CEAS Colloquium Series
In my lecture, I will examine the connections between Japonisme and the emergence of cinema. Japonisme, the influence of the Japanese art, culture and aesthetics on European and American art, roughly between the 1860s and 1910s, also had a significant impact on early cinema. In particular, I discuss the relationship between Japonisme and the films of Lumière brothers. Finding inspirations from paintings and applying their compositions to their films, the Lumière films presented accuracy, immediacy, and temporality, three goals of Impressionist painters. In order to challenge the liner...
This talk contemplates the following questions about Song-period China. If only certain parts of China experienced a “Medieval Economic Revolution,” can we view such revolution as a common feature of entire “China”? If other parts of China experienced a significant economic downturn, how did such downturn interact with or offset the revolutionary growth elsewhere? Much of the regional downturn was associated with environmental degradation. And much of the environmental degradation both resulted from and led to the furthering of regional disparity, unequal resource allocation, and...
This talk takes up the figure of the supply chain to think about the problem of constancy-amid-flux in the circulation of people and things between Fuzhou, China and the United States. Ethnographically, the talk focuses on a grey industry of transnational Chinese couriers whose work revolves around the transport of American-born infants and a steady supply of “quality” milk formula from their migrant parents in the U.S. to designated caregivers in rural Fuzhou. For Chinese migrants hoping to ensure the safe movement and return of their “Little Americans,” supply chains not only emerge as...
It is the presence and placement of kanji or “Chinese characters” within the German and Japanese texts (both written by Tawada) that is a striking feature of Borudō no gikei/ Schwager in Bordeaux. Published first in 2008, the German language text written by Tawada contains 276 characters as headings or “titles” for component sections of varying lengths. In Tawada’s 2009 Japanese text, published in the following year, contains a similar layout, but the kanji that appears at the heading of each section is printed as a mirror image of itself. Can we take at face value, and as a kind of “key” to...
Most Daoist scriptures in Early Medieval China were not freely accessible; they were transmitted from Masters to chosen disciples via elaborate transmission rituals. Scriptures, ritual manuals, and compendia record detailed instructions for the transmission of specific texts, including references to “pledge offerings” (called faxin, mengxin, xinwu, mengwu, mengshi, laixin, guixin or zhangxin) to be given by the disciple to the master as a requirement for the transmission of scriptures or other written materials. Offerings for the transmission of esoteric scriptures are not unique, we find...
Based on archives, local gazetteers, 35 in-depth interviews in Beijing and Shanghai and many diaries and studying/working notes given by former Educated Youths, autobiographies, memoirs, documentary literature and reportage etc., this talk shows that firstly, the hunger for books and knowledge of the educated youths was stratified, and youths from city cadres and intellectuals’ families constituted the main body of personal reading activity during the Cultural Revolution. They found ways and means to obtain books to read, but in comparison, thirst for reading was not significant for the...
The later reception of the Chuci anthology has been largely framed around the representation of the attributed author Qu Yuan as a loyal subject. This talk instead traces the earlier reception and contested status of Qu Yuan during the Han dynasty, to open up a space for the language of the Chuci to be deployed for a different orientation: as part of the repertoire of imperial performance in Xie Lingyun’s poetry. Harrison Huang received his Ph.D. from The University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in medieval Chinese poetry and intellectual history. His research interests...
Yakushiji temple in Nara houses a 2.5-meter bronze sculpture of the Master of Medicine Buddha with two attendant bodhisattvas; the triad was completed ca. 718. A temple of the same name was vowed by Emperor Tenmu (r. 672–686) in 680 for an earlier capital, Fujiwara, when his chief consort, later Empress Jitō (r. 686–697), became ill. Visually and metaphorically, the 1.5-meter bronze pedestal beneath the Master of Medicine icon supports the Buddha’s promise to quell forces that sicken people and foster chaos. The elegant and powerful blend of Indic foreign figures, Chinese cosmology, grape...
A major cult figure in southwest China from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, Liu Benzun was best known for sacrificing parts of his body to quell demons and save lives. This paper examines key figurations of Liu at cave temples in Anyue and Dazu as part of a broader study of how these sites reshaped the mountain setting, which has long been the destination for Buddhist ascetics, for lay devotees. Central to my discussion is the presentation of Liu’s Ten Austerities as a spectacular relief across a cliff surface at Baodingshan, which is in a marked contrast with the Cave of Perfect...
From the debut of the Buddha Śākyamuni in early historical Japan through the fifteenth century, the Indian sage often cut a remote and un-affecting figure. Only late in Japan’s tumultuous sixteenth century did new stories of his life, filled with original poetry, drama, and derring-do, begin to circulate as commercial books. In turn, these print commodities were adapted for the puppet theater from the middle of the seventeenth century, and for the kabuki stage from the mid-nineteenth. Largely overlooked by scholars of Japanese Buddhism and the Japanese theater, these new staging’s of the life...
Nanban byōbu, screen paintings depicting the arrivals of Europeans in late 16th - early 17th century Japan, constitute one of the most numerous genres of Japanese painting. Long admired for their visual accounts of the brief encounter between Japan and Europe in the age of exploration, Nanban screens have opened avenues of research for the study of genre painting, the Momoyama period, and the history of European maritime exploration and missionary activity in East Asia. This lecture will approach Nanban screens from the perspective of the history of early modern Japanese painting, addressing...
Media censorship in contemporary China is sustained effectively without losing its legitimacy domestically, even when the Chinese media became much more commercialized through media reform, and censorship in China in the post-Mao era is highly criticized globally. A high level of compliance is evident within the journalistic field and among the general public, although resistance and conflict are also reported occasionally. This talk provides historical perspective on the Chinese media censorship system by exploring how the CCP achieved such a high level of compliance among media workers in...
For several decades now, IT developers in Japan have battled with their colleagues in other parts of the world for a chance to shape the ubiquitous computing protocols of the future. But as with the internet before it, attempts to establish global standards for ubiquitous computing continually bump up against the disparate needs and practices of specific populations. This talk explores debates over how to build a ubiquitous computing network with Japan in mind, from specific aspects of Japanese communication and urban design to the particular challenges of an aging and shrinking population....
In April of 1936, the magazine Kamigata hanashi (Kamigata Story) was launched in Osaka. This was a rakugo (comic storytelling) magazine published monthly out of a local storyteller’s home. One mission of the magazine as laid out by the editor in the inaugural issue was to help breathe new life into a traditional art that was losing a popularity battle with manzai (two-person stand-up comedy) and other modern performing arts and media. In the second year (of four and a half) of the magazine’s run, the editor issued a call for yoshikono verses, which, like dodoitsu, are conventionally written...
Of all the war atrocities committed by the Japanese military in China, perhaps the most notorious and curious case was that of the Hundred Man Killing Contest. As Japanese military units raced to capture the Chinese capital of Nanjing in late 1937, Tokyo Nichinichi shinbun reporters breathlessly covered the story of two officers competing to be the first to kill one hundred Chinese soldiers. Although the event is remembered today as an example of the cruelties of Japanese militarism, thinking about the Killing Contest as media spectacle can provide new insights on how total war transforms...
The scholarship of Japanese Empire seems to have developed along a series of dichotomous ideas, including the victimizer and the victimized, the colonizer and the colonized, Naichi and Gaichi, and so forth and so on, though the more recent scholarship aims to multi-layer these simple dichotomies. In my presentation, I try to make efforts to find the moments of humanism, and even humanitarianism, in Japan’s reign of its empire. I do so by focusing on the destitute children deprived of parents in both sides of Japanese Empire, Japan proper and the occupied China. In the early twentieth...
As the earliest full-size towering pagoda extant in China, the pagoda at Songyuesi 嵩岳寺 in Dengfeng, Henan (ca. 523 CE) is one of the most important objects we have for understanding the creation of Buddhist sacred space in Asia. Yet the plan of this structure, incorporating both dodecagon and octagon, is mysterious in its complexity－doubly so because it may be the only surviving example of its kind. By focusing on the geometry used in its creation, in this paper describe one possibility for determining the interior and exterior dimensions of the Songyuesi Pagoda plan, effectively encoding the...
How does one remember a traumatic experience, write about it, and turn it into a work of literature? How does traumatic memory shape its literary representation, and how does its literary representation in turn shape one’s memory? The study of trauma became prominent in the twentieth century with the rise of psychoanalysis and the outbreak of the World Wars, especially after the Holocaust; but the causes of trauma—war, death, violence, displacement—had appeared throughout human history. What happens when the received language of poetry resists the representation of pain and trauma? In the...
According to a widely cited statistic, there are around 5,000 new novels published each day on the Chinese Internet. For all practical purposes, these publications are in fact books, even though they are not printed, and they challenge the PRC publishing regulation regime which holds that a book is only legal if it carries a “book number” (shuhao). Chinese regulators have tried various ways of bringing this avalanche of online publishing under control in recent years. Two concerns are paramount: firstly, that the online publishing boom might destabilize the state-controlled publishing system...
Displaced persons during times of war provide a moral opportunity as well as a logistical problem. Some of the most vivid material examples underpinning such truisms come from the period ranging across the Second Sino-Japanese, Civil, and Cold Wars in mid twentieth century China and Japan. Plans for the development of the wartime economic engine overlapped with desires to pacify floods of refugees. Plans for rural cultivation mixed military and civilian personnel in experiments of territorial control and patriotic education. Government appropriation of land enacted through refugee bodies...
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