Category Archives: Transnational history

Friday, January 26th: Sandra Park “Crusading for the Twentieth Century: Christianity, Chaplaincy and Militarism in Cold War South Korea, 1945-1973”

Sandra Park

“Crusading for the Twentieth Century: Christianity, Chaplaincy and Militarism in Cold War South Korea, 1945-1973”

Friday, January 26th, 3-5 p.m.
Location: CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)
Co-sponsored with the Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop

Discussant: Jun-Hee Lee (PhD Candidate, History)
This Friday, East Asia Transregional Histories Workshops and Arts and Politics of East Asia workshops are proud to host Sandra Park (PhD Student, History). She will be presenting a draft of her dissertation proposal, which she summarizes as follows:
My anticipated dissertation, “Crusading for the Twentieth Century: Christianity, Chaplaincy and Militarism in Cold War South Korea, 1945-1973,” elucidates the origins of Christianity’s increasing social and political influence from the Korean War (1950-1953) through 1973, when the Billy Graham Seoul Crusade attracted over three million people (the largest gathering in global Church history). Two decades before the Seoul Crusade, Graham visited American GIs and Korean Christians during the Korean War in 1952. At the time, wŏllam (those who went south) Korean Christian leaders like Han Kyung-Chik (who interpreted for Graham) and Hwang Ŭn-gyun articulated the conflict with communism in North Korea in eschatological language, invoking the imagery of medieval European crusades. My proposal engages the trope of “crusades” articulated during the Korean Cold War as reflective of the ways in which Christianity and militarism were folded into each other. At this stage, I expect to trace three currents that were formative to the relationship between Christianity and militarized politics in Cold War South Korea: the discursive, transpacific politics of Billy Graham and Han Kyung-Chik (1945-1950), the institutional history of the Republic of Korea (ROK) military chaplaincy from its inception in 1951, and the hegemonic culture of militarism and dissent.

Sandra’s paper can be found in the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Please make note of the distinct time and location for this event.

 

Thursday, November 16th : Jonathan Henshaw “Remembering and Forgetting: Commemorations of the Second World War in Nanjing”

Jonathan Henshaw

PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of British Columbia

“Remembering and Forgetting: Commemorations of the Second World War in Nanjing”

Thursday, November 16th 4:00-6:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room [SSR 224]

Discussant: Kyle Pan, University of Chicago History Department

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Jonathan Henshaw [University of British Columbia] as he presents his work-in-progress, titled “Remembering and Forgetting: Commemorations of the Second World War in Nanjing.” Mr. Henshaw provides the following abstract:

The manipulation of wartime commemoration in China by the CCP exists as a commonplace in English-language scholarship. Under the People’s Republic, the retreat of Maoism, contact with Taiwan and renewed (anti-Japanese) nationalism have indeed provided context for recent manipulation of wartime commemorations, but such accounts cut short much of the history of wartime commemoration in China by beginning only in the 1980s. Nanjing, as a former capital, has a large collection of monuments and relics that suggest a longer, more complex narrative. This paper marks an intervention in the literature by extending the history of Chinese wartime commemoration back to 1938, while the war still raged, and by setting the received national narrative of the war against the local record contained in commemorative sites in Nanjing and local accounts of the war. In doing so, it opens a productive space for considering the dynamic between local and national narratives, and also points to how efforts to commemorate the war have evolved in step with developments in China’s international relations. As Gail Hershatter has suggested of the practice of “speaking bitterness,” the post-war national narrative of resistance has China functioned more as a matrix that local or individual accounts must be recuperated within (or be forgotten), as opposed to an outright script. Drawing on newspaper reports, steles and Chinese secondary sources dealing with Nanjing, this paper traces the history of wartime commemoration to its earliest iteration in the wartime era, when collaborationist Nanjing politicians were faced with the task of mourning the dead in a city that was both under Japanese occupation, and still reeling from the 1937 Nanjing massacre. Following the war, Chiang Kai-shek’s victorious Nationalists returned to Nanjing and appropriated the site of a former Japanese Shinto shrine for use as a museum that advanced their own triumphalist narrative of resistance. The establishment of the PRC in 1949 greatly reduced such public commemorations, which fit uneasily within the reigning anti-imperialist framework, but did not entirely eliminate them. Instead, wartime commemoration was refashioned into the reigning paradigm of anti-imperialism. In 1960, when historians in Nanjing took up a formal research project on the Nanjing massacre, it was within this framework that they portrayed the war. Their work, published only in 1979, castigated Japanese brutality and Western complicity, but their anti-imperialist framework soon gave way to the more familiar rhetoric of Chinese victimhood that has taken hold in the post-Mao era. These successive revisions not only highlight the ways in which local experiences of the war have been re-worked within a national framework but also point to the malleable nature of a history that is often presented as above question in China.

Jonathan’s paper can be found in 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, 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.

Thurs. Feb. 9 **4:30 PM** : Stacie Kent “Commercial Treaties: A Framework for Governance”

Stacie Kent

Collegiate Assistant Professor, University of Chicago

“Commercial Treaties: A Framework for Governance”

February 9, 2017

4:30 – 6:30 PM

John Hope Franklin Room, SSR 224

**Please note the time change from 4:00 to 4:30**

Discussants:

Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor of Modern Chinese History and the College, University of Chicago

Carl Kubler, University of Chicago History Department

In the first decade of the 19th century, European opinions about China and its trade policies began to shift towards bellicose opposition. China was denounced as backwards and antisocial, its administrators as arbitrary and self-interested. With this critique in mind, this paper examines the significance of Qing commercial treaties to global commercial and geopolitical integration as well as everyday commercial administration. It argues that Qing commercial treaties should be seen as part of a global effloresce in treaty making that attempted to rationalize and simplify global trade by curtailing the prerogatives and decision making power of local political authorities. Presented as a means to codify a natural community of equal nations, treaties naturalized the abstract compulsions of capital growth and offered a new interface between political authorities and global commerce that generated new limits on the exercise of official power. In China evolving treaty language gradually erased Qing claims to govern trade through flexible decision-making and mutual obligations between merchants and government authorities. In their stead, the treaties called for a novel static regulatory framework and rote official actions.

Professor Kent has been kind enough to provide us with both a chapter and the book proposal from her current project. Both can be found at the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop website 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 Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.

Frontiers Across Eurasia: A Faculty Forum — October 13, 4:00 PM

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop for our first meeting of the Fall Quarter.

Frontiers Across Eurasia: A Faculty Forum

Thursday, October 13, 4:00 – 6:00 PM

CEAS Room 319 (1155 E 60th St)

Presenters:

Kenneth Pomeranz (University Professor of Modern Chinese History and in the College; Member of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge) “From ‘Civilizing’ to ‘Modernizing’: Late Imperial and 20th Century Projects to Remake Chinese Frontier Communities”

and

Faith Hillis (Assistant Professor of Russian History and the College) “Frontiers and the Relationship between Center and Periphery in Russian History.”

Discussants:

Robert Burgos (PhD Student, History, University of Chicago) and Alexander Hubert (PhD Student, History, University of Chicago

______________

As participants in EAT Histories’ first-ever faculty forum, Professors Pomeranz and Professor Hillis will each give a brief presentation on their recent work frontiers on opposite ends of the Eurasian continent. During the subsequent discussion we hope to draw connections between these two seemingly disparate sites of analysis and explore the boundaries of the frontiers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

There is no pre-circulated paper for this event, and first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments 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.

Lester Zhuqing Hu – June 2

Frontiers of Music History: The Trans-Eurasian Making of “China” in 18th Century Qing Court Music

Paper: Hu — Frontiers of Music Theory, Proposal, 28 May 2016*

Speaker: Lester Zhuqing Hu (PhD Student, Department of Musicology, University of Chicago).

Discussant: Yiren Zheng (PhD Student, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago)

Date: Thursday, June 2

Time: 4:15 to 6:00pm

Venue: John Hope Franklin Room (Social Science Research Building, 224)

*“The entire proposal, compiled of various fragmentary sections, is presented here — but I have “de-highlighted” parts to skip by putting them in a very light color; they are there in case you want to consult anything in there [for example with a search function] or if you are interested to see what’s there. I am only requesting you to read the parts in black, as well as the red rubrics, and the primary source appended to the end. I thank you very much for your accommodation and patience and look greatly forward to your comments.”

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