CEAS Postdoctoral Associates Lecture Series
Hair embroidery is a particular technique practiced by lay Buddhist women to create devotional images. The embroiderers used their own hair as threads and applied them on silk to stitch figures. Scholars contend that this tradition started from the Tang Dynasty (618-907). However, the resurgence of this practice in the Ming period (1368-1644) was related to two historical factors: the spread of the cult of Guanyin, the most prevalent Chinese female deity, and the proliferation of embroidering Guanyin during late imperial China. In recent works on women’s talent, scholars have cursorily...
In this lecture, Jin Woong Kang will explore how North Korea’s anti-American state power has operated in individuals’ everyday practices by focusing on its post-war militant nationalism. Existing studies have neglected an aspect of North Korea’s nationalist power that has been neither necessarily top-down nor violent, but rather productive and diffusive in people’s everyday lives. While the regime’s anti-American mobilization has come from above, people’s politics of hatred, patriotism, and emotion have been reproduced from below. Along this line, Dr. Kang will examine the historical and...
Can a physically limited architectural space embody an infinite multiverse? Can an architectural monument transform a mundane space and time into a transmundane space-time of a Buddhist cosmos in which the efficacy of rituals is eternalized? Through an examination of the Chaoyang North Pagoda (1043-44), a Liao-dynasty (907-1125) structure whose archaeological excavation was completed only in the 1990s in northeast China, this talk answers these questions. After Buddhism was transmitted from India to East Asia, a cosmological scheme of unprecedented sophistication was developed in the seventh...
Medicalization of suicide in Japan progressed rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The inclusion of suicide into the repertoire of psychiatrists was almost simultaneous with the establishment of Western-style psychiatry in Japanese academia. Although the narrative of medicalization of suicide as a quest of modernity certainly applied to the Japanese case, Japanese attempts to medicalize suicide had an almost diametrically opposite dimension. On the one hand, they characterized suicide as an act prompted by certain pathology of the body and/or the mind. At the same...
This talk examines changes in mobility laws regarding Koreans in the late nineteenth century and the unintended consequences of these changes. Whereas movement was previously controlled by a host of factors, such as one’s vocation, class, lineage, or religion, in the late nineteenth century, nationality became the primary factor in determining the terms of one’s movement between Korea and Russia - one was defined either as a “Korean” subject or a “Russian” subject. Though the new laws and passports clearly demarcated the one’s legal status, levels of enforcement and comprehension on the part...
It is well understood that the spread of industrial modernity in China in the first half of the 20th century was primarily an urban phenomenon. However scholars have largely limited modernity’s influence to Shanghai and other major cities, without illustrating how similar processes impacted on the countryside. Concentrating on Wuxi, China’s largest inland industrial center, this paper will illustrate how the growth of an urban system led to a modern regional social geography in the Lower Yangzi delta. Moreover, I will propose that such a linear narrative of expanding modernity is too...
Heekyoung Cho’s paper takes up Hyon Chin gon’s (1900-43) adaptation of a Chekhov short story. It demonstrates both the process of Hyon’s creative engagement with Chekhov in the mid-1920s, and also shows the interpenetration of translation and creation, and literary and journalistic discourse at the time. In particular, Suni, Hyon’s female protagonist, who is a child bride, burns down her husband’s house to escape her unendurable marriage with an older man. Through this character, Hyon was able to link female arson with resistance to the institution of young marriage, which was a hotly debated...
The Society for Creative Aesthetic Education, Sōbi for short, had an idealistic, even fanciful conviction that natural growth would tend towards the good. They advocated a thoroughly child-centered education, where the teacher’s role was to remove all possible interferences (including themselves) from the path of the child’s development. The form of this emergent, uninhibited balance promised to correct modernity’s tragic overreliance on rationality, and Sōbi proposed their pedagogy as a model for all education in the newly democratic Japan. Though the early postwar in Japan is often...
The Gansu corruption case of 1781 has taken an important place in memory production in China since the 1990s. The case has not only produced a plethora of articles by historians and the publication of relevant primary sources by the First Historical Archives in Beijing, but has also been remembered in a historical drama, the “Qianlong dynasty” (Qianlong wangchao), shown on Chinese primetime television in 2003. The memory of the Gansu case is also perpetuated in local history, and more particularly, among Chinese Muslim scholars. Hence, trapped between the ongoing process of memory works and...
The project is an intellectual history of Korean nationalist (民族, minjok, or minzoku) identity formation, inspired by historical memories linked to famous physical locales within the larger Japanese empire. While the capitalist development and modernity as a spatial veil sweeping across undeveloped parts of the globe in the 1910s and 20s, this project inquires how the travels of key nationalist Yi Kwangsu (1892-1950) through the Japanese empire (in travelogues like “Short Letters from Tokyo,” “Record of Travels in the Diamond Mountains,” and “From Manchuria”) as both a colonized intellectual...
When Richard Wilhelm (1873 - 1930), the German translator and commentator of Chinese classics, equated the Daoist “Eccentric” with Nietzsche’s “Superman” in 1912, was this just a fascinating misunderstanding? Curiously enough, his contemporaries such as Lu Xun (1881 - 1936), the “father of modern Chinese literature,” Feng Zhi (1905 - 1993), the “founder of German studies in China,” Xu Fancheng (1909 - 2000), the Chinese translator and interpreter of Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) and the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950), all initiated similarly dramatic encounters of Asian and European...
Shugendô, a tradition of mountain asceticism in Japan dating from the 8th century C.E., has been commonly portrayed as a syncretic, folk, practice-based religion influenced by Esoteric Buddhism. It is seen to have flourished in the medieval era but to have declined in the early modern period due to institutionalization and the ritualization of practice. Yet, examination of Tokugawa texts presents us with a different picture.The talk will have two parts. The first will consist of methodological issues in the study of Shugendô, with particular reference to the position arguing for the tradition...
The April Revolution was a defining moment in early South Korean history. High school students played a crucial role throughout the two-month chain of protests (28 February – 26 April 1960) that culminated in the ouster of the country’s first president, Syngman Rhee. This presentation will examine middle and high school civics curricula and student organizations designed by Ministry of Education ideologues after the Korean War (1950-53). These two components of post-war school life equipped South Korean youths with important ideational and organizational resources for the anti-government...
After the Opium wars, the Western powers forced China to submit to the legal structures of the Unequal treaties. In 1898 the modernization of the Chinese jurisprudence began with the Xinzheng reforms. The aim of the late Qing dynasty and Republican governments was to put China on the same juridical level with foreign powers by abolishing the extraterritorial system. In this paper, Dr. De Angeli delineates the most significant changes in Chinese jurisprudence from the end of the nineteenth century until 1937, chief among which was the Westernization of the Chinese criminal code.
The distribution of tracts, booklets, and religious texts in Chinese Buddhist temples is a well-documented tradition that dates back many centuries. Drawing on an analysis of temple literature collected during my fieldwork, my presentation will discuss how a continuation of this practice has contributed to the revival of contemporary Chinese Buddhism. I will discuss how books, tapes, and DVDs were initially distributed into mainland China by overseas Chinese. Subsequently, many have been reprinted and redistributed by lay practitioners in China. Finally, Chinese lay practitioners have written...
This presentation examines the mise-en-scene of some contemporary Korean horror films with a focus on the externalization of character psychology as manifest in a decorative impulse.
Dr. Cohen will speak briefly about her research on empire and its collapse focusing on the Japanese settler community of Korea, 1876-1946. In addition to speaking about how she arrived at this topic, a little about the project itself, and the scholarship that informs her methodological and theoretical interests, Nicole Cohen will discuss her future research agenda.
One of the most important outcomes of China’s market-oriented reform is the emergence of a significant domestic private sector. China has successfully made the transition from complete reliance on state and collective sectors to a mixed economy where private sector plays a leading role. This remarkable transformation has been accomplished through the creation of new private enterprises and recently through the privatization of state-owned enterprises. This lecture will discuss the evolution of the private sector and identify the constraints and opportunities for its future contribution to...
Christopher Gerteis will explore how women members of the Japan Railway Workers’ Union, Kokurô, recorded in poetry and prose their experiences of the highly politicized union activism characteristic of public sector workplaces during the 1950s. Scholarship to date argues that there were significant continuities with the prewar period in the way many postwar social institutions re-constituted gender roles for men and women. Indeed,the labor movement is particularly well known for having reasserted normative social roles that made women’s status secondary to that of men.However, Dr. Gerteis...
Pages
