*Please note this event is scheduled to begin at 9:25am Please register for this Zoom event here The Buddho-Daoist group of bas-reliefs crudely carved on the cliff of Kongwangshan 孔望山 in Lianyungang 連雲港 (Jiangsu) has been widely reputed to date to the late Eastern Han (25–220 CE), following the report of the preliminary survey published in 1981 and the authority, among others, of the late Yu Weichao 俞偉超 (1933–2003). Rather recently, the date has been reaffirmed by the final site report published in 2010. But the...
This talk introduces the main thesis of the speaker’s forthcoming book, Spatial Dunhuang: Experiencing the Dunhuang Caves, which experiments with a new way of analyzing Dunhuang art—and Buddhist grottoes in general. Starting from re-examining the Mogao Caves through the perspective of space, this analysis also leads us to think about the complicated temporalities of this large cave complex. Wu Hung has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art. His interest in both traditional and modern/contemporary Chinese art has led him to experiment with different ways to...
The Treaty of Chanyuan, signed at the beginning of the eleventh century, established the international order of multiple coexisting states based on alliance pledges that had intermittently emerged since the ninth century onward, creating a “system” with long-term sustainability. This system was based on the formal equality of the relationship between the Kitan Liao and the Northern Song, which regulated not only relations between these two states, but also with other regimes for one hundred and twenty years. However, the establishment of the Jin led to the emergence of suzerain-vassal...
Two paradigms, both based in Western experience, dominate the literature on the transition to adulthood. One of these, which I call the traditional marker paradigm, focuses on access to and the timing of the attainment of markers of adulthood idealized in mid-twentieth century America. The other, the emerging adulthood paradigm, focuses on this life stage as a time of identity exploration, self-focus, and a sense of possibilities. Based on interviews with 100 young men and women in southwestern China, I demonstrate that neither paradigm fully accounts for the Chinese experience. Rather than...
During the violent early years of China’s Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. Why? One explanation posits a process of collective killings focused on rural households categorized as class enemies by the regime. This view draws parallels with genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, and similar settings. New evidence from classified investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide counter-insurgency campaign carried out by village militia. The...
This paper will present the results of a preliminary investigation into gender-based differences in treatment of poetic topics (dai) in the waka poetry anthology, Eikyū yo nen hyakushu (‘The Eikyū 4 Hundred Poem Sequences’; 1117). This collection contains 701 poems on one hundred topics by seven poets, five men and two women. By this point in waka history, topic was a significant category which provided strictures for poets on suitable diction (kotoba) and conception (kokoro) to be used in the production of their poems. Poetic quality was often determined by the faithfulness with which poets...
Commemoration through Collaboration: Memory making in late medieval muzhiming墓誌銘 (entombed epitaphs)
A recent turn in the study of late medieval Chinese muzhiming has been to consider not simply what information they communicate but also how, why, and to whom, and how answers to these questions can inform our understanding of that period’s commemorative practices. In this talk, I analyze muzhiming as textual and material objects produced through processes of “collaborative remembrance,” as coming into being due to the shared efforts and remembrances of multiple parties. In the first part of my talk, I discuss what close examination of the muzhiming as a material object reveals about how...
This talk analyzes the current political predicament of Hong Kong by examining “Nightmare Wallpaper,” an art project composed of the automatic drawings by local artist Pak Sheung Cheun when he was attending the court cases of some political activists on trial. He subsequently transformed them into wallpaper prints, a series of installation arts, and a book. This political work, which is also very private, honestly demonstrates the artist’s intense struggles along with despair felt by many in the city. It is both a work of abjection and intersubjectivity, with no naïve expectation to reconcile...
Why are perennially entrenched institutions so hard to reform? This talk proposes a novel theory of institutional rebound for difficult reforms. It untangles reforms in China’s state-owned enterprises, which aimed to break the “iron institutions” in leadership, employment and wages and introduce competition. I argue that the reforms triggered the emergence of informal institutions, which eroded the new rules and allowed previous institutions to bounce back. When actors had denser political connections, their active manipulation helped the vested interests to design rules to maintain...
In 1903, Ōsaki Tatsugorō, builder and manager of some 1,100 slum houses in Tokyo, dictated his autobiography. This talk draws on the autobiography to examine the social context and the economic calculus underlying the construction of the city’s sprawling working-class periphery. Ōsaki’s story reveals a transitional moment in the city’s history, before a land-centered real estate market governed by contracts and planning regulations redefined the economics of housing. His building practice is shown to be part of an economy of circulation rather than accumulation, bearing traits in common with...
Most letters in Tokugawa Japan were written in sōrōbun, the epistolary style of classical Japanese. Yet there were also letters composed in kanbun, or Literary Sinitic prose. This talk will focus on a set of three letters, written in Literary Sinitic prose in Genroku 11 (1698) by Muro Kyūsō (1658–1734), then a Confucian scholar in the service of the Kaga domain lord Maeda Tsunanori (1643–1724), and addressed to Aochi Norimoto (1675–1744), a samurai retainer of the same domain. These letters contain bits of information that may not have surfaced otherwise: Kyūsō and Norimoto’s secret...
In 1868, one of the first acts of the new Meiji government was to declare that Shinto and Buddhist institutions must be separated. For most of Japanese history, the nation’s two major religious traditions had been tightly integrated and so this change has been characterized as a “cultural revolution.” My talk will focus on one component of traditional Japanese religion, the Tenjin cult, and how it was practiced at one of its principle centers located in Dazaifu, Kyushu. The institution began, unambiguously, as a Buddhist temple, Anrakuji, but today flourishes as a Shinto shrine, Dazaifu...
The radical framework of the Black Pacific offers a unique way to make sense of the multiple afterlives brought together in the heavily militarized island of Okinawa, Japan. This talk will focus on key lessons learned while researching and writing about the entanglements of Black and Asian intimacies, colonialities, and forms of anti-Blackness in Okinawa. Carter will also discuss how the Black Pacific, as a conceptual lens, gives scholars of Okinawa a way to raise better questions about the legacy of White supremacy in the Pacific and better analysis of the persistence and vitality of Black...
The recent political crisis in Hong Kong is characterized by a level of social unrest the city has not seen since the riots of 1966/67. After that earlier round of turmoil, the British colonial regime secured legitimacy through socioeconomic improvement in Hong Kong. “Prosperity and Stability” became the hallmark of Hong Kong’s success. This catchphrase also came to be adopted as the slogan of the HKSAR government in its bid to seek legitimacy with socioeconomic appeals. Against such perennial state rhetoric, grassroots protesters came to demand “Democracy and Freedom.” Examining these...
Smuggling, overseas gambling, human trafficking…Contemporary media coverage and government policies tend to frame the shadow economy at the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands as “new problems” posed by market-oriented reforms in both societies. These activities were nevertheless part of the long-existing inter-Asian economic and social networks. This talk investigates how consecutive political authorities in China and Vietnam sought to tame the spontaneous cross-border connections since the formal demarcation of the international boundary following the Sino-French War up to the mid-twentieth century...
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