CEAS Colloquium Series
With the cataclysm of death, what happens to those remaining fragments of a life, which appear disposable to others but become the mourner’s heart-breaking distillations of both loss and trace? While a fading practice today, handwritten letters in medieval Japan were the primary form of communication between long-separated lovers, parents unlikely to reunite with their children, and distant friends, artists, and poets. In this rich epistolary culture, letters – reused, recycled, and reframed – figured prominently in Buddhist memorial rituals. With the death of a loved one, family members...
What does it mean to narrate a queer feminist ethical praxis of “encounter” and diaspora bridging disciplines, languages, and politics that rarely meet in academic writing or activisms? My new research interweaves readings of Japanese fiction with Hong Kong, Sinophone studies, and queer women of color feminisms. In doing so, I question assumptions about the positionality of our readers, present and future, asking what Japanese literary studies might look like if we write for “Sinophone” queer/feminist readers, or queer/feminist of color readers. For example, I explore the significance of...
The last phase of Lu Xun’s (1881-1936) literary career started in 1933 with a bang. Emerging from a five-year hiatus as a translator, mostly of Russian and Soviet literature and theory, and after completing a patient reorientation toward Shanghai metropolitan landscape, Lu Xun re-engaged with the essay as the chosen mode of writing suitable for representing and intervening into reality. The notion of false liberty (weiziyou), which Lu Xun appropriated to name his collection of short essays published in the “Free Discourse” column of Shenbao, captures the centrality of the heightened...
Directed by Wen Hui and Eiko Otake Edited by Yiru Chen, Wen Hui, and Eiko Otake 2023, 73min This is a story of friendship between two independent female artists and their body memories each willingly carry. In January 2020, New York based, interdisciplinary performing artist Eiko Otake arrived in Beijing to visit Wen Hui, a Chinese choreographer and filmmaker. Eight years apart, Eiko grew up in postwar Japan and Wen during the Cultural Revolution. They planned to visit each other for a month to converse and collaborate. The surge of COVID-19 abruptly cut off Eiko’s visit and the...
Korea has a long, riveting history—it is also a divided nation. South Korea is a vibrant democracy, the tenth largest economy, and is home to a world-renowned culture. North Korea is ruled by the most authoritarian regime in the world, a poor country in a rich region, and is best known for the cult of personality surrounding the ruling Kim family. But both Koreas share a unique common history. Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo draw on decades of research to explore the history of modern Korea, from the late nineteenth century, Japanese occupation, and Cold War division to the present day. A...
As repression grows in China, some pastors, lawyers and NGOs are neither resisting it nor withdrawing from the public sphere, but instead are finding ways to adapt. Coping strategies include: being transparent about their activities and maintaining close communication with the authorities; cultivating allies in the government and giving credit to officials for their achievements; keeping the size of their organizations non-threatening and consenting to a heightened Party presence; staying a safe distance from red lines and focusing on less controversial issues; encouraging their constituents...
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor of Japanese Studies, Deputy Director of the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center (APARC), Director of the Japan Program at APARC, Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Co-Director of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, and Professor of Sociology, all at Stanford University. His research on the globalization of human rights and its impact on local politics has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Social Problems, Journal of...
In 2014, the Chinese artist Dai Xiang completed a photo montage that portrayed modern Chinese people in actual situations against the backdrop of the landscape of the Song-dynasty scroll entitled the Qingming shanghe tu (often translated as “Going Up River on the Qingming Festival”), traditionally attributed to Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). In this talk, Dai will explain why the Qingming scroll lends itself to reinterpretation and give the historical background of the situations he showed in the New Qingming scroll. He will also briefly introduce the technology he used to make the photo montage (...
This talk delves into Okinawa-born artist Yamashiro Chikako’s (b.1976) recent moving image works. Focusing on the artist’s recent video installations, Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family (2019) and Reframing (2021), this project argues that these works may be seen as a type of eco-fantasy highlighting contentious, and oppressive infrastructural imaginaries. My question specifically concerns what art(-making) can achieve through exposing Okinawa’s colonial status quo, its border politics and security-infrastructural regime, and how works like Yamashiro’s may intervene in the social...
Newspaper headlines describe a China that is uniformly bleak: a slowing economy, tensions with the West, and a surveillance state that seems to have crushed all opposing voices. But in his new book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, Ian Johnson presents a more nuanced picture of Xi Jinping’s China, one where a vibrant movement of underground filmmakers, magazine publishers, and authors challenge the Communist Party on its most important source of legitimacy: its control of history. Join us as Ian presents his book and introduces us to China...
In the early 1970s, acupuncture suddenly burst into the American consciousness. The journalist James Reston, who had traveled to Beijing to report on China’s reopening to the Western world, suffered a burst appendix and was treated with acupuncture for his postoperative pain. From that moment, acupuncture became a word on every American’s lips – even if it was not yet a therapy that had penetrated their skin. This talk reconsiders the early history of acupuncture in the United States by tracing its journey from an all-but-unknown medical modality to a popular, albeit “alternative,” form of...
The earliest extant composition by the patriarch of Shingon Buddhism in Japan, Kūkai 空海 (774–835), is the Sangō shiiki 三教指帰 (The ultimate meaning of the three teachings). This elaborate work in kanbun presents an outline of the Three Teachings transmitted from China in hierarchical arrangement, with Confucianism first shown to be inferior to Daoism, and Daoism in turn giving way to Buddhism. The rhetorical achievement of the Sangō shiiki is visible first of all in its epideictic rhetoric, rich in rhyming and alliterative compounds as well as creative adaptation of allusions from the classics...
From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In this talk, Ying Qian draws from her forthcoming book to discuss documentary as deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements. Situating cinema’s invention in 1895 in the East Asian context of colonial warfare and revolutionary agitation, this talk discusses documentary’s emergence in transnational revolutionary activism in...
This talk is based on chapter 5 of my new book manuscript on the collective character of agency, tentatively titled All Entities Have Consequences. In this chapter, “The Power of the Assembly: A New Interpretation of Wuwei,” I approach the phenomenon of reversal (fan 反) through the angle of by-product states: optimal states that can only come about as the by-product of actions undertaken for other ends. In the contemporary philosophical literature, spontaneity is one such paradigmatic by-product state, but, according to the Daodejing, so is power, strength, beauty, virtue, efficacy,...
This talk examines the gendered logic and contradictions in faith-based aid work in South Korea by contrasting programs for widows and orphaned children. The Korean War precipitated a humanitarian crisis in South Korea, and Protestant organizations stood on the forefront in providing emergency relief and rehabilitation aid. Of particular concern was the plight of orphans and widows. These two groups were potential threats to the long-term stability of families. Would orphaned boys and girls become ideal husband-fathers and wives-mothers? What if orphans fell into a life of crime—in particular...
This talk explores how we should make use of steles (beike) beyond analyzing the texts they bear by contextualizing the rise and fall of epigraphic practices in social and political transitions in Chinese history. In particular, I will focus on a long-forgotten epigraphic genre that flourished under the Mongol rule (thirteenth to fourteenth century). Since the emergence of the field of epigraphy in eleventh-century China, inscriptions engraved on the front side of steles have attracted attention from scholars, antiquarians, calligraphers, and travelers, while the stone steles and their...
We will delve deep into the intricacies of life in North Korea, beyond the common narratives and misperceptions. Drawing from firsthand accounts, the session aims to provide an authentic glimpse into the nation’s socio-political fabric. As we journey through the realities of North Korea, we will also explore the broader implications of these truths on regional stability. Toward the conclusion, the discussion will pivot towards potential solutions to the ongoing challenges posed by North Korea, culminating in an exploration of the profound significance and potential paths to a unified...
This presentation examines the Cold War transformation of blood collection practices in South Korea to understand their operation at the intersection of local medical need, globalized scientific technologies, and postcolonial bio-governance. Today, voluntary blood donations account for almost all of South Korea’s medical blood reserve, but this donor culture is a relatively recent phenomenon. For decades after the Korean War, medical blood collection efforts struggled with widespread stigma against the purported dangers of donation and reservations about sharing such a personal substance with...
When William Gibson and Bruce Sterling published their collaboration The Difference Engine in 1990, it was very natural for the proper readers of science fiction to consider it as the magnum opus achieved by each writer at that point. However, once it was out in 1990, the general fans of cyberpunk in Japan, who had expected Gibson and Sterling to keep demonstrating the cutting-edge of internet computer culture, seemed more or less disappointed by their collaboration. The Japanese readers tended to neglect the significance of the trans-Pacific imagination in this alternate historical novel;...
Inspired by the techno-goth style of her admired British fantast Storm Constantine, Kotani’s seventh monograph Techno-Gothic (Tokyo: Homesha Publishers, 2005) collected essays on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mariko O’Hara’s Ephemera the Vampire, Riche Tankersley Cusick’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Wachowskis’ Matrix and other works, paving the way for gender-bending poetics. “The Pure Hearted Major,” the last chapter of the book, skillfully reconsidered Oshii Mamoru’s masterpiece Innocence not only as a cyborg feminist story but also as a typically techno-gothic narrative. Innocence vividly...
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