2/14 Justyna Jaguscik @ APEA

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

1/24 Jae-Yon Lee @ APEA

Jae-Yon Lee
Associate Professor of Korean Literature, UNIST, Korea

Thematic Mapping of Kaebyŏk (The Opening, 1920-1926) and the Rise of the Prophetic Critic in Korea 


Time: Friday, January 24, 3-5 pm
Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)
Discussant: Ethan Waddell (Ph.D. Student, EALC)
 
Friday, January 24, The Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) workshop is proud to host Jae-Yon Lee (Associate Professor, UNIST, Korea), who will present his book chapter “Thematic Mapping of Kaebyŏk (The Opening, 1920-1926) and the Rise of the Prophetic Critic in Korea ” He summarizes his chapter as follows:
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.
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

1/17 Yuanxie Shi @ APEA

Yuanxie Shi

PhD Student, EALC

Divination for “Alternative” Healing:

A Preliminary Study on Divination Medicine in the Long Twentieth Century China

Time: Friday, January 17, 3-5 pm
Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)
Discussant: H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing (PhD Student, EALC)
On January 17, The Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) workshop is proud to host Yuanxie Shi (Ph.D. Student, EALC), who will present her paper “Divination for ‘Alternative’ Healing: A Preliminary Study on Divination Medicine in the Long Twentieth Century China.” She summarizes her paper as follows:

“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. ”

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

1/16 Sohye Kim @ APEA

Sohye Kim

(Postdoctoral Weinberg Fellow, Northwestern University)

“Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films”

2:00-4:00pm, Classics 312

*Please note the special date and location*

On January 16th from 2:00pm to 4:00pm the Art and Politics of East Asia workshop will host Sohye Kim (Postdoctoral Weinberg Fellow, Northwestern University). She will deliver a mock job talk titled “Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films.” Sohye provides the following abstract:

 

Zhang Lu (1962-) is one of the most emblematic diaspora filmmakers in South Korea today. In the six feature films which he released between his debut in 2004 and 2009, Zhang portrayed ethnic Koreans across China, Korea and Mongolia who are pushed by inexorable forces to the peripheries of, and boundaries between nation-states. However from 2012 to 2018, Zhang set his films exclusively in South Korea, his ancestral homeland to where he had relocated from his home in China. As both spatial and thematic departures for the director, films such as Scenery (2013), Gyeongju (2014), Love and…(2015), A Quite Dream (2016), and Ode to the Goose (2018) refrain from explicit portrayals of the diasporic issues that had surfaced prominently in his earlier works. This talk examines how Zhang’s “South Korean” films negotiate the formation of national culture in the homeland and in turn, how they uncover new forms of transnational practices through cinematic imagination and spectatorial experience. Specific focus is placed on Zhang’s articulation of his own diasporic history in relation to collective memories surrounding South Korean film culture and the internalized notion of border, from the physical border between the nation-states toward the metaphoric boundaries of human beings and their memories. The talk demonstrates how the audience’s temporal experience and memorialization of cinematic texts is intensely interwoven with the director’s memory. On this communal ground, I argue, Zhang’s films illuminate the mutually constitutive and dialectical relationship between national film culture and diasporic filmmakers, and in doing so, become a potential site of transnational postmemory.

 

There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk. Refreshments will be served at the workshop. We look forward to seeing you there!

2020 Winter Quarter Schedule

The Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop (APEA) is pleased to announce the Winter 2020 schedule. Unless otherwise noted, the workshop meets alternate Fridays from 3:00-5:00pm in Room 319 at the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) in the Harris School building (1155 E 60th St).

 

Winter 2020 Schedule

 

1/16/20 (Thursday) – Sohye Kim, Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

Mock Job Talk: “Crossing Borders of Memory: The Making of Transnational Post/memory in Zhang Lu’s Films”

*Please note the special date and location*

Location and time:  Classics 312 – 2:00-4:00pm

 

1/17/20 (Friday) – Yuanxie Shi, PhD Student, EALC

“A Preliminary Study in Chinese Divination Medicine in the Long Twentieth Century”

Discussant: H.S. Sum Cheuk Shing, PhD Student, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

 

1/24/20 (Friday) – Jae-yon Lee, Assistant Professor, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology

“The Topic Modeling of Kaebyŏk and the Rise of the Prophetic Critic in 1920s Korea”

Discussant: Ethan Waddell, PhD Student, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

 

2/7/20 (Friday) – Julian Yi Cao, Masters Program in the Humanities

“Visualizing Japan’s Wartime Pan-Asianism: The Ideological Landscape in Triumphal Entry into Nanjing

Discussant: Jiakai Sheng, PhD Student, History

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

 

2/14/20 (Friday) – Justyna Jaguscik, Lecturer, University of Zurich

“Configurations of Gender and Class: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s (郑小琼) Poetry”

Discussant: Yueling Ji, PhD Student, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

 

3/6/2020 (Friday) – Jiarui Sun, PhD Student, EALC

“Méng Subculture and Cyber Nationalism in Year, Hare, Affair”

Discussant: Alex Murphy, PhD Candidate, EALC

Location and time:  Center for East Asian Studies 319 (Harris) – 3:00-5:00pm

 

For further information, please consult the APEA website. Please contact both Jiayi Chen (jiayic@uchicago.edu) and Sabine Schulz (sabines@uchicago.edu) via email should you have any questions or need any assistance.

 

We are excited for our events this quarter and we hope you can attend!

11/8 Yueling Ji @ APEA

Yueling Ji
Ph.D. Student, EALC

The Piano in a Factory and Socialist Theories of Form

Time: Friday, November 8, 1-3 pm screening+3-5 pm discussion
Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)
Discussant: Anthony Stott (Ph.D. Student, Comparative Literature)
*Please note that there will be a screening of the film The Piano in a Factory 鋼的琴 before the discussion.
Catered lunch will be provided!*
On November 8, The Arts and Politics of East Asia (APEA) workshop is proud to host Yueling Ji (Ph.D. Student, EALC), who will present her paper “The Piano in a Factory and Socialist Theories of Form.” She summarizes her paper as follows:
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.
We look forward to seeing you at the workshop.
Jiayi Chen and Sabine Schulz
Co-coordinators, Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop