Category Archives: Intellectuals

Thursday, March 1st: Alex Haskins, ““Reimagining Japanese Modernities” – Alertness, Dignity, and Foreign Learning in Sakuma Shozan’s Thought”

Alex Haskins

PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science

“”Reimagining Modernities”- Alertness, Dignity and Foreign Learning in Sakuma Shozan’s Thought”

Thursday, March 1st, 4-6 PM

CEAS 319

Discussant: Tejas Parasher [PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science]

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Alex Haskins as he presents a draft of his fourth dissertation chapter, titled “”Reimagining Modernities”- Alertness, Dignity and Foreign Learning in Sakuma Shozan’s Thought.” He has provided the following abstract:

Sakuma Shozan (佐久間 象山, 1811-1864) is perhaps best known to Western audiences for his phrase “Eastern ethics, Western technical learning” and scholars have used this catchphrase to situate Sakuma as an unsuccessful modernizer in late Edo Japan. But in doing so, these scholars have neglected the broader, dynamic process of thought that underpinned Sakuma’s turn toward embracing reform along “Western” lines. Through an analysis of Sakuma’s defining work,Reflections on My Errors, as well as his memorials to the Tokugawa shogunate and his personal correspondence, I argue in this chapter that Sakuma’s thought is better captured by what I am terming an “alertness-dignity” paradigm. In essence, Sakuma drew on legacies of Confucian learning that emphasized both deep theoretical and practically relevant learning to justify reform toward a “dignified” future ideal that was continually open to revision through an “alertness” to one’s own—and one’s enemy’s—strengths and weaknesses. By reconstructing Sakuma’s arguments, I intend to challenge readings that dismiss him as “too traditional or anti-modern” or as an “unabashed Westernizer or modernizer” and show that although his approach was overlooked by later Edo and Meiji reformers, it, perhaps ironically, offers resources for thinking beyond the linear narratives of Western modernity that eventually took hold in Japan and continue to inform its present.

Alex’s Paper can be found at the post below.

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 Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu or Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu

Thursday, February 15th: Dan Knorr, “A City of Springs: Local Geography and Imperial Presence in High Qing Jinan”

Dan Knorr

PhD Candidate, Department of History

    “A City of Springs: Local Geography and Imperial Presence in High Qing Jinan”

Thursday, February 15th, 4-6pm,

Social Sciences Tea Room [SSRB 201]

Discussant: Alex Jania [PhD Student, Department of History]

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Dan Knorr as he presents a draft of the first dissertation chapter, titled “A City of Springs: Local Geography and Imperial Presence in High Qing Jinan.” He has provided the following abstract:

Since the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) Jinan has been the capital of Shandong Province in eastern China. Despite its political preeminence in the late imperial period, the city boasted neither of the two most important cultural sites in the province: Mt. Tai, one of the five sacred peaks of China, and Qufu, the ancestral home of Confucius’ descendants. During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), visiting these sites were the primary objectives of the Kangxi (r. 1661-1722) and Qianlong (r. 1735-1796) emperors when they passed through Shandong on their eastern and southern tours. However, along the way, both emperors also visited Jinan and expressed their appreciation for the city’s scenery, including its three most famous sites: Baotu Spring, Thousand Buddha/Li Mountain, and Daming Lake. Their patronization of these sites was part of a larger imperial project of solidifying the patrimonial rule of the Manchu Qing Dynasty over the empire through “encompassing” the cultural values of Han elite. The imperial tours and their material legacies, such as steles and scroll paintings, intersected with a corpus of writings about these sites that was preserved and augmented through the successive compilation of local gazetteers (difang zhi). This included Jinan native Ren Hongyuan’s Baotuquan zhi (Records of Baotu Spring), which he compiled in the years between the Kangxi and Qianlong tours.

Focusing on writings about Baotu Spring and its connection to Jinan’s other famous sites, this chapter accomplishes three goals. First, it adds to our understanding of both writing about local sites and scenery and responses to the imperial tours in North China. As the economic and cultural heart of late imperial China, Jiangnan has understandably received considerable attention from scholars like Tobie Meyer-Fong and Michael Chang who have studied the relationship between cultural production and the consolidation of imperial authority under the Qing. This chapter demonstrates that similar processes also played out in northern China, whose beauty some writers even compared favorably to Jiangnan. However, texts about these sites demonstrate that this history was framed in terms of Jinan’s particular position in-between both the capital in Beijing and Jiangnan and the Grand Canal and Mt. Tai.

Second, this chapter demonstrates that local literature was, in fact, a translocal and political production. Compilations of writings about these sites often included and even gave prominence to the voices of writers who were not natives of Jinan. In many cases these writers were officials who worked in Jinan temporarily but left behind literary and architectural impressions on the landscape. Their writings occupied a privileged place in both officially-reviewed gazetteers and the privately-compiled Baotuquan zhi.

Finally, I examine the literary interventions of officials and emperors within the geographic context of Jinan. While the positioning of official yamens in the center of the city, which was itself surrounded by walls, suggests a spatially concentrated projection of imperial power, in fact official patronage and control spilled beyond the city’s walls to Baotu Spring and Thousand Buddha Mountain. Local writers did not, however, treat this as an unwanted imposition on indigenous space. Rather, as suggested above, it was a continuation of a long history of the local landscape – both material and discursive – being produced through the functioning of the state. What was different in the Qing Dynasty was the direct intervention of emperors themselves, which facilitated their personal knowledge of Jinan’s geography and people and the city’s claim to an even greater level of grandeur.

Dan’s Paper can be found at the post below.

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 Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu or Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu

Friday, May 12th 4-6 PM : Robert Tierney “Terminal Time, Authenticity and Looking Back at Meiji”

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in conjunction with the Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop and the Midwestern Japanese Studies Workshop in welcoming:

Robert Tierney

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Terminal Time, Authenticity and Looking Back at Meiji”

Friday, May 12th

4-6 PM

CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)

Discussants:

Alex Jania, University of Chicago

Professor Tierney will be presenting a draft of a chapter in his current book project. The chapter is an exploration of the writing of Nakae Chōmin’s One Year and a Half and its sequel, composed in 1901 after Chōmin was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the chapter, Professor Tierney explores the concept of “terminal time,” and how Chōmin both reacted to and learned to live with his death sentence as reflected in the two novels.

This event is being held as a part of the Midwestern Japanese Studies Workshop, which also includes presentations by graduate students on Saturday, May 13th starting at 8:30 AM. The workshop and conference are sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

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.

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.

November 11 4PM–David Andrew Knight (Co-sponsor with APEA)

David Andrew Knight

“Plain Becomes Patterned: Li Deyu and the White Lotus”

Friday, November 11, 4-6 PM

CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St)

Discussant:

Yiren Zheng (EALC)

The East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop, in conjunction with the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop, is delighted to host David Andrew Knight next Friday, 11/11. Below is a brief abstract of the work:

This paper is part of a larger project that situates the fu 賦 poetry of the ninth century minister Li Deyu 李德裕 (787-850) within the context of his life. Through the focal point of a fu poem about a white lotus flower written by Li Deyu, one of the most powerful men of his day, I will demonstrate how this poem captures a retrievable moment of poetic creation. I have discovered that Li Deyu’s fu poem on the white lotus is a literary recreation of his encounter with the fifteen year old Xu Pan who was soon to become his concubine. By analyzing a key stanza in the poem, I will illuminate the links between Li’s literary life and his real life.

The paper can be found at the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop website at this link. The password is “lotus”. Please do not cite or circulate this paper without express permission of the author.

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.