CEAS Colloquium Series
The fiction of the popular early-Tokugawa writer Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693) is noteworthy for the tension between its narrator’s stern moral pronouncements regarding characters’ transgressive behavior and sympathetic, even heroic portrayals of these same characters. The resulting ambiguity has led scholars to radically differing interpretations of the ideological stance of these texts. This presentation will elucidate as a key to interpreting this ambiguity chapters in Saikaku’s first published work of fiction in which the narrator’s condemnations of hubristic behavior on the part of...
In the last twenty years, Western scholars have begun to pay more attention to the importance of Manchu-language sources in the study of the history of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). The recent discovery of the value of these materials ought more properly be regarded as a rediscovery, however, since in the early 19th century the first European sinologists had already begun to take a serious interest in the Manchu language, noting then its value for the study of Chinese history and the classics. The pioneer in this regard was the remarkable Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788-1832). It was two...
As part of the post-World War II democratization and modernization policies under US military occupation, the Japanese court system adopted the Anglo-American legal principle of direct trial and the adversarial system. This innovation left behind the earlier inquisitorial system and foregrounded oral-based trials and cross-examination, and thus introduced live speech at the core of judicial processes. This transformation was marked by the the adoption of the Japanese stenographic typewriter (sokutaipu) in 1950 as an official recording method to produce trial records. Drawing on interviews...
Contrary to popular imaginings the Dharma has not historically been an inherently environmental religion. Rather, early Buddhism was a prosperity theology that succeeded largely on account of its willingness to exploit both people and natural resources on the commodity frontier. As such, by investigating the links between Buddhism and agricultural expansion this talk will explore how Buddhists radically transformed Asia’s environment. Johan Elverskog is Altshuler University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at SMU. He is the author of numerous books and articles...
What does it mean to write literary history? How is it possible to reduce the vast arrays of literary data into a comprehensible historical narrative? And since it is not possible to include all literary data, then what is selected and what is omitted, and how are the selections representative of the whole of the data? This talk will take up the relationship between data and literary historical knowledge, focusing on the Quan Tang shi 全唐詩, the massive comprehensive anthology of Tang poetry that was produced during the Qing dynasty. The methodology that Chen employs is that of topic modeling,...
Over the last two decades, rapid urban expansion building on landgrabs has become ubiquitous in China. The pursuit of urban-centered economic growth has created crises of land deprivation and rural identity in Chinese rural society. Land-related protests have become the focal point of movements for the protection of Chinese farmers’ rights. Drawing on ethnographic materials concerning a series of influential protests over landgrabs in Wukan village, this paper presents a critical rethinking of the economy and an examination of how the restoration of villagers’ collective identity has led to...
The U.S. Constitution enshrined press freedoms in the First Amendment, ratified by the states in 1791. In the subsequent 223 years, the world’s leading economies, whether Britain or the U.S., generally held to be self-evident that a free press was necessary and good for the proper functioning of society and to provide a check on government’s power. Now China is poised to take the pole position as the world’s biggest economy, and its leaders have clearly shown their disdain for press freedoms, with new restrictions on one of the world’s most controlled media environments being introduced just...
Focusing upon Anna May Wong, an early Twentieth-century Chinese-American screen and stage performer, this talk will delve into the intricacies of her vocal and visual performance at the transition from the silent to the talkie era in the international arena. Wang’s previous writings have formulated concepts such as “yellow yellowface” performance (2005) and “minor” stardom (2010, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature”) to understand her ironic performance of Orientalist stereotypes and her performative production of gradational (as opposed to radical) difference from...
The proliferation of power centers in Japan’s thirteenth and fourteenth centuries brought a corresponding boom in cultural activity, which has left an outsized footprint in the extant manuscript corpus. One of the most important centers for the collection and reproduction of books at this time was the Kanazawa Library, established near the shogunate headquarters in Kamakura. This library was unique in the success and scale of its acquisitions, but in fact shows significant continuities with larger patterns of book circulation among the military households of eastern Japan. Why did shogunate...
The intensified interconnections between media after the 1960s entailed numerous shifts that still shape media culture in Japan today. This talk will explore several historical tipping points that negotiate a new economy of mediated life in the transforming media ecology. From the vivisection of giant monsters in the 1960s to the funeral ceremony for a post-apocalyptic warlord in 2007, a pattern of zombification emerges that is tailored to the rhythms of late-capitalist media culture.
Since 2003, a small group of Japanese sanitation workers has traveled annually from Tokyo to Chennai, India to meet with a group they understand as comrades - the Dalit. Every year, over the course of a week, the Japanese visitors tour Dalit places of work, their homes, and share with them stories of pain and discrimination – the difficulties of marginalization alongside the triumphs of resistance. Using this type of solidarity trip as an ethnographic crucible, my talk examines the internationalization of Japanese grassroots politics. I explore how boundaries – national, ethnic, linguistic,...
In this talk I will discuss two questions concerning nationalism among Chinese students overseas: To what extent has the “patriotic” indoctrination to which students are exposed at school survived, or perhaps been reinforced by, the experience of being confronted overseas with contradictory information and values? And what factors might explain student responses to this experience? My sources are interviews with students, as well as my own personal encounters on campus, in cyberspace, and in other contexts within North America, “new” patriotism exhibited on Western campuses by Chinese...
What connects the 16th-century samurai practices of collecting and displaying art at social gatherings to counting and examining heads after battle? How do the rituals of gift-giving among warlords relate to the politics of falconry? This talk will link the extreme violence of this age of civil and international war to the increasing significance of samurai social rituals and cultural practices. It will argue that warlords accrued power and reinforced hierarchy both in tea houses and on the battlefield, having a profound effect on the creation and character of Japan’s early modern polity.
In studies of Japanese rule in Korea, print media have been widely used to claim the existence of “colonial modernity” or the “cultural hegemony” of colonial power. However, few scholars have focused on the bilingual characteristics of the colonial society and the patterns of public communication between the two competing linguistic communities. In this talk, Yumi Moon investigates the two major daily newspapers published during the wartime period — Keijō Nippō in Japanese and Chosôn Ilbo in Korean — and analyzes the divided discourses in their coverage of Hollywood movies and of women.
This talk introduces what I term the “transwar generation” of Japanese human scientists: students of human diversity as captured by the constructs of “race” and “culture” or Self and Other. Born in roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century, the transwar generation was intellectually active before 1945 and responsible for rebuilding an academic tradition after Japan’s defeat in World War II. What bound these scholars together was a shared, lifelong commitment to a putatively “objective” research methodology defined above all by fieldwork. In the 1930s and 1940s, Japanese human...
There is a remarkably comprehensive history of Chinese architecture from the period 1267 when Khubilai broke ground for his capital Dadu to the year 1368 when the Ming dynasty was established. This standard history of Yuan construction is written through archeological remains of Dadu and Shangdu, eminent halls at the Temple to the Northern Peak and Daoist Monastery Yonglegong, buildings from Guangsheng Monastery, small temples in Zhejiang and Henan and Shanxi provinces, and Ciyun Pavilion. The buildings exhibit details described in contemporary records, confirm that the ranked system of...
In Tang Dynasty China, the tujing 圖經was a standard, broad-based governmental geographic reference work widely available to government officials. After the An Lushan Rebellion an increasing number of famous poets and writers referenced the tujing in their writings. This happened especially when the tujing helped the literati rediscover and reconstruct historical continuities in the local landscape. What the tujing provided were not merely useful footnotes to explain local features, but rather some critical points from which to reconnect the radically transformed post-rebellion order of the...
In the early modern period (a deliberate term) overland conquest by large Eurasian empires produced forms which depended to some degree upon the generation of criteria of ostensible cultural identities and their ascription to real communities under imperial control. This talk examines the interaction of imperial legitimacy and identity narratives in the Qing, Ottoman and Russian empires. Pamela Crossley is the Collis Professor at Dartmouth College. She is a specialist on the Qing empire, but has recently published on global history, modern Chinese history, Liao empire history, and the...
It is widely accepted that the order of Buddhist nuns had disintegrated after Prince Yŏnsan (r. 1494-1506) forcefully disrobed or enslaved female monastics as a way of punishing them for their ties with his father King Songjŏng’s concubines who were involved in his mother’s death. Yŏnsan’s ruthless measures to ban female Buddhist monasticism account for the disappearance of nuns from historical records from the 16th century. Although nuns are mentioned occasionally in official documents of late Chosŏn, they tend to be related to undesirable events, such as criminal cases. Historians generally...
Dr. Chen’s talk draws on research from a new book titled The Sounds of Mandarin: The Making of a National Language in China and Taiwan, 1913-1965. The project takes speech as the starting point for investigation, asking how ordinary people learned the “national language” at its various stages of historical formation. Her premise is that rendered as “Mandarin,” the generic English term obscures significant variations and political conflicts that were critical to the making and unmaking of the “national language” throughout the twentieth century. The goal is to disaggregate “Mandarin” into...
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