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Jun Hee Lee (PhD Candidate, History)
In Chorus with Cold War Allies: the Rise and Fall of the Utagoe Movement’s National Music Paradigm


Date and Time: Friday, May 24th, 3-5 p.m.
Location: CEAS 319, (1155 60th Street)
Discussant: Sabine Schulz (EALC, PhD Student)

Please join us for the final Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop next Friday, May 24th at 3-5 PM. We are proud to be hosting Jun Hee Lee (History, PhD Candidate) as he presents a draft of his dissertation chapter, “In Chorus with Cold War Allies: the Rise and Fall of the Utagoe Movement’s National Music Paradigm.” Jun Hee offers us the following abstract:

From its humble origins as a choral group within the Japan Communist Party’s youth association, Nihon no Utagoe gained prominence and notoriety through the 1950s as a singing movement of national scale, giving birth to multitudes of choruses across workplaces and localities in Japan. Since the early 1950s, Utagoe began calling for the creation of “national music” (kokumin ongaku) – a body of music befitting a democratic Japan that was to stand in opposition to “decadent” culture instigated by the mass media and American imperialism. While the term had prewar and even wartime precedents, Utagoe’s national music had both “Japanese” and foreign reference points, including Soviet/Russian songs and later American folk music. In the 1950s and 1960s, Russian and Soviet music served as an example of national music which Utagoe’s leadership figures sought to emulate. American folk music, on the other hand, turned out to be a mixed blessing towards the end of the 1960s, as it caused a serious division within Utagoe over how to treat the “commercialized” version of the genre produced in both the United States and Japan. By examining manners in which individuals and groups from Utagoe translated and incorporated songs from the two Cold War super powers, this dissertation chapter illustrates how the “national music” paradigm informed Utagoe’s musical and political worldview in both domestic and international contexts for the first two decades of the movement (1953-1973), during which Utagoe cultivated its self-image as a part of (socialist) international solidarity against American imperialism and its aggression toward national cultures.

Lilian Kong

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 Lilian Kong

Wolf Warrior II: Chinese Nationalism in the Popular Culture and Media Age

Friday, October 26th: 1 p.m*

Location: CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Poster of Wolf Warrior II (2017)

Discussant: William Carroll, PhD Candidate

Cinema and Media Studies + East Asian Languages and Civilizations

*Screening of Wolf Warrior II [战狼2] (2017, 126 minutes) begins at 1 p.m.

with a discussion of Lilian Kong’s paper to follow.

Lunch will be served during the film screening.

On November 2nd, the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop will host Lilian Kong (Master of Arts Program in the Humanities). She will present a draft of an essay intended for publication entitled, “Wolf Warrior II: Chinese Nationalism in the Popular Culture and Media Age.” Lilian offers the following abstract:

Amidst economic reforms in the 1980s, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SPPRFT or SARFT) initiated and financially supported main melody (zhu xuanlü) films to reunify public opinions at a time of national transition toward a capitalist China. Since the beginning of the 21stcentury, these films have solidified their nationalist agenda, attracting China’s young consumer generation with hyper-commercialization, but rarely deviating from state-administered political ideologies and Han Chinese glorifications of socialist history. Wu Jing’s military-action drama Wolf Warrior II (2017), China’s largest grossing domestic film to date, represents a new development in the Chinese main melody genre. Scholars have paid particular attention to the film’s setting in Africa instead of China, arguing that the film embodies a bold expansion of nationalist power to the international arena (Liu, Amar, Osnos). On the premise of this current scholarship, my paper explores Wolf Warrior II’s character formations and its construction of inter-racial relationships to reveal how the film has altered the foundational components of China’s contemporary nation-state. I argue that ambiguities of nation and state manifested in Wolf Warrior II signal a transformation in main melody films’ nationalist agenda due its surfacing of the contradictory, entangled relations between international commercial media networks, particularly in the film’s collaboration with the American superhero franchise Marvel Studios, and the continuous surveillance of domestic state-administered networks that structures its production process.

Megan Beckerich

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Megan Beckerich

“Supernatural Bodies and Censorship in 19th Century Japanese Prints”

Friday, October 26th, 4-6 p.m.*

Location: CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Discussant: Minori Egashira (PhD Student, Art History)

*Please note the start time is one hour later than usual!

On October 26th from 4:00pm to 6:00pm the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop will host Megan Beckerich, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. She will present “Supernatural Bodies and Censorship in 19th Century Japanese Prints,” a working draft of her MA thesis. Megan offers the following abstract:

This thesis will explore censorship and morality in images depicting the female body from 19th century Japan. Specifically, by utilizing The Lonely House at Adachi Moor (1885) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), as a case study, this thesis will show that the changing application of censorial laws in Meiji Japan was not solely for a true change in public morals, but rather was an intertwining of Japanese official’s attempt to modernize to western moral standards while utilizing art to promote ideas of what was acceptable and what was “backwards” in a industrializing nation. This censorship was targeted strongly against depictions of female bodies in sexual or violent scenes, but this form of censorship, heavily drawing from existing European moral notions in art, put images identified as “supernatural” into the realm of fantasy. As such, prints depicting supernatural women were able to pass the censors because the bodies depicted are not human, but only fantasy. This is turn allowed the Meiji government to continue promoting modernization vis-à-vis relegating regional folkloric belief in the supernatural to “fantasy” and unreal. An analysis of what constitutes supernatural and human bodies will be conducted to better understand what forms a body in art, and where the boundary between human and inhuman lies within that genre. By comparing the visuals, purpose, and reception of The Lonely House to selected imagery and Yositoshi’s own catalogue, this thesis aims to more clearly illustrate the web of cultural meanings, connotations, while better understanding why certain visually grotesque prints were more acceptable than others in early modern Japanese society.

2018 Fall Quarter Schedule

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Sun Xun 孙逊 Endopsychic Fire, 2015. Painting Ink and color on Photographic Paper, Silver dust pigment.

Location: Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319, at the Harris School Building (1155 E 60th St)

Time: Friday, 3-5PM

Please note special location or time for some events.

 

10/12   Art in Smog (2018, 76 minutes, Mandarin with English subtitles)

Screening and Conversation with Director Lydia Chen

Introduced by Professor Paola Iovene (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Joint Event with Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia Workshop

Time and location: 3-5PM, Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 157

 

10/19   Chao Wang, PhD Candidate (History)

“Blind Singing Girls and the Respectability of Livelihood in Early Republican Guangzhou, 1911-1927”

Discussant: Weichu Wang, PhD Student (History)

Time and location: 3-5PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319

 

10/26   Megan Beckerich, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities

“Supernatural Bodies and Censorship in 19th Century Japanese Prints”

Discussant: Minori Egashira, PhD Student (Art History)

Time and location: 4-6PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319

 

11/2   Lilian Kong, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities

“Wolf Warrior II: Chinese Nationalism in the Popular Culture and Media Age”

Discussant: William Carroll, PhD Candidate (Cinema and Media Studies + East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Special time for lunch and screening:

With a screening of “Wolf Warrior II” (战狼2) and catered lunch at Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319, starting at 1PM

 

11/16   Nicholas Lambrecht, PhD Candidate (East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

“Life After Return in Postwar Japan: From Fujiwara Tei to Miyao Tomiko”

Discussant: Nicholas Wong, PhD (Comparative Literature)

Time and location: 3-5PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319

 

11/30   Yuqian Yan, PhD Candidate (Cinema and Media Studies + East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

“Constructing the Ancient: Set Design in Orphan Island Cinema”

Discussant: Pao-chen Tang, PhD Candidate (Cinema and Media Studies + East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Time and location: 3-5PM, Center for East Asian Studies, Room 319