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(Image courtesy of MUBI.com)

Abstract: Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker series (2012–ongoing) reimagines temporality through the deliberate, meditative walking of a Tang monk, Xuanzang, moving against the backdrop of fast-paced, globalized urban spaces. Drawing on Chan Buddhist aesthetics, the series manifests an alternative temporality that resists the accelerated rhythms imposed by capitalist modernity. This paper argues that Walker’s extreme slowness not only counters the dominant temporal regimes of contemporary life but also addresses postcolonial temporal dysphoria, a condition of temporal dissonance shaped by uneven modernities and global capitalist pressures. By mobilizing and transforming the Chan Buddhist tradition of walking meditation and its emphasis on immediate presence, Walker critiques the regulated, productive time of global capitalism while proposing an alternative mode of existence. The series positions the walking body as a site of temporal, philosophical, and political intervention, enacting a politics of rhythm, slowness, and presence that disrupts the structures of liquid modernity. This paper further examines how Walker introduces a “temporal punk aesthetic,” blending sacred ritual with performance art to generate decolonial alternatives to contemporary temporal orders. Through its hybrid performance, Walker reveals the critical potential of Chan Buddhist aesthetics to reimagine the experience of time and space under global modernity.

Presenter: Sihan Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literary Studies and Asian Languages & Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature, culture, and intellectual history, situated within the global modernist studies and world literature. Her broader interests include comparative modernities, aesthetics and religion, multimedia modernism, critical animal studies, Sinophone cinema, and Chinese diasporic culture. Her teaching experience spans topics on Chinese, Sinophone, and East Asian literature, film, popular culture, as well as animal studies.

Discussant: Hang Wu is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research explores Chinese media history and theory in the eras of broadcasting, digital, and new media. She has published academic work on Chinese animation, cinema, and broadcasting infrastructures in journals and edited volumes such as Animation, Dangdai Dianying (Contemporary Cinema), Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific, and Digital Animalities (forthcoming). Her dissertation examines the role of Chinese martial arts television in the construction of transmedia and transregional storyworlds..

Digital Soundscapes of In-Betweenness: Crisis Documentation Through Global Chinese Podcasting

Friday, November 8th, 3:00–5:00 PM

Presenter: Shiqi Lin (Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian Studies, Cornell University)

Discussant: Lilian Kong (PhD Student, EALC/CMS, University of Chicago)

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

Access Shiqi’s paper HERE with password Podcast

Abstract: This chapter thinks through global Chinese podcasting—a digital audio culture that has grown exponentially since COVID-19—to consider what it means for sound to document a permanent state of crisis and pave alternative futures for global media justice. As COVID-19 continued to unfold and restructure macro and micro levels of global social life, I contend that podcasting stood out for its capacity of “elastic listening,” which allowed for both a condition of close, intimate listening and a state of distracted, anxious listening for a sense of security and refuge. The modest, conversational, episodic, and border-crossing qualities of this hybrid medium, I discuss, enabled podcasting to capture shifting traces of this chronic crisis with a sonic infrastructure of everyday documentation. For this workshop, specifically, I highlight how my working concept, “in-betweenness,” may capture the medium specificity of podcasting for straddling multiple modes of media, transmitting intimacy, and linking together diasporic/global Chinese populations on the air. In a context of growing media fragmentation and political polarization across the world, I conceptualize podcasting as a mode of guerrilla media that continues to shift its form across media platforms, intersect with other forms of storytelling, and carry the weight of social engagement for alternative futures in the making.

Presenter: Shiqi Lin is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests include Chinese film and media cultures, critical theory, media theory, and global cultural politics. Her current book project examines the rise and shift of different documentary media in the Chinese digital media landscapes in response to post-2008 global social crises. With Xiaobo Yuan, she is the co-editor of a special issue, “Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China,” for China Perspectives (2023). Her other works have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as positions politics, Foundry, and Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media.

Discussant: Lilian Kong is a PhD Student in Cinema & Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

★This event is also co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Centers program. The event’s content does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government ★

Reading Race across Languages and Disciplines in the Early Works of Mori Ōgai

Time: Friday, October 4th, 3-5pm CT

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

Abstract: This paper examines race as a phenomenon in the works of Mori Ōgai, a canonical author of Japan’s Meiji Era. Mori also studied medicine abroad in Germany as part of the Japanese army. Past English-language studies of Mori have generally ignored the issue of race, focusing more on topics like national subjectivity. To investigate how race manifests in Mori’s works, I focus on his writings related to his time abroad in Germany, specifically his medical essays and studies written in Berlin and Munich from 1884 to 1888, and his 1890 story “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl”) written upon his return to Japan and based on his time abroad. I propose that across his early scientific and literary works, Mori is grappling with race in the form of a European gaze upon East Asia, and that this gaze is, by its nature, hybrid. Thomas Lamarre, citing the work of Bruno Latour, has argued that Mori’s science and literature can be read together by acknowledging that modernity proliferates countless hybrids while simultaneously working to conceal and separate them. Not only do these categories include academic disciplines such as “literature” and “science” but also languages such as “Japanese” and “German.” For this reason, this study also takes into account Mori’s writings in the German language, not only those in Japanese. In his articles on medicine and hygiene, Mori confronts regimes of knowledge that assumed that Japanese were members of the inferior “Mongoloid” race. In doing so, Mori is confronting scientific racism as a gaze upon East Asia, attempting to prove that Japan is a “civilized” nation despite the physical difference of Japanese from Europeans. I subsequently read “Maihime” as an exploration of racial subjectivity, reconsidering the racial dynamics of the Japanese narrator, Toyotarō, and his German lover Elis. I conclude that Mori confronts racism in his scientific and literary works through appeals to quantitative data, social relations and affect. In doing so, Mori allows for the existence of “quasi-subjectivities” and “hybrids” as described by Latour.

Presenter: Simon Tsuchiya Lenoe is currently a first-year PhD student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His primary research areas include modern Japanese literature, race studies, Asian diaspora literature, and German-Japanese transnational exchange. He received an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2024 and a B.A. in German Studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021.

Discussant: Hoyt Long is a Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He has research and teaching interests in modern Japan, with specific interests in the history of media and communication, cultural analytics, sociology of literature, book history, and environmental history.

Please go HERE to access Simon’s paper.

Associate Professor in Anthropology, Zhejiang University

Secularism and the Arguments of Intellectual Freedom:

Revisiting an Encounter between Ma Yifu and Cai Yuanpei in Early 20th-Century China

Presenter: Yang Shen Ph. D. (Assistant Professor in Anthropology, Zhejiang University)

Time: 3-5pm CT, Friday, May 10

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

Abstract: The paper suggests that the global arena of secular universities—rather than the national realms of “religion”—allows us to explore diverse pathways of intellectual freedom in a broad range of modernizing regimes. It focuses on the contrasting views of two key figures in early Republican China, Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940) and Ma Yifu (1883-1967), who had divergent perspectives on the idea of a university. Cai, a secularist and institutional reformer, advocated for the creation of a German Enlightenment-style secular research university, while Ma, an independent classical scholar, was critical of the university institution and instead favored a model based on Chinese Buddhist monasteries. Aware of the condition of financial independence of modern universities, Ma explained that the Buddhist monasteries were a rare example of supporting organized scholarship by social contribution-rather than through state patronage and public funding—in the context of Chinese histories. The paper argues that Ma’s reservations about the university framework reflect a critical examination of the core promise of modernity and its organizational possibilities. By re-visiting the Ma-Cai encounter, this paper highlights the diversity of visions for intellectual freedom under secularist conditions. It also sheds light on the discrepancy between personal ethics and institutional policies and the cultural and societal contexts of the university institution.

Presenter: Dr. Yang Shen is a cultural anthropologist of religion and secularism. Her work explores forms of Chinese secularism and how Chinese conceptions of religion and secularity transform global projects of modernity. Yang received her Ph.D.in Anthropology from Boston University  and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. She also taught at the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a Frieberg-Glorisun Fellow at the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies. Dr. Shen is currently an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the Department of Sociology at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

Discussant: Dr. Wáng Yōu 王悠 (she/they) is an economic and environmental historian of early modern and modern China and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Division. Her current book project, Crafting the Waterscape: Environmental Governance and Rural Communities of the Lower Yangzi Delta, 1500-1850, examines the everyday interactions of village women and men with water- and landscapes and how their labor was self-organized, textualized, and gendered.

PhD students from EALC who are working on their dissertation proposals will present on their dissertation proposal writing. The primary focus of the workshop is to brainstorm on the introduction section of the proposal. We will also be mainly addressing the pre-circulated materials themselves, though we will dedicate time to questions about the projects in general. Please do not circulate the materials without the consent from the authors.

EALC Dissertation Proposal Workshop

Presenters: 

Hang Wu, EALC & CMS

Yiwen Wu, EALC & TAPS

Yuwei Zhou, EALC

Time: Friday, May 3, 3-5pm CT

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