Category Archives: Family

Thursday, April 27th 4-6 PM : Amy Borovoy “Japan Studies in the Postwar Era: Reflections on Modernity and Society in American Social Thought”

Amy Borovoy

Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

“Japan Studies in the Postwar Era: Reflections on Modernity and Society in American Social Thought”

Thursday, April 27

4-6 PM

CEAS 319 (Harris School, 1155 E 60th St.)

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop and the Committee on Japanese Studies in welcoming Professor Amy Borovoy (Princeton University) as she presents a section of her new project. Professor Borovoy has provided the following abstract for her talk:

In the decades following World War II, Japan emerged as a “place to think with” for American social scientists. Until 1945, Japan studies had been centered in Europe. Although understanding “total war” was the initial provocation for American social science research, as in the 1946 classic, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, not long after, social scientists began to see in Japan compelling forms of socio-centrism, social community and cultural identity. By the 1970s, Japan studies had become fruitful terrain for reflecting on the excesses of American liberal individualism. In this project, I analyze this process through a series of canonical texts in anthropology and sociology, from Benedict, to occupation-era village studies, to Thomas P. Rohlen’s ethnography of a Japanese bank and Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One. Japan’s modernity offered powerful insights for those wrestling with American post-industrial society, but it was an experiment made possible by a particular historical moment, and one that raised as many questions as it answered.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. This event is sponsored by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.

Thursday, March 9 : Jessa Dahl

Please join us next week as the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop welcomes our own

 

Jessa Dahl

PhD Student, University of Chicago

“After Dejima: Nagasaki’s ‘Heroic Women’ and Networks of International Exchange, 1827-1899”

Thursday, March 9th

4:00PM – 6:00PM

John Hope Franklin Room (SSR 224)

 

Jessa will be presenting an early draft of her dissertation proposal, which centers on personal and professional networks managed by women in nineteenth century Nagasaki. Jessa describes her project as follows:

 

As a treaty port community, Nagasaki experienced the dynamism of Japan’s entry into the nineteenth century international system first hand. Unlike the other treaty ports, however, Nagasaki was built upon already extant personal and professional networks of intercultural exchange that were over two hundred years old. It was also the only treaty port in which a small cohort of women participated prominently the most vital networks of exchange including international trade, the exchange of ideas and technology, diplomacy and even prostitution. My research will show that these two developments are not coincidental. I will argue that Nagasaki’s history as an established site of international exchange provided a base for the subsequent dynamic transformation that allowed these women to capitalize on the opportunities that were afforded to them. By showing how these women and their networks adapted to and transformed under the new treaty port system, I hope to explore what conditions made their success possible and illustrate how kaikoku (lit. “opening of the country”) and Japan’s subsequent modernization transformed local sites of international exchange.

 

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

 

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.

6/5 Guo-Quan Seng

Of Daughters and Widows: Kapitan Legal-Ritual Brokerage and Creole Chinese Patrilineal Inheritance in 19th Century Colonial Java

Peranakan Chinese family, circa 1890

Peranakan Chinese family, circa 1890

Speaker: Guo-Quan Seng (PhD Candidate, History)

Discussant: Eric Alan Jones (Assistant Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies & Associate Professor, History, Northern Illinois University)

Date/Time: June 5, 2014 (Thu), 4-6pm

Venue: John Hope Franklin Room (SS224)

Tadashi Ishikawa

Tadashi Ishikawa (Ph.D. Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Title: “Can Adopted Daughters Be Free Aside from Their Household? Anti-Human Trafficking Discourses and the Law in Colonial Taiwan, 1919-1936″

Discussant: Wei-ti Chen (Ph.D. Candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations)

Time and Venue: 4-6 pm on 2/27 (Thursday) and SSR 224

The image of the Taihoku District Court in 1915 (Special Collections & College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, Paul Barclay)

The image of the Taihoku District Court in 1915 (Special Collections & College Archives, Skillman Library, Lafayette College, Paul Barclay)