CEAS Visiting Scholars Lecture Series
In this lecture, Marran offers an analysis of island chains in the work of famed writer-activist Michiko Ishimure. Marran shows how Ishimure’s approach to island-chains offers an ecopolitical perspective that rejects geopolitical and ethnic identities as primary modes of belonging. Foregrounded will be a new materialist analysis that uses Marran’s concept of the biotrope to analyze the intersection of biological and cultural formations. Questions to be answered include: how does Ishimure address local island-sea chains in relation to the main archipelago of Japan?; what do the two...
Beginning in 2017, the Chinese government launched a program of mass detainment of Uyghur scholars, writers, artists, religious leaders, musicians, intellectuals, and even ordinary people. These policies not only led to the detainment of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, but also the destruction of material and cultural heritage. Government officials, police, and military have directed a campaign of Uyghur book burning, the demolishing of thousands of mosques, shrines, and holy pilgrimage sites (called Mazar), and the destruction of ancient buildings and old city centers. Even...
Death, in the eyes of the samurai, was often too important a moment to leave its records to the inconvenient domain of truth. For that reason, death among the samurai was frequently covered with a heavy layer of make-believe. In this lecture, we will blow the lid off the grave of the second shogun to get a glimpse of the mindset it has been hiding for almost four hundred years. Professor Reinier H. Hesselink teaches the history and culture of the Japanese islands from ancient to modern times at the University of Northern Iowa. His specialty is the cross-fertilization of Japanese sources with...
