Author: campus

Friday, November 5th– Anup Grewal

campus

the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

presents

Anup Grewal

Phd Candidate, Dept. of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

Close-Ups of Reality:

Women’s Experience, Social Space & Proletarian Femininity

in 1930s Chinese Reportage Literature

DOWNLOAD PAPER HERE

Friday, November 5th  3:00-5:00 pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

Abstract:

Reportage was one of the genres of aesthetic experimentation with new ways to represent social reality promoted by leftist cultural movements in China and worldwide starting in the late 1920s.  Along with photography and film, reportage was conceived as one of the new “genres of fact” that had the potential to provide close-ups of reality and to represent a broader arena of social experience by conveying subjectivity as much through its construction in relation to social, political and economic structures and the material world, as through expressions of psychological interiority.  In this paper, I bring together a discussion of the photographic, cinematic and journalistic techniques of reportage and the representation of proletarian women by looking at the work of women writers such as Ji Hong, Peng Zigang, Yang Chao and Ding Ling.  I argue that their works reveal unique spaces of textual intersubjectivity through which different social subjects – the proletarian women who tell their stories, the activist investigator whose impressions narrate the scene, and the reader who has access to the multiple real time voices and perspectives working in the texts – all interact to create new ways of experiencing and understanding social reality. 

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.

Tuesday October 12th- Professor Chen Yongchao

campus

the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

presents

Chen Yongchao

陈泳超

Assistant Professor, Chinese Literature Department

Peking University

北京大学中文系民间文学教研室副教授


The Folksongs of Rural China

Through 60 Years of Intellectual Transformation

一个民歌乡在国家思潮变动中走过的60年

Tuesday, October 12th

3:00-5:00pm

Judd 313

5835 S. Kimbark Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

A lecture and discussion on the historical relationship between folksong and the literary and artistic policy of the People’s Republic of China by a leading folklorist from Peking University.

Talk and discussion to be conducted in Chinese with English Translation

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.

Friday October 1st- Prof. Chelsea Foxwell & East Asian Studies Workshops Reception

campus

the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop

presents:

Chelsea Foxwell

Assistant Professor of Art History

Colorful News:

The Limits of Art & Information in Japanese “Newspaper Prints” of the 1870s

(click title above for link to the paper)

Special Link for Images

Friday, October 1st, from 3:00-5:00pm

in the John Hope Franklin Room

Social Science Research Buidling 224

1126 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL  60637

TO BE IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED BY A SPECIAL EVENT:

An East Asian Studies Workshop Reception

5:00-6:30 pm in the John Hope Franklin Room

COME ONE and ALL!

FOOD and DRINKS and DISCUSSION!

Meet students and faculty studying East Asia at Chicago!

Learn about WORKSHOPS and their programs for the year!

Jointly sponsored by the following workshops:

Art and Politics of East Asia

East Asia: Politics, Economy, and Society

East Asia: Transregional Histories

Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia

Literature, Theater, and Cultural History of China, 1500-Present

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact maxb@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene

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.

6/9 Sei-Jin Chang, Cold War and the Cultural Politics of ‘The Pacific’

campus

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop presents:

Cold War and the Cultural Politics of ‘The Pacific’:
The Transition of Spatial Imagination and Nationalizing the Sea in South Korea in 1945~1950

(click here to read the paper)

Sei Jin Chang
(Visiting scholar, EALC)

With a response offered by
Ji Young Kim
(PhD Student, EALC)

June 9 (Wednesday)
2:00-4:00 PM
Judd 313

ABSTRACT
With the break up of the old Japanese imperial territory, the issue of space has surfaced in the ‘post-colonial’ era. This being precipitated by the mass migration of people to the Korean peninsula and the demarcation of the 38th parallel through the dynamics of global politics. Foucault’s point that the modern nation state is not completed until it occupies an exclusive national territory: “Space is central to any exercise of power” is worth noting in this regard. During this period, one of the characteristics of spatial discourse produced in South Korea was a ‘rediscovery’ of the sea or ocean which became politically inscribed within a cultural/national narrative, thus being given a new significance.

From a colonial perspective of Korean history, ‘peninsulaness’ is regarded as a central trope delineating its dependence on other countries. In such a construction, Korea is neither island (like Japan) nor imposing land empire (like China). But in this ‘Post- colonial’ period, it has come to be taken as a geographical benefit through which Korea can connect with both land and water. After the establishment of the South Korean government below the 38th parallel, an oceanic affinity has been much emphasized compared to a continental one. This discourse on water – seen by many as a binary between territorial waters and the open sea – became politicized and signified in its totality within the national. This political and conceptual shift evinces the way in which ‘the Pacific’ obtains new meaning in contrast to colonial period. The momentum of new meaning comes from three directions. First, the new discourse of the Pacific subverts the old: Japan and its pan-Asian imaginary, of which the Pacific forms a central discourse, is rendered ineffective in the closing scenes of the second World war. A new Pacific connection is made, that of America as the ‘Democratic’ victor which now occupies the position of the vanquished. Second, the Pacific is settled into the narrative of ‘honorable origin’ as the sacred space where the fight for Nation’s independence has taken place. This ‘glorious’ metaphor exists in relation to another, the Pacific ocean as theatre for national suffering during the war. Thus, it has been located at the centre of a nexus of meaning that has been colored by discourses of the Nation state. Finally, the most dramatic signification of the Pacific begins with the Cold war which accelerated after the communization of China in 1949. The sign of the Pacific –the locus of many poor countries – was transformed into a space to be preserved in competition with the USSR in the terms of bloc theory. The Pacific was regarded as ‘the sea of race’ before and during WWII, but it quickly gains new meaning as ‘the sea of ideology’ in the post-War era and beyond. In a word, the Pacific was the sign connected directly America as a global power which was seen as making the new spatial order of East-Asia after 1945, so-called ‘Postcolonial’ world.

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

June 7th, Helen Findley: The Language of Sekkyô: Buddhist Homiletic Performance in Late Meiji Japan

campus

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop presents

The Language of Sekkyô:

Buddhist Homiletic Performance in Late Meiji Japan

(click here to read the paper)

Helen A. Findley
Ph.D. Candidate
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Chicago

Cameron Penwell, Respondent

(PhD student, History, University of Chicago)

June 7th (Monday)

3:00-5:00 p.m.

Judd Hall 313

5835 South Kimbark Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

ABSTRACT:

For many Buddhist reformers of the Meiji period (1868-1912), language became the principle object through which to address the interpretative project then underway, namely the discursive creation of a “modern” Japan.  The practice of sekkyô, or preaching, is crucial to this debate, not only as an important medium of social communication but also as an essential form of Buddhist praxis.  Deployed in a variety of physical settings – from train stations, temple grounds, to colonial missions – this mutable, peripatetic practice is ultimately argued to constitute a new understanding of religious space in modern Japanese society, one which by 1912 had expanded to include every place and every time available to the preacher in the course of “expounding the teachings.”

In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Buddhist preaching was reconceptualized in the years following the dissolution of the doctrinal instructor system in 1884. In addition to examining the hermeneutical constraints posed by homiletic terminology, contemporary debates surrounding the development of a standardized written language will be drawn upon as I seek to argue that Buddhist preaching in the form of sekkyô constitutes a “standard language” in its own right, one that is predicated on plain and elegant use of the vernacular as a skilfull means by which to disseminate Buddhist teachings.  The performance of Buddhist preaching events was ultimately argued to constitute a form of bodhisattva practice that required formal training and discipline in refining the entire corpus of communicative tools available to the preacher – from the body, to the spoken word and finally to the written text.  While the individual was transformed through the theorized discipline to become a “speaking bodhisattva,” the audience was expected to also undergo a transformation commensurate with the speaker’s skill, ideally resulting in the production of a Japanese Buddhist citizenry, and hence a Buddhist vision of “modern” Japan.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

June 3: Andre Schmid, Family and Domesticity Across the Cold War Divide: North and South Korea in the 1950s

campus

Please join the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop and the East Asia: Tranregional Histories Workshop on June 3 (Thursday), 4-6 p.m. HM 141.

  

 

Family and Domesticity Across the Cold War Divide:

North and South Korea in the 1950s

Andre Schmid

(Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto)

There is no paper for this workshop

 Thursday, June 3, 4:00-6:00 PM

Harper Memorial 141

1116 E. 59th Street

Chicago, IL 60637 

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene 

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)

APEA Upcoming Events

campus

5/26 Wed 4:30-6:30 p.m. CWAC 152
Co-Sponsored with VMPEA Workshop
Wu Hung (Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor, Art History & EALC), “Inventing a “Chinese” Portrait Style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller (active 1850s-1860s)”

5/28 Fri 3:00-5:00 p.m. Judd 313
Tie Xiao (PhD Candidate, EALC), “Inside of the Crowd: Inquiring Qunzhong in Republican China”

6/3 Thu 4:00-6:00 p.m. WB 408
Co-Sponsored with Transregional Histories Workshop
Andre Schmid (Associate Professor, University of Toronto), “Family and Domesticity Across the Cold War Divide: North and South Korea in the 1950s”

6/7 Mon TBA
Helen A. Findley (PhD Candidate, EALC), “The Language of Sekkyô:  Buddhist Homiletic Practice in Late Meiji Japan”

6/9 Wed TBA
Sei Jin Chang (Visiting scholar, EALC), “Cold War and the Cultural Politics of ‘The Pacific’: Transitioning of Spatial Imaginaries and the Nationalization of the Sea in South Korea between 1945~1950”

May 28th, Xiao Tie: Inside of the Crowd: Inquiring Qunzhong in Republican China

campus

Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop presents

 Inside of the Crowd: Inquiring Qunzhong in Republican China

 Tie Xiao
Ph.D. Candidate
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
University of Chicago

Saul Thomas, Respondent

(PhD Candidate, Anthropology/History, University of Chicago)

May 28th (Friday) 

3:00-5:00 p.m.

Judd Hall 313

5835 South Kimbark Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

ABSTRACT: 

My dissertation studies various modes in which crowds were conceptualized and represented as well as their different aesthetic and political implications in early twentieth-century China. This chapter examines the rise of the discourse of crowd psychology in China. The decades from the 1910s to 1930s witnessed the expansion of the political field, as manifested in the incessant strikes and other mass demonstrations by an increasingly organized populace. The social phenomenon of the crowd fascinated modern Chinese intellectuals of a variety of ideological positions and political affiliations and became a mysterious object of various political, psychological and sociological investigations. Is there a reenergizing of consciousness in the moment of crowding or merely collective delusion? Is the action of crowding together a manifestation of self-awakening and self-determination or just a showcase of blind craze and primitive passions? What is the dimension of “in-common” that makes the crowd the mode of existence of being-in-common and, more pertinently, does this dimension of “in-common” qualify or disqualify the crowd as the source of political agency and authority? To answer these questions and understand the behavioral surface of “crowd phenomena,” Chinese crowd theorists studied the psychological interiority of the crowd mind and responded to the imported theories of crowd psychology by such authors as Gustav Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, William McDougall, and Everett Dean Martin. Through interacting with the transnational flow of crowd concepts, the new understanding of qunzhong as a socio-psychological category and concomitant political implications arose and circulated.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list and receive workshop updates, please contact jiyoung22@uchicago.edu

Faculty sponsors: Michael Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene 

The workshop is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies and the Council on Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Ji Young Kim (jiyoung22@uchicago.edu) or Ling Zhang (ling1@uchicago.edu)