Author: campus

the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop

presents

Baek Moon-Im

Associate Professor

Dept. of Korean Language & Literature

Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

“Film as Art” as a Strategy :

Im Hwa’s Discourse on Chosŏn Cinema in the early 1940s

Friday, May 27th

3:00-5:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

(No paper will be circulated for this workshop meeting)

Abstract:

In four articles written during the 1940s, Im Hwa, the most influential Korean literary critic during the colonial period, presented a discourse on Chosŏn film as an effort to interfere in the “transitional time,” a period in which film control was fortified while the war progressed. Im Hwa’s declaration of the concept, “(Chosŏn) film as art,” was a strategic one utilized to criticize and prevent Chosŏn cinema’s colonization, commodification and propagandization. The meaning of the concept was, first, ‘art as universality’ by which Chosŏn cinema could acquire a proper and equal membership when being posited in the context of empire. The second meaning of it was Im Hwa’s “special attitude for art” that was used to investigate Chosŏn cinema’s own “idiosyncracy” from its birth to check the heightened expectation among Korean filmmakers that the Government-General in Korea would provide them with material foundations such as capital and film facilities. The third meaning of the notion was artistic norm as “character,” underlining the question of the individual that cannot be subsumed to the group and stressing the quality of documentary and the structure of classical drama as the indigenous values of cinema while Fascist aesthetics rose as a standard of ‘People’s film [Kungmin yŏnghwa; kokumin eiga 國民映畵] .’ These tactics of Im Hwa were to ultimately address Chosŏn filmmakers while bearing the empire and colonial government’s attention in mind, under the intensified film control in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere era.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator in advance at: maxb@uchicago.edu

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Prof. Baek’s presentation coincides with this week’s event:

Bordercrossings in East Asian Film:

Koreans on the Move

Two Evenings with Directors Zhang Lu and Yang Yong-hi

Friday, May 27, 2011 – 7:00pm – Saturday, May 28, 2011 – 5:00pm

University of Chicago Film Studies Center

5811 South Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall 306, Chicago, Illinois 60637

Border Crossings in East Asian Cinema brings to campus films that cross generic and geographic borders in East Asia. This year’s theme, “Koreans on the Move,” calls attention to recent works about the experiences of migrants and refugees from and to North Korea.

Dooman River, a feature film by ZHANG Lu, and Sona, the Other Myself (Goodbye, Pyongyang), a documentary by YANG Yong-hi, explore questions of ethnic identification and solidarity, probing into the tragic ways in which national boundaries affect people’s lives and reminding us of the vital yet fragile efforts of those who seek to maintain human connections across national borders.

Screenings will be followed by conversations with the directors and a roundtable discussion with University of Chicago faculty and graduate students.

For More Information Check Here

Co-sponsored by CEAS Committee on Korean Studies, CEAS Committee on Chinese Studies, CEAS Committee on Japanese Studies, and Confucius Institute at the University of Chicago.

the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop

presents

Robert Tierney

Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Anthropology and Literature in Colonial Taiwan”

Friday, May 13th

3:00-5:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

(No paper will be circulated for this workshop meeting)

Abstract:

While Western scholars introduced the science of anthropology to Japan in the 1870s, Japanese scholars soon “nationalized” this science and brought it to bear on the aboriginal population of Taiwan, the first overseas field in which they could work. As a genre of writing about primitive societies, anthropology offered a model that other writers used to explore the cultures of exotic societies. In this paper, I study the relationship of anthropology and literature through a case study of the interaction between the writer Satō Haruo, who traveled to Taiwan in 1920, and the anthropologist Mori Ushinosuke.  In 1923, Satō wrote Machō (Demon Bird), a short work based on a passage from an ethnographic study by Mori.  The narrator of “Demon Bird” impersonates an anthropologist who is studying an episode of persecution in an unnamed barbarian village and attempting to explain their customs to his civilized audience.  At the same time, the story he tells is an allegory about Japanese persecution of Koreans during the Great Kanto Earthquake.  “Demon Bird” uncovers unexpected links between colony and metropolis and is, at one and the same time, both a deconstruction of colonial anthropology and an ethnographic critique of the Japanese empire.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator in advance at: maxb@uchicago.edu

the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop

presents

John Person

PhD Candidate

Dept. of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

The Intellectual as Metaphor:

Theories of Leadership and Empire in Wartime Japan

(Download Paper Here)

Friday, May 6th

3:00-5:00pm

Judd Hall 302

in the

Center for East Asian Studies Conference Room

5835 S. Kimbark Ave.

Chicago, IL. 60637

with discussant Kathryn Tanaka (EALC)

Abstract:

The years between the failed coup attempt in 1936 and the official surrender of Imperial Japan is often remembered as an era in which intellectual discourse was stifled in the midst of state surveillance and censorship. Though the range of possible intellectual expression had indeed been narrowed, this did not mean that it had ceased altogether. This chapter explores attempts by intellectuals to produce a new theoretical paradigm for thinking the ideal form of leadership and Empire through an analysis of the writings of nationalist polemicist Minoda Muneki, the focus of my dissertation, and his criticism of one the most prolific theorists of the Imperial project, Miki Kiyoshi. With the freedom of expression curbed and the rise in the influence of technocratic designers of society and Empire, intellectuals trained in the humanities perceived with dismay a waning in their influence as the leaders of pubic opinion. In this context, the idea of “synthesis” was tagged as a mental capacity unique to the intellectual culture that would give unity and principle to the perceived fragmentary specialization of technocracy. Yet, at the same time, they struggled to discover a way in which their theoretical innovations could be made to produce the desired effects in society. Despite these struggles, intellectuals as diverse as Minoda and Miki continued to harbor the belief that the discovery of a new intellectual paradigm was a necessary component of social progress, a faith that I argue characterized the intellectual culture of the period.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator in advance at: maxb@uchicago.edu

the East Asia: Trans-regional Histories

with the Literature, Theater, and Cultural History of China

&  the Arts and Politics of East Asia workshops

present

Professor Andrew F. Jones
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of California, Berkeley

Quotations Songs:

Portable Media and Pop Song Form in the Chinese 1960s

Monday, May 2

4:00-6:00 pm

Social Sciences Tea Room (2nd floor of SS building)

~There will be no paper circulated for this workshop meeting~

Abstract:

As the Cultural Revolution reached its crescendo in the years between 1966 and 1969, a new and remarkable form of popular music saturated Chinese public space by way of a system of hundreds of millions of wired loudspeakers that spanned the country. ‘Quotations songs” set Chairman Mao’s writings to music, and were deliberately conceived as a musical analogue and mnemonic device for The Quotations of Chairman Mao. Surprisingly, these songs adapted from what is now known as “Little Red Book” were eventually proscribed by Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who objected to what she saw as their off-color propensity to set listeners into pleasurable motion. Yet what could possibly be promiscuous (or even pleasurable) about a choral march in duple meter entitled (to cite just one of the more than one hundred such compositions that were published and recorded) “Ensure that Literature and Art Operate as Powerful Weapons for Exterminating the Enemy”? The answer may lie not just in the ecstatic movement which sometimes accompanied the performance of such music, but also in the deliberate promiscuity of their form. By form, I indicate not only their musical, lyrical, and ideological characteristics, but also the way in which these qualities made use of the new technological possibilities and ever expanding reach of the socialist mass media in the 1960s. Quotation songs, in a manner not radically different from popular music in the same years in the West, were designed for promiscuous movement, for effortless portability. And as with the mass-mediated pop songs of the 1960s in the US and Europe, the revolutionary songs of the 1960s owed their popularity in part to the self-conscious crafting of a ‘hook’ — a ‘catchy’ melodic figure, catchphrase, or distinctive sound that rendered a song not only recognizable but also replicable in disparate media and contexts. One of the arguments of this chapter is that the rhetorical logic of the “hook” is already implied by the citational form of the “Little Red Book” itself. Quotations songs were in fact the product and the logical conclusion of a system of what we might now call “cross-platform marketing” or “media interactivity” that took shape in the Chinese 1960s, and their power was premised on the ease with which they traveled across different media, from print to performance, from radio to records, and from the revolutionary postures of the “loyalty dance” to poster art.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons with a disability who need assistance, please contact Nianshen Song (nianshen@uchicago.edu), Anne Rebull (anner@uchicago.edu) or Max Bohnenkamp (maxb@uchicago.com) in advance.

the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

presents

Xiang Song

PhD Candidate

Dept. of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

A Divan in a Remote Chinese Village:

The Problem of “Ouhua” in Early Chinese Films

(Click link above to download the paper)

Friday, April 22

2:00-4:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

Abstract:

In 1920s Shanghai films “ouhua” or the use of Western sets, costumes and manners to portray the lives of Chinese residents of Shanghai was a wide-spread phenomenon. Persistent cultural nationalist criticism of it met with equal obstinacy on the part of filmmakers to continue the practice, suggesting that this was a central battle in the history of Chinese film of the period. Received Chinese film history has indeed approached the issue from a nationalist perspective. In my reading of some of the most notoriously “ouhua” films I take the different route of examining them from the perspective of affirmation and creation of both “Occidentalist” and consumerist desires. This allows me to shine a spot light on Shanghai film as a process both global and local as it borrowed amply from Hollywood films to visualize narratives about Shanghai life. As Shanghai was also problematically a part of a modernizing nation, national trends were refracted in these films. Thus I question the dominant national film paradigm in the study of early Chinese cinema that tends to extrapolate the national out of the local and blur the difference and tension between the two.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator in advance at: maxb@uchicago.edu

IMPORTANT TIME CHANGE- 3:00-5:00pm

The Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

presents

Mika Endo

PhD Candidate

Dept. of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

The Promises of Poetry:

Writing in other-than-prose

in Working-Class Classrooms of 1930s Japan

Download Paper Here

Friday, April 8th

3:00 – 5:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

Abstract:

Though most scholars suggest that prewar Japanese education was a field tightly controlled under the Ministry of Education, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a wide range of pedagogical experiments that sought to reverse, through practice rather than policy, the social and class inequities that were reproduced through the institution of public education. Along with a desire to change society through the schools, a growing awareness grew among adults of varying political motivations to recognize children as valuable members of society in their own right: to carve out a space for them in society that went beyond regarding the young as instruments of national progress, or as nature’s antidotes to the rationalizing forces of modernization. This carving out of a space – the very process through which perceptions of childhood were forcibly altered among adults and the young alike – was driven by a new sense of urgency in the decades of the 20s and 30s among school teachers who encountered poor, working class students in rural areas classrooms. This chapter shows how modern free verse poetry, a literary form that was itself still in its historical infancy, was accorded a central role in shaping new definitions of the child. Beginning with the modern poet Kitahara Hakushu’s (1885-1942) decisive role in encouraging the production of child-authored poems, the paper explores how educators later went on to employ poetry in the classroom to engage the expressive capacities of their working class students. By placing poetry in the hands of children, teachers sought to forge a culture that reconnected with the pedagogical possibilities hidden within writing from local life and daily experience.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator in advance at: maxb@uchicago.edu

The Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

presents

E. Taylor Atkins

Professor, Department of History, Northern Illinois University

Curating Koreana: The Management of Culture in Colonial Korea (click!)

(from the book Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945)

A Short Interview about Primitive Selves (click!)

Friday, January 21st

3:00-5:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator at maxb@uchicago.edu in advance.

the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

presents

*Special Session -“Mock” Job-Talk*

Xiao Tie

PhD Candidate

East Asian Languages & Civilizations

The Good, the Bad and the Hypnotized:

Imagining the Crowd

in 1920s China

*Special Time*

Thursday, January 13^th

4:00-6:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator at maxb@uchicago.edu in advance.

the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

presents

Tomoko Seto

PhD. Candidate

Dept. of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

Shitamachi Socialism:

Activism, Performance and Popular Culture in Tokyo, 1904-6

(Download Paper Here)

Friday, January 7th

SPECIAL TIME: 2:00-4:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

Abstract:

Scholars in the latter half of the twentieth-century have often emphasized that socialists in the Meiji period (1868-1912) were intellectual ideologues who mainly addressed their ideas to sympathizers belonging to roughly the same social class and who were simultaneously subjected to government persecution. These activists are argued to have been by and large detached from the sentiments of the masses. As shown by the case of socialists’ participation in public events and popular theater in Tokyo at the time of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), however, contemporary socialists also made an effort to engage in activities that would have broad appeal to many different audiences. These activists often employed an appeal to visual spectacle in their performance in order to underscore that socialism was the solution for the social and economic problems facing local residents. Major local newspapers also frequently advertised these events with varying degrees of sympathy toward the socialist cause. At least in the eyes of these socialists, by late 1905 Tokyo residents had demonstrated their capacity to be mobilized en masse in both government-run ceremonies and urban riots directed against the government. In this chapter, I explore the experiences and meanings of publicly identifying oneself as “socialist” in early twentieth-century Tokyo by examining popular theatrical formats employed by socialists in their own neighborhood, that is, the commoner area known as shitamachi (lit., “low city”). By doing so, I will demonstrate the ways in which what I call “shitamachi shakai shugi” (shitamachi socialism) dynamically interacted with local popular culture, as it was imagined by multiple agents, at a time when Tokyo was being constructed as the modern capital of the nation-state.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator at maxb@uchicago.edu in advance.

the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop

presents

Lily Chumley

PhD Candidate, Dept. of Anthropology

After Revolutionary Romanticism:

New Socialist Realisms in Postsocialist China

Download the Paper Here

Friday, November 12th        3:00pm-5:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

Abstract:

In this chapter I argue that the realist genres of drawing and painting used in the Chinese art school entrance examinations, which are reproduced on a massive scale in art test prep schools, constitute a new socialist realism. These forms of realism the anchoring genre of a “vision” of the characterological role “the worker” shared with both contemporary official and independent visual cultures, including the New Realism of artists like Liu Xiaodong and Sixth Generation filmmakers like Jia Zhangke. In this chapter I examine how this vision has been shaped by changing ideologies of realism, chronotopes of history and politics of class, arguing that these images of laboring people participate in a form of class “recognition” (Povinelli 2002) that offers a key to understanding what is “socialist” about postsocialist China.

This workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Persons who believe they may need assistance to participate fully, please contact the coordinator at maxb@uchicago.edu in advance.