CEAS Colloquium Series
North Korean leaders have issued numerous fashion statements with an intention to promote fashion as a national project meant to groom ideal corporeality. While many other socialist regimes glorified masculine clothing as preferred means to represent revolutionized women, North Korean fashion has continuously explored and expressed various degrees of femininity which seemingly contradicted astringent revolutionary spirit. The varying visual representations of traditional femininity and state organized socialist ideals, which often equals masculinity, collide in North Korea so as to mark a...
North Korean leaders have issued numerous fashion statements with an intention to promote fashion as a national project meant to groom ideal corporeality. While many other socialist regimes glorified masculine clothing as preferred means to represent revolutionized women, North Korean fashion has continuously explored and expressed various degrees of femininity which seemingly contradicted astringent revolutionary spirit. The varying visual representations of traditional femininity and state organized socialist ideals, which often equals masculinity, collide in North Korea so as to mark a...
One of the current impediments in US-DPRK relations is the presence of North Korea on the US State Department list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism.’ North Korea has been on this list since 1988, even though, according to the State Department itself, the DPRK has not sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987. In the Six-Party Agreement of February 13, 2007, the United States promised to ‘begin the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state-sponsor of terrorism.’ What are the justifications for North Korea to remain designated as a state...
Translation has long been deemed primarily a verbal shift from one language to another, an art of verbal performance. But this attitude cannot explain why and how translation may play a role in the formation of a nation’s modernity, a time when people evaluate and re-evaluate their history and adjust to a new situation, wherein the local and the alien, the old and the new are in constant conflict. The relatively new field of translation studies has helped scholars throughout the world to appreciate the ideological function of translation. In the past two decades Chinese scholars too have...
The lecture will be about the afterlife of Lu Xun’s “Ah Q”–as may be seen in the reincarnations of Ah Q in MURAKAMI Haruki’s (1949-) fiction and Wong Karwai’s film. All these rewritings of the image of Ah Q have touched on our search for new cultural identities.
All kinds of religions have been reviving in reform-era China despite restrictive regulations. To describe and explain the paradoxical phenomena, I borrow some notions of the “shortage economy” by Janos Kornai (1980, 1992) who made the most penetrating analysis of the material economy in the classic Communist/Socialist System. Besides describing demand-side dynamics of queuing up, searching, substituting, and suppressing the demand for religion, I also hope to develop a conceptual framework that would incorporate both conventional religions and their competing alternatives into the model,...
Numerous scholarly works on “memory projects” as the culture and politics of nation-states in the modern world have been produced. Yet remaking of the past is not the monopoly of modernity. This paper investigates the problem of engineering memory in Chosŏn Korea. In particular, I examine the emergence of new cultural imagery built by the state and its “national” elites to legitimate the state’s rule and its position in the changing environment of East Asia. This “national” project involved intellectual movements to revisit and rewrite Chosŏn Korea’s historical past. At the same time, I...
China recently overtook the US as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases by volume and, with future projected growth rates, China’s emissions could double in the next two decades. Climate change mitigation requires constructive dialogue not only with the Chinese government but with a broad spectrum of stakeholders in China, including experts, civil society and policy makers. This presentation will explore China’s environmental and climate change crisis and examine the obstacles and opportunities for dialogue. Isabel Hilton is a London based writer and broadcaster who has reported...
In 1992 lesbian activist Kakefuda Hiroko published a book entitled “What it means to be a ‘lesbian’ ” – a scathing attack on Japan’s heteronormative mainstream culture. Kakefuda claimed that the category “rezubian” had become so closely aligned with male pornographic fantasy that it was impossible for her to reclaim the term to express her own female agency. Yet how and why did this male colonization of “lesbian” sexuality take place in Japanese popular culture? During the Edo period, scant attention was paid to women’s same-sex sexuality and Meiji and Taisho-period discourses tended to...
Professor Ogawa is renowned for his studies in medieval Chinese Painting, particularly the intriguing relation of time and space in landscape painting. His publications deal with important Song masters, such as Guo Xi, Li Tang and Mi Youren. He is also interested in the cultural interactions between China and Japan, discussing the cross-cultural significance of Muxi’s (Mokkei) and Sesshu’s works. His talk will introduce the collaborative project he is currently conducting in the United States. It is a continuation of the compilation of the Composite Catalogues of Chinese Paintings (Chugoku...
This illustrated lecture surveys optical theories in early Greece as well as the current neuroscience on perception, both for their intrinsic interest and for the contrasts they provide with the moral technology of optics in early China, as expressed in two canonical works, the and the . Modern neuroscience and Greek optics provide useful vocabulary, as well as a repertoire of distinctions (between sight and perception, between outside and inner vision, between commonsense perception and scientific or philosophic skepticisms, and so forth) that serve to highlight the specific contents and...
Lectures and discussion will be in Chinese.
Interactions between Indian and Chinese Culture in Buddhist Monasteries in 9th-10th Century Dunhuang
Lecture and discussion will be in Chinese.
This lecture will examine an historical event that supposedly occurred in 961 and became known subsequently as “Dissolving Military Power over a Cup of Wine.” This incident, in which the new Song Emperor T’ai-tsu convinces his army comrades to relinquish their military authority over cups of wine at a banquet, became a metaphor for the Song transition from military to civil authority. My lecture will chronicle the political use of this “event” over the course of Song history and its evolution into a “policy of the ancestors.”
The stone garden at the Zen temple Ryôanji is not only one of the most famous gardens in the world, it is an emblem of Japanese culture. However, in inverse ration to the garden’s renown, its history—including patronage, designer, original design, and date—is obscure. Although the garden is often said to stand for timeless purity and simplicity as well as for “nothingness” and “emptiness,” the countless interpretations and visual iterations suggest that it is largely a construct of our own age. This talk does not add to this impressive hermeneutic enterprise but rather it first sketches the...
The Biographies of Foreign Women (Waiguo lienu chuan) was compiled by Xue Shaohui (1866-1911) and her husband Chen Shoupeng in 1902 and first published in 1906. Chen searched and orally translated two hundred fifty-three biographies of Western women, dated from antiquity to 1885, and Xue rewrote them into ten categories.A leading woman writer and thinker in China’s reform era (1890s-1911), Xue openly argued against male reformer’s nationalistic approach that subordinated women’s issues to larger national concerns, and advocated to prioritize women’s self-improvement over national empowerment...
In 1815, Shikitei Sanba wrote manuscript prefaces for two privately produced books: a scrapbook in which he had collected ephemera and broadsheets related to the history of Edo’s raconteurs and a much more ambitious compilation, a sixteen volume collection of playbills that traced the history of the city’s licensed kabuki theaters, the earliest examples dating back a century to the 1720s. As physical objects, both books are deeply suggestive: each is a manuscript comprised entirely of printed matter, a unique object fashioned from the mass produced. These collections are constituted of...
In the November 2004 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, Gail Hershatter published a “state of the field” article covering about 500 recent scholarly publications about women in China’s long twentieth century. This paper takes the form of an extended afterthought and a series of suggestions for the study of women in recent Chinese history, made in a spirit of creeping discomfort. Making gender visible and audible cannot be considered a finished project. If we take seriously what we have learned in the past three decades, however, we cannot continue to mine “the gender field” as though...
This presentation explores the last stage of life in Japan, a society characterized by both the practice of high tech medicine and the locating of selfhood in social context. Common to other postindustrial societies, contemporary Japan offers and expects people to make choices to define who they are as individuals, including choices about how to die. But “dying one’s own way” in Japan does not always incorporate the sort of autonomous decision making that defines dying well in American and western European bioethics.
From a strictly theoretical perspective, the seemingly generous Chinese policies toward ethnic minorities make little sense. Given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government and the small share of minorities in the general population (8%), the state should have little problem suppressing any sign of uprisings, which means that minorities, even if they have some rebellious attributes, cannot credibly threaten an uprising. Indeed, the CCP regime has successfully suppressed many minority rebellions since 1949. Despite the over-whelming might of the CCP, the party in the reform era has...
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