CEAS Colloquium Series
This project looks at the original intentions - spoken and unspoken - behind the Truman and Eisenhower administration’s decisions to create a network of bilateral (as opposed to multilateral) alliances in East Asia, including Korea.
Zidishu (bannermen tales), a storytelling genre created by Manchus, was popular in Beijing and Northeast China during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper reconstructs various milieus for zidishu’s performances, including both public and private arenas. By reconstructing zidishu performances as well as introducing three linguistic types of zidishu, I argue that zidishu was intimately tied to elite, Manchu literati aesthetics and their amateur culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Beijing. The practice of zidishu helped bannermen maintain a sense of Manchu...
Art and Critique in 1960s Japan: Political Aesthetics, Urban Daily Life, and the Yomiuri Indépendant
The lecture seeks to trace the changing contours of the independent documentary community in China today and its polymorphous social and expressive manifestations. The independent DV documentaries produced and circulated within and beyond this community demonstrate the wide spectrum of documentary practices as well as explore the relationships between aesthetic experimentation, the ethics of representation, and political advocacy.
A current discussion topic of immense interest and importance is the extent to which the current banking crisis, keyed, in part, by problems in the U.S. subprime mortgage market that then spread throughout financial markets more generally, could lead to a persistent stagnation in the U.S. economy that resembles the prolonged malaise in Japan beginning in the early 1990s. After providing a brief overview of the Japanese banking crisis and some explanations for its persistence, I will discuss why I do not believe that the U.S. economy is likely to follow a similar path. Among the themes...
In 1953, flush from the stunning international success of Rashomon (1951, Kurosawa Akira), Daiei Film Studio president Nagata Masaichi set out on a tour of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaya, the Philippines and Thailand as member nations in order to establish the Federation of Motion Picture Producers of Southeast Asia (FMPPSA). Leveraging the considerable influence that his films were gaining on the international festival circuit, Nagata appealed for the necessity of creating a Pan-Asian market as both a showcase and marketplace for films produced in the region. He also saw this Pan-Asian...
Spring 1938. As Japan was expanding into China, imperial policies in colonial Korea were fluctuating from that of differentiation/assimilation to imperialization. A catchy official slogan Naisen ittai (One Body of Japan and Korea) promised equality for the colonized in exchange for support in the wartime empire. Not unrelated to this political climate, a metropolitan consumer trend of the “Korea Boom” highlighted exotica from the colony throughout the empire. Responding to such consuming desires, a highly anticipated Japanese-language theatrical adaptation of Ch’unhyang chŏn (The tale of Ch...
According to Professor Yang’s statistical research, by 2007, discoveries of about 20,000 tombs of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) have been reported from nearly every corner of the empire. In fact, the total number of Han tombs excavated in China is no less than 100,000. So far, not many scholars have approached these widely distributed and numerous Han tombs comprehensively and systematically. Professor Yang’s talk will focus on the structure of Han tombs, with special attention to their typology and development. Professor Yang will also discuss the regional styles, the impact of the...
The trope of a city constructed in the blink of the eye is central to recent Chinese films and stage plays. The instant city is visually represented by miniature models and computerized simulations. The salience of architectural modeling - in the media, on the theater stage, and on the screen - is a symptom of the neoliberal state’s need to reify its vision in idealized form. In response, some filmmakers have turned to preserving the present condition of cities in images. Others go beyond recording the pro-filmic, using new media to propose a post-cinematic and post-spatial understanding of...
As local debates raged about whether Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s foreign policy had tipped too much toward the United States, and whether it needed to be more “autonomous” or even “pro-Asian,” two of his successors had already started to stake out the case for a Japanese diplomacy that would embrace and promote free markets, liberal democracy, and the rule of law. Although both Abe Shinzo’s “Values Diplomacy” and Aso Taro’s “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” were implicitly targeted at aligning Japan with the United States, Australia, and India against a rising China, these visions...
Lecture in Chinese “湖南省博物馆藏品、展览与湖湘考古新发现 “
An image of the Gelugpa founder Tsongkhapa, cast in the exotic astadhatu alloy in 1781 as a copy of a golden image sent to the Qing court by the Panchen Lama speaks to the claim that Buddhist images gain power through displacement, by representing what is elsewhere or even nowhere. In the 18th-century Qing court in Beijing and even in China’s southern cities, Buddhist images of foreign make, exotic manufacture, or mysterious, self-generated origin figured in a self-conscious connoisseurial culture that asked where they had been made and when. The flood of images from Tibet and Mongolia...
Lecture in Chinese The purpose of this lecture is to trace the literary education of the Ming-Qing writer Li Yu （李渔）, whose works of drama were known for a playful and colloquial style that was extremely appealing to the popular audience. Li Yu, a genius, always believed that good literature was a product of literary talent. But in his lecture, Prof. Guo Yingde will demonstrate how most of Li Yu’s literary accomplishment could be traced back to the richness of his literary education, which consisted of a solid background in traditional poetry, classical prose, the eight-part (“contemporary...
Seen in spatial terms, the Meiji Restoration was less a quick coup d’etat than a centuries-long project of rehabilitating an ancient map for modern purposes. Beginning with Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, central power-holders had recruited classical geography to the cause of administrative reform. By the nineteenth century, this classicizing strategy was embraced and carried forward not only at the center but by leading lights in the region itself. Drawing on the cartography of Shinano Province (Nagano Prefecture), this illustrated talk traces the continuing career of the classical court’s most...
Lu Xun (1881-1936) is a misleading and “dangerous’ thinker. If we read his writings without paying too much attention to its concrete historical background, then we very often get the impression that he is talking about today’s Chinese society. This might be the reason why last year some of his essays were removed from schoolbooks on the mainland. His “Memory of Liu Hezhen” for instance reads today as if written after June 4th. The lecture tries to show why the writings of Lu Xun do not fit into the policy of China any more.
This paper discusses electronic poetry featuring aspects of the Chinese language, including original Chinese language works, Chinese translations of western works, as well as interactive e-poems that can be displayed in various languages. The emphasis is on ways in which aspects of the Chinese language are used to produce poetic experiences that rely less on the semantic value of words and more on visual stimuli and unconventional sound effects. Visual techniques to be showcased include the “textual morphing” of western writing into Chinese writing and back, used in the work of John Cayley;...
The metaphor of the “birth of cinema” (eiga tanjô) enjoys great popularity in Japan, as the long list of books that carries it in their titles suggest. Most Japanese film histories follow an evolutionary model in their descriptions of Japanese cinema’s development. After its “birth” (respectively importation) and its “cradle years” as primitive side-show cinema matured and developed into the “seventh art”.In this presentation I will address the problems that this teleological model poses - with respect to the rich and diverse traditions of moving images projected on screen in Japan that...
Dai Zhen (1724-1777), a leading scholar of the Qianlong era, criticized the Confucian orthodoxy for “killing people in the name of principle”. In his talk Torbjörn Lodén will analyze Dai Zhen’s criticism and compare it to the criticism formulated by Wang Yangming (1472-1529) and his followers. On the basis of this comparative analysis he will discuss the relationship between the meaning and function of Confucian ideas as an important aspect of the social dynamics of Confucianism in Chinese history.
Taking Jean-Paul Sartre’s provocative question “What is Literature?” as a point of departure, this lecture will explore the parameters of Sinophone literature in the emergent field of Sinophone Studies, which is the study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities on the margins of China and Chineseness. Shu-mei Shih teaches at UCLA and is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937 (2001) and Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (2007). She is also the co-editor of Minor Transnationalism (2005) and The...
This talk will explore the issues surrounding the North Korean nuclear programs, focusing on what we know and what we don’t know. In addition, this talk will assess the role of the Six Party Talks, and ask – and attempt to answer – some basic questions about North Korea, such as whether Kim Jong-il truly intends to give up his nuclear program, and whether a lasting peace on the peninsula is possible.
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