Author: jiayic

Justyna Jaguscik

Lecturer, University of Zurich

“Configurations of Gender and Class: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry”

Time: Friday, February 14th, 3-5 pm 

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Discussant: Yueling Ji (Ph.D. Student, EALC)

The Art and Politics of East Asia (APEA) workshop is proud to host Justyna Jaguscik (Lecturer, University of Zurich), who will present her book chapter “Configurations of Gender and Class: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry” this Friday. She summarizes her chapter as follows:

This chapter brings a discussion of texts by Zheng Xiaoqiong, who is one of the most acknowledged female poetical voices from the generation of authors born in the 1980s. To date, Zheng’s texts have been primarily discusses as examples of the so-called “writings by the lower rungs” (diceng xiezuo). This broad category entered the literary discourse in the first decade of the twenty-first century and is, most generally, used to point to the social background of authors who belong to the lower strata of the Chinese society in its current shape. Zheng, who is a former migrant worker, is also one of the first writers from the bottom, who successfully entered the field of professional highbrow literary production. Her texts have been mostly discussed as portraying the precarious working and living conditions shared by silent contributors to the Chinese economic miracle, the migrant workers, and sometimes also as a proof of this group’s rising collective class consciousness, but they have only rarely been studied as feminist articulations. This chapter focuses on Zheng’s gender-conscious outlook and eco-feminist sensibilities in her writing. Furthermore it scrutinizes her texts for their connections to the discourse of women’s poetry.

Refreshments will be provided. We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!

Jiayi Chen and Sabine Schulz
Co-coordinators, Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop

This talk is about part of the book manuscript I am working on, Networking the Repetition: Formation of Collective Authorship through 1920 Korean Magazines. For situating the chapter better, I spare the first part of the talk to briefly outline the book. It aims to revisit the seemingly meaningless lexical, literary, and social repetitions in literary production, and examine how 1920s magazines mediated those patterns to shape the process of collective authorship-making, during the formative years of modern literature in Korea. In the second part, I trace the rise of the particular author figure, the prophetic critic, through the general interest-magazine for intellectual masses, Kaebyŏk (The opening, 1920-1926) by means of both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The latter approach particularly includes topic modeling, among others, as a means to investigate the semantic relations of the words in question and their co-occurring words based on a probabilistic model. The focus here is how quantitative methods can stretch our understanding of the magazine’s proto-leftist literature to connect its ideas about the Ch’ŏndogyo (the Heavenly Way religion) and to those of social reforms.

“This paper examines the practice of yaoqian or divination medicine based on a close reading and comparison of the woodblocks collected from Hunan Province and Suzhou in Jiangsu Province during the long twentieth century.

Though the divination for healing is regarded as a popular religion similar to demonic divination or divining for family affairs, I would argue that yaoqian in my sample is distinct in its content. A discovery of possible sources of medical knowledge reveals how vernacular healing tried to incorporate the popular medicinal knowledge into its business and how minor schools of medicine together with vernacular practices have been overlooked and excluded from what is nowadays known as the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Though TCM has been regarded as the orthodox and prior way of medical practice, for people in rural China throughout the long twentieth century or even earlier, due to various possible reasons (e.g. inaccessibility to doctors or modern Western medicine, efficacy of any healing methods), what methods they would choose to use in their everyday practice questions what we might perceive as the priority and the alternative. For many Chinese, all means serve the same end. The paper implies that there is no absolute priority or alternative: multiple methods of healing coexisted in China. ”

The first task of this paper is to read the film The Piano in a Factory closely, formalistically, but also politically and historically, and show how the film demands that we do all of these things together. The second task is to survey theories of form in Chinese socialism, many of which rely on a dichotomy of form and content. While in some cases this leads to the dominance of political over formal aspects of the arts, in other cases politics itself valorizes and operates on a theory of form. The invention of a formal theory of subjectivity that is non-essential and malleable is key to political mobilization in times of social change. I will consider a long-lasting analogy between artistic form and subjectivity reform in Chinese socialism, and revisit the call to action in socialist realism as an opportunity to move beyond the form/content divide.