Inter-area Panels that include Korea:
Inter-area Panels that include Korea:
THURSDAY EVENING
THURSDAY, 31 MARCH 2016 | 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM
Gaming Rounds the World: The Worldwide Circulation of Chinese Gambling Games during the Late Qing and Republican period
Organizer | Xavier Paules | Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Panel Abstract:
As sugar, coffee, tea that world historians have studied, gaming goes around the world. The import into China of gambling games like horse races, poker, and roulette during the Late Qing and Republican period is a well-known fact. But during the same period, many Chinese games took the reverse direction and made their way to other countries all over the world.
This panel aims at highlighting the multiple and far-reaching consequences of such a circulation.
Li’s paper focuses on the impact of gambling games among the Chinese diaspora. They were not only socially destructive, as they were instrumental in reinforcing the cohesiveness of the Chinese overseas communities and in maintaining connections to the homeland.
Kang deals with the case of lotteries in Korea. She argues that Overseas Chinese circulated not only merchandise but also a gambling culture through their powerful transnational network.
Paulès takes the example of fantan to investigate the spread of Chinese games outside the diaspora in different places: why did the local people in some countries emulate the Chinese and took up this game, while in other cases they refrained to do so ?
Heinz leads us to the very last end of the dissemination of Chinese games. She shows how mahjong was appropriated in the USA by another minority (Jews) and was instrumental in creating a modern Jewish American culture.
Games are a window to local, national, and transnational networks of identities and migration.
THURSDAY, 31 MARCH 2016 | 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM
Intangible Cultural Heritage in Asia: Discourse and Practice
Organizer | Ziying You | College of Wooster
Panel Abstract:
Since the Second World War, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has supported a series of world heritage initiatives that have had a significant global impact, most recently the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). What happens when the UNESCO ICH Convention is ratified by a state in Asia? How do UNESCO’s global efforts interact with local, regional, and state efforts to protect expressive culture? What changes emerge on the ground in local communities? Drawing upon four case studies ranging across Asia—from India, South Korea, Japan, and China—this panel illuminates various discourses and practices surrounding the safeguarding of ICH in national and local contexts, and the conflicts and challenges faced by local communities. The first paper examines ICH discourse and practice in India through the lens of Kutiyattam theatre of Kerala, exploring the (re)production of the state’s role and a sustained state-level promotion of artistic continuity through creative adaptation and change. The second paper explores what UNESCO recognition actually brings to local ritual practitioners in Cheju Island, South Korea, after their annual shamanic ritual was added to the Representative List of the ICH of Humanity. The third paper addresses conflicts over tradition in the process of protecting stigmatized “feudal superstitions” as China’s national ICH. And finally, the fourth paper explores how the concept of cultural heritage has been recontextualized in the discourse of Japanese society and considers the particular implications that have taken hold, with regard to the historical context.
FRIDAY MORNING
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Framing Devices: Cold War Manga/Manwha and Popular Media in Japan and Korea
Organizer | Hikari Hori | Columbia University
Panel Abstract:
Studies of cultural representations of Cold War tend to highlight bilateral national relationships and interactions between the hegemonic powers and their allies. This panel, however, departs from the dominant narrative mold and argues, instead, that it is crucial to examine the experiences of Cold War as parallel developments, intersections, and dialogues within Asia vis-à-vis the hegemonic superpowers. Specific attention is given to the popular media of film, TV anime, and comics because they not only paraphrase but also reconfigure views of international conflicts and divisions for wider audiences.
Michael Baskett examines representations of Asia in the 1960s children’s spy franchise “Ninja Brigade Gekko” which blended Cold War ideology with reimagined imperial Japanese rhetoric to function as a form of cultural containment. Kyu Hyun Kim discusses the process of political reconfiguration and nation-building of South Korea in the late 1960s through the 1980s, through an examination of gender, sexuality and ethnicity coding in popular Korean comics by Ko Woo-young. Hikari Hori analyzes Japanese comics “Tomorrow’s Joe”, widely shared text ranging from political activists to general readers in the 1970s, which illustrates the emergence of new Asian and gendered identity. Finally, Kukhee Choo redefines the millennium in South Korea as an era of ongoing Cold War/postcolonial masculinity project in her analysis of the Korean film “Old Boy” (2003) which was based on a Japanese comic of the same name.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Sound and Script: Phonological Scholarship and Intellectual Life in Early Modern East Asia
Organizer | Mårten Söderblom Saarela | Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Panel Abstract:
Early modern East Asia was a site of great linguistic diversity, reflected in the scholarship of the time in a variety of ways now often forgotten or misunderstood. In modern China, Korea, and Japan, proponents of new national languages and academic disciplines saw in earlier dynamic relationships between languages, registers, scripts, and genres an opposition between the fixed written media of high culture and local vernaculars, gradually elucidated by increasingly refined philological studies. Their narratives of national languages and level-headed philological research, still influential today, make little sense when we consider the contents and stated purposes of early modern scholarship on language. This panel illuminates the linguistic landscape of early modern East Asia by investigating how scholars at the time conceptualized language and put it to work for various purposes.
In China, phonological scholarship was more than the elucidation of the past; in dialogue with opera, scholarship shed new light on human speech and influenced the arts in the process. Sometimes, it was simply treated as a game. In Japan, the study of ancient language led to an examination of dialectal diversity and the creation of new theories of cultural development and value. In Korea, finally, scholars experimented with Chinese characters, the local alphabet, and the several registers of lexicon and phonology that they could represent to change literary style or even speech habits. This panel investigates linguistic scholarship in East Asia before national linguistic unification and concurrent regional fragmentation.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Understanding Disease in Space and Time: Local and Universal Medical Discourses in Early Modern East Asia
Organizer | Daniel Trambaiolo | University of Hong Kong
Panel Abstract:
From the sixteenth century onwards, a growing number of doctors across East Asia adopted styles of practice based on the Chinese medical classics. However, the wide variation in social and environmental conditions across the region meant this tradition could not always help doctors understand the diseases they encountered in local contexts. Some doctors concluded that the classics should be understood as products of specific geographic and historical circumstances and that other times and places called for different approaches; others reaffirmed the universality of medical principles and suggested how these principles could be interpreted to provide guidance in novel contexts.
Historians of East Asian medicine are increasingly recognizing the importance of these local adaptations of the Chinese medical tradition. However, we still lack an overall comparative framework for understanding how doctors in different parts of early modern East Asia reconciled their acceptance of universalistic traditions of medical discourse with their experiences of local disease ecologies. This panel brings together historians of China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan to show how the problem of localizing medical understandings of disease provoked parallel and divergent responses in a variety of East Asian contexts. Opposing both diffusionist accounts of the spread of “Chinese” medicine and nationalist accounts of the emergence of local traditions, we conceive of new approaches to understanding early modern East Asian medical history, not in terms of binary relationships between centers and peripheries, but in terms of linked cultural processes taking place across the region as a whole.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Negotiating Doctrine, Practice, and Apocrypha in East Asian Buddhism: Papers Presented to Honor Robert Buswell
Organizer | Richard D McBride II | Brigham Young University Hawai’i
Organizer | Robert M Gimello | University of Notre Dame
Panel Abstract:
Panel Abstract:
In his research, Robert Buswell has shown an abiding interest in textual materials, particularly what we now call “Chinese Buddhist apocrypha.” Robert’s passion for critically examining Buddhist texts is a trait he has helped to foster in his many graduate students. The papers in this border-crossing panel commemorate the research and mentorship of Robert Buswell by exploring venues of Buddhist literature and its interaction with ritual practice and intellectual discourse. Lee’s paper discusses how a particular Chinese Buddhist apocryphon, the Awakening of Faith, negotiates indigenous doctrinal concerns in medieval Korea and China. The remaining papers in this panel demonstrate that by taking an anthropological or art historical approach to texts and material culture we can locate seminal doctrinal concerns in the practice of Buddhism on the ground and in sacred spaces. Riggs’s paper shows how an eighth-century image made by a Korean immigrant artist inspired rag robes for Soto Zen priests in twentieth-century Japan. Keyworth and McBride focus on dhāraṇī sūtras and practices in tight institutional contents and examine the influential role of how material culture demonstrates a distinctively this-worldly approach to ritual practice in contemporary Korea and at Matsuno’o Shine in Japan.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 12:45 PM – 2:45 PM
Revisiting The Zen Monastic Experience: Papers presented to honor Robert Buswell
Organizer | George Albert Keyworth | University of Saskatchewan
Panel Abstract:
Some of Robert Buswell’s (UCLA) landmark research in the area of Zen (C. Chan, K. Sŏn) studies includes the life and works of Chinul (1158-1210), the practice of kōan (C. gong’an, K. kong’an) introspection, apocryphal Buddhist literature, and Sŏn Buddhist monasticism in Korea. The principal theme of this panel is to explore social, intellectual, historical, and material approaches to establishing authority in the early modern and contemporary Korean, Japanese, and Chinese Zen traditions by expanding upon and providing significant nuance to a matter of tremendous importance to Robert Buswell: the lived experiences of Zen Buddhism. The papers presented in this border-crossing panel are delivered by several of Buswell’s students whose research encompasses Zen studies in Korea, Japan, and China. The papers accomplish far more than simply paying tribute to a great teacher. Park and Riggs consider how precepts within contemporary Korean and early modern Japanese Zen movements—Chogye and Sōtō Zen—contributed to discourses of institutional authority. Nathan and Poceski consider kōan discourse in contemporary East Asia. Poceski’s paper discusses how a particular kōan case—Nanquan ‘Kills a Cat’—has been reinterpreted through successive narratives in China and Japan, as well as within contemporary global discourses about Zen practice. Nathan reconsiders kanhwa sŏn practice within monastic and lay contexts in Korea. The panelists’ papers provide a wealth of information about Zen ideas and practices, and provoke important questions about the nature of Zen and its place in modern East Asian life that bridge temporal, chronological, sectarian, intellectual, and national boundaries.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 12:45 PM – 2:45 PM
Exploring National Identity Construction across Northeast Asia: Self-Perception, the State, and Transnationalism
Organizer | James DeShaw Rae | California State University, Sacramento
Panel Abstract:
This panel examines the role of the state and transnational forces of migration and globalization on national identity in China, Japan, Korea, and Mongolia, and considers the impact of race, ethnicity, and culture on self-perception, the role of hegemonic narratives in conditioning identity, and how official policies and social changes helped to construct new notions of membership in the nation. Normative factors and strategic geopolitical concerns explain the importance of a multi-national Chinese identity to the Communist Party as it sought to accommodate ethnic elites in the revolutionary era. Today, exclusive ethnic and racial conceptions challenge government orthodoxy of civic harmony while a more inclusive cultural understanding of Chineseness is undermined by the ongoing territorializing of Chinese nationalism and online ethno-national rhetoric. The exclusive boundaries around the conception of Japaneseness in the term nihonjin conflates nation, race, and culture, foreign nationals of Japanese ancestry (nikkeijin), mixed race and mixed ethnicity Japanese (hafu), and Japanese citizens born and/or raised abroad (kikokushijo), which reflect these diverse experiences and identities but also reproduce a central, hegemonic Japanese identity. Differing social, cultural, and political conditions among Koreans growing up since the 1980s leads to multiple understandings of collective identity depending on how the individual subjectively and self-consciously experiences the larger narrative of national identity as official state ideology. Mongolia’s post-socialist identity has been narrated and enacted by various social and political actors that express an “ideal” representation of the nation in a continuous process of boundary-making within discursive frontiers of race, language, and history.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 12:45 PM – 2:45 PM
Children of Empire: Writing “Greater Japan” from Center and Periphery
Organizer | Kate McDonald | University of California, Santa Barbara
Panel Abstract:
How do empires reproduce themselves? How do children, as writing subjects, participate in broader conflicts of colonial rule and imperial subjectivity? “Children of Empire” presents three papers that grapple with the question of how children understood themselves as part of empire. Challenging the notion that children were simply blank slates upon which imperial ideologies could be inscribed, these papers explore how children gave voice to their own identities both within and in opposition to institutional frameworks that sought to mold them into ideal, imperial subjects.
The papers proposed here explore these issues from center and periphery, setting their investigations in the context of Korea, Manchuria, and Japan. Andre Haag argues that student writers in Kanagawa used compositions on “Japan-Korea harmony” (naisen yūwa) to subvert expectations, by pairing colonial triumphalism with indictments of the colonizers’ failings. On the continent, Helen J. S. Lee shows how both Korean students in Korea and the children of Japanese settlers in Manchuria struggled to articulate their own place in the empire under imperial subjectification policy (kōminka) of the 1930s. Crossing between these two territories, Kate McDonald investigates how Japanese student travelers used their travel writings to construct affective connections with colonial territory, without necessarily conforming to the expectations of the colonial authorities. Together, we argue that children should not be reduced to mere vessels of imperial ideology. Rather, the children of empire produced new ideologies and discovered new conflicts, which carried ambivalent and conflictual practices of colonial rule and imperial subjectivity into the next generation.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 12:45 PM – 2:45 PM
The Construction of Xiyouji (西遊記) in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and beyond
Organizer | Barbara Wall | University of Hamburg
Panel Abstract:
In the academic realm Xiyouji, or The Journey to the West, is generally identified with the Shidetang edition of the 100-chapter novel allegedly written by Wu Cheng’en in Ming-China at the end of the 16th century. Yet the popularity of Xiyouji is not based on the 100-chapter novel but on various transformations which were neither restricted to China nor to the Ming-dynasty. This panel sets out to reconsider the construction of Xiyouji. We suggest perceiving Xiyouji not as a graspable static text on which author, place and time of publication can be imposed, but rather as a bundle of characters, motives, themes and discursive threads, which are in ever new combination passed down more or less together as tradition without regard to the boundaries of time periods or national literatures.
Specifically, (1) Hoang Yen Nguyen will discuss Phật Bà Quan Âm truyện 佛婆觀音傳, an early Vietnamese transformation of Xiyouji. (2) Yevheniy Vakhnenko compares two Japanese adaptations of Xiyouji: Tamenaga Shunsui’s Fūzoku onna saiyūki 風俗女西遊記 _and Takizawa Bakin’s Konpirabune rishō no tomozuna 金毘羅船利生纜. (3) Nick Stember will discuss the shifting role of Sun Wukong in comics and animations in China and the USA. (4) Barbara Wall focuses on transformations of Sun Wukong in Korea over eight centuries.
Having invited a discussant in Chinese vernacular literature, we hope to spark a larger discussion about the mutable history of books away from a focus on supposedly stable classic texts which are bound to a specific time period and particular national literature.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 12:45 PM – 2:45 PM
Videogames Grow Up: Offline Issues in East Asian Gaming
Organizer | Ben Whaley | University of British Columbia
Panel Abstract:
This interregional panel traces the relations between contemporary videogames and sociocultural issues across several regions and gaming cultures in East Asia, from youth gameplay practices in Korean mobile gaming, to issues of bullying and marginalization in networked play, to racializing discourses and the representation of natural disasters in Japanese console games. As 2015 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America, this timely panel takes as its premise the understanding that videogame design is indebted to political, ethical, and cultural ideologies, and that gameplay is an effective prism for looking at social relations at the local and transnational levels.
This unique collection of papers analyzes both the content and real-world ramifications of different kinds of videogames from a variety of methodological approaches. Dal Yong Jin utilizes interviews to take a broad survey of the rise of smartphone use in Korea and its effect on local youth gaming practices. Florence Chee’s comparative ethnographic fieldwork elucidates some of the effects of this social gaming with regard to bullying in Korean and Japanese online play. Rachael Hutchinson analyzes the racialization of Korean characters in Japanese games, while Ben Whaley discusses how the earthquake simulations in the Japanese game Disaster Report (2002) helped real-life victims of the 3.11 Fukushima disaster. With a particular attention to translingual and transcultural linkages, this panel aims not only to apprehend the complex social narratives of videogames, but also to articulate the critical stakes of what happens when the game switches off.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Beyond ‘Host’ and ‘Home’: Asian American ‘Return’ Migration to Asia
Organizer | Mytoan Nguyen | University of Washington
Panel Abstract:
Our panel speaks to the issue of cross-borders and cross-regions in the Asia Pacific-US migration corridors. In recent decades, a different type of migration pattern in Asia has been taking place. Reversing the more typical direction of immigration from Asia to the United States, many Asian Americans of varied generations are now “returning” to their respective ancestral homelands in Asia to live and work. While Asian migrations to the United States have historically fit a broader pattern of Global South to North migration, migration from the United States to Asia does not, raising a variety of questions. How are Asian Americans treated in their Asian homelands – and how does this vary by country and region? More broadly, how are Asian American experiences in Asian “homelands” mediated through class, gender, labor, and bifurcated experiences of national belonging? What can they tell us about constructions of Asianness and Americanness in both the United States and Asia? Offering a pan Asian comparative lens via case studies of Chinese Americans in Beijing, China; Indian Americans in New Delhi and Mumbai, India; Vietnamese Americans in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Korean Americans in Seoul, South Korea; this panel explores how issues of trans-Pacific belonging are complicated by axes of race, class, gender, and nation.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Global Capitalism, National Experiences, and Changing Labor Markets in Asia
Organizer | Anthony D’Costa | University of Melbourne
Panel Abstract:
Asia has provided the “evidence” that postcolonial status need not mean underdevelopment and stagnation. Beginning with Japan, followed by South Korea and the three other “dragons”, and more recently even China and India in their own way have reinforced this favourable prognosis of global capitalism. The rise of Asian manufacturing in a US dominated geopolitical environment with built-in local egalitarian institutions had contributed to a region where millions experienced prosperity and social wellbeing. Yet today they are increasingly characterized by labor market outcomes such as temporary, contract, and part-time employment, considered to be the hallmarks of contemporary OECD afflictions. Even China (and India on a smaller scale), whose economic growth and employment creation has been historically unprecedented since opening up is faced with severe employment challenges as global growth slows down, the state withdraws, and businesses invest in automation and hire skilled workers. Consequently, employment growth in Asia remains a conundrum and ironically seems to converge with the OECD prematurely in a perverse way. This panel brings in four specialist scholars on China, South Korea, Japan, and India to focus on the common theme of how labor markets, employment, and labor relations are changing in Asia. They focus macro/global structural dynamics of production and employment, the local/national responses to changing labor markets, including the rise of informal markets, and the worsening employment conditions of women in Japan. The collective analysis addresses not only the workings of labor markets but also why, how, and who are impacted.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Radical Fashion: Social Changes and Dress Reform in Modern Asia
Organizer | Kyunghee Pyun | Fashion Institute of Technology
Organizer | Aida Yuen Wong | Brandeis University
Panel Abstract:
China, Japan, and Korea underwent radical socio-political reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the forefront of the changes was clothing. Uniforms for the military and the government officials, including those for the ruling elites, were re-designed in accordance with visions of modernity. The Meiji Restoration in Japan transformed the presentation of ranked officials by adopting Western-styled hats, coats, and trousers. But this development did not preclude incorporations of traditional textiles, patterns, and symbols. Hybridity permeated East Asian dress policies. As expressions of power, dress reforms also revealed the ideological underpinnings of shifting governmental systems. In China, the collapse of the imperial order and its replacement by a Republic was far from a smooth transition. From the new attires worn by political leaders, much can be observed about the fierce struggles for legitimacy. Ordained changes sometimes met with vehement opposition from below. Such was the case of late-Joseon Korea where many ministers and ordinary people regarded the enforced clothing reforms under King Gojong as infringements of national pride as the country became torn by imperialism.
The adaptation of foreign dress elements and the reformation of traditional clothing have been under-investigated in the study of East Asian modernity, especially in a cross-cultural context. This panel seeks to fill this gap by considering similarities and differences in Japan, China, and Korea. Using visual culture theories, literary texts, political statements, popular journals as well as surviving artifacts, our speakers address intersections of material culture, history of consumption, and identity politics.
FRIDAY EVENING
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM
Religion, Family, and Gender in East Asia: Ethnographic Approaches
Organizer | Jessica Starling | Lewis & Clark College
Panel Abstract:
Laywomen are the driving force behind religious institutions in East Asia, and yet they are remarkably understudied. Scholarship on women in East Asian religions tends to focus on female practitioners in one of two roles: either Buddhist nun or shaman. Such a focus casts female religious specialists as women at the margins of the familial norms of their society who use their religious identities to sidestep Confucian familial obligations. This panel gathers together four papers that focus on women who are simultaneously wives, mothers, and fervent religious actors, spotlighting the intersections, rather than isolation, of family roles and religious authority in multiple East Asian contexts.
The individual studies in this panel show how women use social activism, ritual, recreation, and academic study to further their own interests and agendas in contemporary East Asia. Because the papers consider women from China, South Korea, and Japan, and our discussant’s specialization is in Taiwan, the panel presents a border-crossing view of women’s negotiation of family and religious roles in Confucian-influenced cultures.
FRIDAY, 1 APRIL 2016 | 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM
Sites of Consumption: Food and Bodies in Asian Urban Spaces
Organizer | Michelle Tien King | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Panel Abstract:
This panel focuses on the dynamic relationships among food, urban space and bodies in Asian cityscapes. Although tourism bureaus emphasize street food as the quintessential Asian sensory experience, we locate the preparation and consumption of food in a range of alternative sites made possible by the convergence of urban densities and economic development. Our papers examine representations of food and eating in both real and imagined spaces, including Shenzhen restaurants in a French-Canadian graphic novel by Guy Delisle, a woman-friendly restaurant/bar in Tokyo owned by television screenwriter Mukōda Kuniko, a high-rise in Seoul envisioned by Korean director Chul-Soo Park, and a television studio in Taipei, home to Fu Pei-mei’s long-running cooking program. These sites hint at the fragmented urban experiences of eating, with diners not gathered in a commensal meal around the family dinner table, but engaged as individual foreign travelers, apartment dwellers, restaurant diners and television viewers.
Several questions animate our conversation: How are urban sites infused with literal or suggested theatricality, underlining the preparation and consumption of food as a performative activity? How does eating in these places suggest boundaries, real or imagined, about intimacy and privacy, hygiene and cleanliness, local and foreign selves? How does food affect the way bodies inhabit urban interiors and exteriors, cross semi-public boundaries, or interact with other bodies, both real and virtual? How are these spatial dimensions inflected by gendered identities, with women operating not only as cooks, servers and diners, but also of entrepreneurs, entertainers, performers, nurturers, torturers, and educators?
SATURDAY MORNING
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Asia and the changing circuits of global production and consumption
Organizer | Solee Shin | National University of Singapore
Panel Abstract:
In the recent decades, the manufacturing platforms of Asia have developed into thriving consumer economies in their own right. This transition to consumer economies in Asia happened alongside larger global capitalist developments to which Asian market actors have become ever more responsive. For example, global retailers and brand-name merchandisers that initially sourced goods for Western consumption are now expanding their physical presence to sell to Asian customers. In response, Asian retailers and merchandisers are reconfiguring their strategies to compete and coordinate with these Western actors. Contract manufacturers that primarily depended upon orders from Western-buyers are now responding to the rising local markets. What new configurations, paradoxes, and power structures emerged within these changing market orders?
This panel brings together papers that take seriously the inter-relationships between global production and consumption landscapes, and Asia’s changing role within this nexus. Tsaiman Ho studies the evolutionary paths of Hong Kong and Taiwanese contract manufacturers and their growth and dependence vis-à-vis Western buyers. Solee Shin and Tommy Tse examines the ascendance of Korean fashion in the absence of an individual-designer-based creative system. Eileen Otis examines the distinctive work regimes in Wal-Mart, China and their local and multinational origins. Christina Moon examines the everyday work of Korean fast fashion families and their connections to the ever-shifting production landscape in Asia. Together, these papers capture the competitive and cooperative workings of various local and Western market actors – retailers, merchandisers, and manufacturers – in defining the marketplace for consumption and production in Asia and beyond.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Border Anxiety, Border Ambiguity: Nation and Empire Building in the Borderlands of East Asia
Organizer | Martin Fromm | Worcester State University
Panel Abstract:
Defining and enforcing borders has been critical to processes of state formation in East and Southeast Asia since the early modern period. Yet equally significant to these developments have been anxieties about borders and movements across them. Drawing on the recent theoretical discussion on border/lands, our panel examines the anxiety and ambiguity that border/lands may retain, exploring the following questions: 1) What kinds and whose imaginations have come to play in making and remaking the concept of border and the affect of borderland? 2) In what ways has cartographic anxiety affected the everyday life of borderlands? 3) How has the particular characteristic of the border and borderlands shifted with national and imperial building processes in East Asia? Arina Mikhalevskaya investigates the role of local Burmese political practices in complicating Qing attempts to define and regulate the border through the tribute system. Noriaki Hoshino uses the lens of Japanese social scientist discourses on ethnic and racial contacts in the 1930s and 1940s to examine the relationship between anxieties about cross-border population movements and the construction of multi-ethnic empire. June Hee Kwon and Martin Fromm turn attention to the continuing role of border anxieties along China’s northeast borders with Korea and Russia. Kwon uses ethnographic research to examine the conflicted meanings associated with the Tumen River border between China and Korea and their appropriation in local economic policies and practices. Fromm analyzes a state-sponsored oral history project’s reconstruction of China’s northeast border with Russia as an ambiguous political space in the transition to a new form of post-Mao nationalism in the 1980s.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Forms of Physical Protest in East Asian Parliaments
Organizer | Axel Peter Klein | University of Duisburg-Essen
Panel Abstract:
In this panel, three area specialists trained in political science will analyze forms of oppositional protest in the national parliaments of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. As an introductory video will illustrate, all three cases display characteristics of legislative violence and physical conflict hardly found in similar formal settings in today’s Western-European or Anglo-Saxon national parliaments.
In political science, these forms of physical conflict are looked at from different angles, depending on where academics position themselves on the continuum between “culture” and “structure”. Those who suspect the (operating) norms and political ideals of a polity to be the main cause of particular behavior will turn to an approach from political culture studies, while others may look for incentives woven into the structure, the formal institutions of a parliamentary system. A third approach is that of analyzing “informal institutions”, the unwritten laws (Guillermo O’Donnell) that shape actors’ behavior in systematic and often robust ways (North; Helmke & Levitsky).
By applying a comparative perspective all three presenters will critically assess the usefulness and explanatory power of these approaches. The panel’s format (each presentation limited to max. 15 min.) will also secure ample time for engaging the audience into a discussion of ideas and factors which may or may not explain the respective forms of parliamentary protest and how political science could profit from these findings in research on other world regions where similar forms of protest can be found (e.g. Mexico, Ukraine, Venezuela etc.).
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Re-spatializing Center and Periphery in East Asian Medicine: Cases from China and Korea
Organizer | Xiaoshun Zeng | University of Washington
Panel Abstract:
This panel focuses on the politics of medicine. The four papers look at herbal drugs, healing cultures, and medical practices originated from geopolitical peripheries and marginalized by modern biomedicine, yet highlight the ways in which these branches of peripheral medicine were re-centered in the medical-cum-political arena in China, Korea and more broadly, East Asia. Through examining the various political, commercial and medical networks in which peripheral medicine regained significance, the panel challenges both the dominance of modern biomedicine and the assumed centrality and homogeneity of Chinese Traditional Medicine. Yunju Chen investigates the circulation of drugs in the far southern region of Song-Yuan China, showing that both the state and literati were concerned with medicine specific to southern miasmatic disorders. Xiaoshun Zeng studies an herbal remedy from southwestern China that first emerged in the late Qing period and later became an “Ethnic Medicine” in the PRC, shedding light on a third component to the bifurcated field of Chinese versus Western medicine in modern China. Adding a comparative perspective form Korea, Eunjeong Ma discusses the recent history of South Korean government advocating mass production, global marketing and scientific research for traditional herbal medicine. Finally, James Flowers explores a Korean physician-scholar who theorized re-centering Korea in the geopolitical world of East Asia by returning to Han Dynasty medical and philosophical texts, thus bringing up the transnational nexus between China and Korea. Taken together, the four papers raise questions on conventional understandings of center and periphery in East Asia through the lenses of medicine.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Shaping Families, Shifting Lives: Law in the Japanese Empire
Organizer | Jooyeon Hahm | University of Pennsylvania
Panel Abstract:
This panel explores the role of family law in reordering family relations and gender norms in the Japanese Empire. Recent scholarship has identified the law as a set of discourses and practices amenable to contestation, interpretation, and negotiation. Building upon this conception, this panel will study family law in the Japanese Empire as a fluid and changeable instrument for imperial governance and an interactive space of confrontation. Two broad lines of inquiry unite the panel’s individual papers. First, how did the contradictory impulses of custom and change manifest on the ground? Jooyeon Hahm shows how the compromises made by the Japanese Civil Code in enforcing monogamy marginalized unwed mothers and out-of-wedlock children. Ji Young Jung reveals how household head rights of the Japanese Civil Code clashed with the Korean custom of family head authority. Our second line of inquiry explores the conflicts and negotiations engendered in colonial settings by the adoption of the Japanese Civil Code. Tadashi Ishikawa probes how the Japanese regulation of bride prices redefined this established practice and transformed marital relationships in Taiwan. Sungyun Lim examines debates over implementation of the Japanese custom of son-in-law adoption in Korea. These four papers together capture the shifting dynamics of power relations among individual family members as the Japanese Civil Code was introduced into colonial settings. The panel will explore the legal development of the Japanese Empire not as a unilateral process from center to periphery but as a multi-directional negotiation of colonial policy and local custom.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 10:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Genealogies of Tribute: East Asian Interstate Relations and the Imperial Nineteenth Century – Sponsored by Sino-Japanese Studies Group
Organizer | Bradley Camp Davis | Eastern Connecticut State University
Panel Abstract:
This panel situates the margins of the Qing tributary world within the center of a historical investigation into the concept of a Chinese tributary system. During the nineteenth century, European and American officials in a variety of settings produced knowledge about the various practices and protocols of the foreign relations of the Qing Empire, relations that have come to be known as tributary relations or the tributary “system.” As the British, Americans, French, Japanese, and other imperial powers came into military and diplomatic contact with Qing China, Chosŏn Korea, and Nguyen Vietnam, Qing foreign relations became an object of diplomatic and scholarly inquiry. By examining cases from the nineteenth century, this panel collectively investigates the genealogies of “tribute” in East and Southeast Asia to come to an empirical understanding of the rich variety of tributary practices in this period and the ways in which multiple actors engaged in and indeed constituted these practices through the production of what we might term tributary knowledge. Specialists in Korean, Vietnam, and Chinese foreign relations, the presenters on this panel will critically revisit the notion of an ontologically autonomous and monolithic tributary system, a notion that continues to animate scholarly and popular discourses of contemporary Chinese inter-state diplomacy.
SUNDAY, 3 APRIL 2016 | 10:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Intervention, Engagement and Transition: the New Artistic and Creative Practices in East Asia
Organizer | Meiqin Wang | California State University, Northridge
Panel Abstract:
In the past decade, socially engaged artistic and creative practices have become a major trend in East Asia, embraced not only by contemporary art circles but also urban and rural communities. Individual artists, art collectives and average citizens have initiated various approaches and projects to challenge problems such as social exclusion, corruption, or negligence bred by capitalist urbanization and to tackle complex postcolonial issues brought about by the legacy of colonialism and accelerating cross-border globalization. This panel calls for in-depth research on these novel artistic and creative practices, as well as on the transnational networks of support that have been established. We posit that the socially oriented practices in East Asia renegotiate the autonomy of art and the conventional norms of the global/local art worlds—including the definitions of socially engaged art deriving from Euro-American scholarship. The panel seeks to facilitate multifaceted and comparative discussions by investigating the discursive practices of socially engaged artistic and creative practices in China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea through a variety of case studies ranging from “community art” to “urban creativity.” We ask: What are the specific sociopolitical, cultural, historical, or spatial factors in the different East Asian countries and regions that have propelled the rising interest and efforts in socially engaged artistic and creative works? How do artists, art collectives or average citizens choose a particular community or site for engagement and intervention? What kind of role does art or creativity play in such undertakings and can the results become sustainable?
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 10:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Modernizing Villages in Asia: Navigating between Urban and Rural
Organizer | Nick R. Smith | Yale-NUS College
Panel Abstract:
As Asia’s villages are increasingly integrated into urban networks of labor, capital, and expertise, they are faced with new opportunities and challenges for their futures. The transition from an agrarian economy to commodity capitalism can deliver dramatic improvements in prosperity and quality of life, but it can also erode resilience, deplete resources, and exacerbate inequity. These tensions can be further intensified by state-directed modernization programs, which often impose idealized visions of rurality on villages that have already transcended the urban-rural binary; conversely, rural modernization can also take on characteristics of urban development as the interdependency between the two increases. Meanwhile, some villagers advance alternative visions of a modern rural future. How can villages sustainably navigate such transitions? What strategies do actors deploy to negotiate these tensions? This interdisciplinary panel addresses these questions from the perspectives across Asia, including China, India, Korea, and Myanmar, exploring multiple developmental strategies, such as industrialized agriculture, agro-tourism, and real estate.
The panel will begin with a 15-minute discussion by Kristen Looney, who will contextualize the papers in a comparative framework of village modernization campaigns across Asia. This will be followed by four paper presentations of 15 minutes each. Chungho Kim will investigate Korea’s New Village Movement. Nick Smith will discuss the commodification of agriculture in Chinese villages. Namita Dharia will explore the role of villages in India’s real estate industry. And Ashley Scott Kelly will address grassroots village modernization movements in Myanmar. Approximately 45 minutes will be reserved for a conversation with the audience.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 10:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Transnationalism, Borderlands, and the History of Archaeology in Twentieth-Century East Asia
Organizer | Justin Jacobs | American University
Panel Abstract:
The study of archaeology and antiquities in twentieth-century East Asia is an emerging field of study, but most scholars have limited their analysis to major intellectual and political figures in the metropoles. Archaeology and the trade in antiquities were fundamentally transnational enterprises, however, ones that not only entailed frequent collaboration with foreign colleagues throughout the world, but also required participation in the politics of the politically sensitive borderlands where they often worked. With four papers focusing on connections among East Asian cultural and political elites with archaeological sites and professional counterparts in Korea, Central Asia, Egypt, and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, this panel will explore the ways in which transnational influences and borderland politics informed the ideological, economic, and legal development of archaeology and the attendant trade in antiquities throughout China and Japan. Three of the papers examine such exchanges in geographical and cultural margins (Xinjiang, Egypt, and Tsushima) of the late Qing, Republic, and postwar Japan, while a fourth paper examines the collaboration of Chinese and American cultural elites during the Republican era. Common to each study is the flexible posture of Chinese and Japanese cultural elites who used archaeology for the benefit of domestic agendas in their own borderlands. By expanding coverage of the archaeological discipline in East Asia to include ideological influences across Eurasia and the Americas, this panel aims to highlight the ironies and contradictions of an ostensibly objective science that was nonetheless utilized to serve decidedly nationalist agendas.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Music and Cultural Intersections in East Asia
Organizer | Tong Soon Lee | Chinese University of Hong Kong
Panel Abstract:
The relationship between Japan and its East Asian neighbours is complex in its historical formations and social impact. Such complexities are often overshadowed by anti-colonial sentiments and polarised nationalistic rhetoric, or sometimes not considered as important markers of identities. This panel uses music to examine Japanese relationships with Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean societies, and more broadly, cultural intersections in East Asia.
What does musical innovation on the Chinese guqin reveal about the ways Japanese intellectuals in the Edo period relate to changing socio-political circumstances? How can contemporary Hakka children’s music in Taiwan shed light on how Taiwanese perceive the colonial period and continuing Japanese influence? How did the showcase of Western classical and Korean traditional music by a Korean government delegate to Japan in December 1960 contribute to its political objectives and subsequent diplomatic normalisation? In what way can the performing arts help us understand the impact of colonial Korean experiences and the divided Koreas in forming alliances and citizenship of resident Koreans in Japan? These questions form the core of our panel as we examine the role of expressive cultures in shaping the nuances of politics and the everyday life, the commercial and private domains. By focusing on music, we emphasize the transient aspects of ideas, nostalgia, and empathy in socio-political intersections across nation-states, as they are evoked and shaped through cultural practices.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Online Teaching in Asian Humanities – Opportunities & Challenges
Organizer | Maya Stiller | University of Kansas
Panel Abstract:
This panel will explore recent innovative instructional and technological approaches to teaching online courses in Asian Humanities. Each paper showcases the increased efficiency, accessibility and efficacy of online teaching in a diversity of contexts including but not limited to Asian Humanities, Korean Studies, Japanese Studies and study-abroad programs. First presenter Adam Lloyd will introduce three versions of the course “Introduction to the Humanities of Asia” with online, hybrid and face-to-face formats that maximize enrollment. Using examples from her “Modern Korean Art & Culture” course, Maya Stiller will offer practical advice for creating a community of learners in an online class via live web conferences and student blogs. Meredith Collier will discuss an efficient combination of online and onsite modules to broaden the diversity of students in the study-abroad program “Terps to Tohoku,” in which participants study disaster recovery in Northeastern Japan. Jascha Smilack will demonstrate the challenging collaborative efforts of contributors from Harvard, MIT, Duke University and several Japanese institutions for the successful creation of the open access course “Visualizing Japan (1850s-1930s): Westernization, Protest, Modernity.” Presenters will conclude that, although it requires considerable time and effort to prepare an online course, instructors and students greatly benefit from online teaching, as it effectively complements and even enhances traditional teaching methods, conveying creative global perspectives in post-secondary education.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Violent Upheavals, State Legitimation, and the Evolving Politics of Elite Families in Early Modern East Asia
Organizer | David Spafford | University of Pennsylvania
Panel Abstract:
In pre-modern societies, a circumscribed group of powerful or eminent families generally constituted the central nexus of the sociopolitical order. Their status and power made them critical allies (or enemies) of a state seeking to enhance its prestige or extend its authority. Beyond this generality, however, we believe there existed across East Asia a remarkable diversity in the relationships between elite families and the political regimes that sought to govern them. Moreover, we believe that better understanding this diversity in the context of a comparative framework is critical for gaining a better grasp on how East Asian states and societies developed over time. This panel brings together papers on Tang-Song China, Chosŏn Korea, and Late Warring States Japan to explore how elite families evolved as political entities in the wake of particularly momentous changes in political regimes. How did political elites adapt and redefine themselves to maintain (or gain) relevance under a new political order? How did new regimes exploit these families in novel ways in their own search for political control and legitimacy? The panel’s presentations span nearly seven centuries and three regions, grapple with both short-term and long-term transformations, and range methodologically from genealogical to quantitative GIS analysis, in an attempt to highlight both recurring phenomena and historical specificities in the evolving politics of elite families in East Asia.
SATURDAY EVENING
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM
Department Stores in Modern East Asia: A Nexus of Cultural and Class Identity Transformation during the Early Twentieth Century
Organizer | Julia Elizabeth Sapin | Western Washington University
Panel Abstract:
The diverse merchandising activities of department stores were critical to the molding of cultural and class identities in East Asia during the early twentieth century. The stores’ marketing and product design recalibrated historical allusions and engendered contemporary trends; these commercial practices along with novel financing strategies radically altered what could be purchased and by whom; urban landscapes were transformed by the stores’ architecture and advertising. Ultimately, these institutions molded cultural perceptions nationally and transnationally across East Asia.
This interdisciplinary and inter-area panel furthers understanding of the multitude of regional networks and cross-cultural connections spurred by East Asian department-store expansion, which fueled economic development and identity construction during an era of nation- and empire-building. Rika Fujioka offers an economic overview of department-store impact on the modernization of retailing, manufacturing, and consumption in East Asia. Ling-ling Lien investigates the synthesis of department-store merchandising of non-Chinese products with the Native Goods Movement in China in the 1910s. Younjung Oh discusses the manipulation of “Japanese” and “Korean” identities at Mitsukoshi in Seoul during the colonial period through analysis of architecture and product design. Julia Sapin explores the commodification of elite culture in Japan through department-store photographic advertising. Collectively, these panelists intend to provoke discussion about the cross-currents of of motivations and the various forms of reception at work in producing culture during the modern period in East Asia.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM
Migrant Choreographies: Dancing across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Europe
Organizer | Katherine Mezur | Keio University
Panel Abstract:
Why dance now? Given the centrality of immigration in our contemporary global crisis of forced and illegal migration, this panel focuses on instances of dance structures in migration in East Asian contexts of shifting and uncertain national identities. Asian dance artists and dance practices have always moved across time, space, borders, empires, and nation states, transmitting and transforming their art across civilizations and bringing “national,” “foreign,” “subversive,” and “dissident” into question. The significance of the migration of dance is not necessarily evoked through particular movement of bodies as the result of cultural migration but rather in the disintegration and reorganization of new structures of the dance as an aesthetic system. The discipline of dance as an aesthetic system offers unique tools and theories to analyze issues concerning migration. Each paper analyzes how specific dance forms, whether traditional, popular, or contemporary, offer direct connections to migration’s issues of fragmented identities, post-migration isolation, and hybrid nationalities. These dance-centered studies require our attention to shift to physical and sensuous modes of analysis, where dance systems disintegrate and reorganize through their aesthetic structures. These presentations demonstrate the dynamism of dance cultures that fly in the face of rigid and bound notions of nation, state, and culture. The presentations include Korean/German interactions, Chinese/Japanese interventions, and Taiwanese/Salsa re-inventions, which examine the inner politics and outer politics of the dance and dancers, where choreography and technique, in their processes of “localization,” reveal the power of dance systems.
SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2016 | 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM
Toward a New Discourse of Nation: The Great East Asian War and the Birth of Korean Nation – In Memory of JaHyun Kim Haboush
Organizer | Jisoo M. Kim | George Washington University
Panel Abstract:
Japan’s invasion of Korea (1592-98), known as the Imjin War in Korea, was of monumental importance in East Asian history. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s ambitious plan to conquer China escalated into a regional war in which the three East Asian countries, Japan, Korea, and China, fought either as allies or as enemies. This roundtable panel will explore the significance of the war in early modern East Asia through the late JaHyun Kim Haboush’s posthumous book titled The Great East Asian War and the Birth of Korean Nation. This new innovative book provides a path-breaking analysis of the “nation” by using wars as the main sites that led to the rise of righteous army and the emergence of a vernacular national space in late sixteenth century Korea. By exploring the historical contingencies such as the war trauma, the role of local elites and popular sovereignty, a diglossic linguistic space, and the commemorative rituals of war dead, Haboush moves beyond the existing scholarship and offers new insights into understanding the concept of nation that is different from the Western model.
The various implications of Haboush’s book will be probed by four discussants with different specialties. Eggert, a scholar of premodern Korean literature, will discuss the issue of language utilized during the war and the literary analysis of the postwar discourse on commemorating the dead bodies. Hasegawa, a historian of Sino-Korean relations, will focus on the wartime procurement and the impact of the war on local society. Swope, a historian of the Chinese military, will respond to Ming China’s role and military strategy during the war. Toby, a historian of early modern Japan, will discuss the ramifications of the war in Japan and early modern East Asia.
One of our foremost concerns is the book’s main argument that the discourse of nation emerged with the Imjin War and intensified after the Manchu invasions in the early seventeenth century and that it was this postwar discourse of nation that sustained and reshaped the Chosŏn state until the advent of modern era. Furthermore, we expect to engage in a broader discussion involving the audience on the issue of war, memory, and violence in early modern East Asia.
SUNDAY
SUNDAY, 3 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Cross-Cultural Engagement: Appropriation of Chinese Literature in Early Modern Japan and Korea
Organizer | Wook-Jin Jeong | University of Washington
Organizer | Kai Xie | University of Washington
Panel Abstract:
Since the adoption of sinographic writing, both premodern Japanese and Korean literature had been tied up with Chinese literature, which served as a model, standard, and source of materials, ideas, and inspirations. This panel explores the efforts of Japanese and Korean authors who infused Chinese elements, adapted Chinese stories, and employed Chinese literary forms and styles in poetry, prose, and fiction. It focuses on the early modern period (17th-through early 19th-centuries), when the reception of Chinese literature spread to commoner class and entered the realm of popular literature.
First, Xie demonstrates that the incorporation of “Chineseness” contributed to elevating Japanese popular linked verse into a serious art. Nagase then analyzes Bakin’s cross-cultural, cross-gender adaptation of the Chinese novel Water Margin. Discussing debates on literary styles during the King Chŏngjo’s reign, Jeong traces how Korean literati internalized Chinese literary theories. Finally, Cho examines the vital role of Korean compositions of the Chinese “Song of Bamboo Twigs” in expanding and enriching the literary practice and intellectual culture of Late Chosŏn Korea.
Collectively, this panel re-examines an underrepresented comparative field of the history of literary exchange in East Asia. By bringing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scholars together, we hope to stimulate transnational discussions on the contrast, interplay, and integration between the foreign and the indigenous, the traditional and the popular. Our investigation of how Chinese literature interacted domestically with the vernacular traditions of Japan and Korea will also enhance our understanding of literary and cultural commonalities and differences among China, Japan, and Korea.
SUNDAY, 3 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Representation and Reaction: Modern Buddhist Nuns through the Lens of Mass Media
Organizer Hyangsoon Yi University of Georgia
Panel Abstract:
Traditionally, Buddhist nuns are perceived as living in seclusion from secular society. Compared with their male counterparts, nuns tend to be less exposed to mass media. Ironically, this tendency attracts a curious gaze from the outside world.
The remarkable development of print, audio-visual, and electronic communication technology in the twentieth century, however, has brought significant changes in the dynamics of interaction between Buddhist nuns and society at large. While nuns are slowly adapting to the new modes of dialogue, their popular image still suffers from misconceptions and prejudices.
This panel, consisting of four speakers and one discussant, investigates the complex relationship between Buddhist nuns and mass media from the 1920’s to the present time. Elise DeVido’s “Changing Perceptions of Buddhist Nuns in Republican China (1920-1949)” analyzes the depictions of Buddhist nuns in secular press in relation to the changing society of early twentieth-century China. Wei-Yi Cheng’s “Social Media and the Image of the Buddhist Nuns” revisits a recent controversy on Tzu Chi and Chao Hwei in Taiwan. In her paper, “The Thai Sangha’s Attitude toward Bhikkhuni Ordination,” Tomomi Ito tackles a media play by senior monks in their attempt to control the thorny issue of full ordination for Theravada nuns. Hyangsoon Yi’s “The Voyeuristic Camera in Mountain Nunnery” examines celluloid nunhood in the Korean Buddhist film genre. Some issues the panelists will discuss include the following: the salient traits of nuns’ media imagery; socio-historical contexts and media-specific environments that gave rise to the gendered and sexualized discourse on female monastics; and the nuns’ own reactions to their problematic portrayals.
SUNDAY, 3 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
The State and Religious Leadership: Empowerment, Disempowerment, and its Consequences
Organizer | Alexandre Pelletier | University of Toronto
Panel Abstract:
When and which religious leaders are more likely to engage with or contest the state? This panel explores the ways in which the state structures loci of religious leadership and means through which religious leaders compete vertically (with the state) and horizontally (with other religious or social actors) to assert their social and/or political relevance. The papers consist of comparative analyses of religious leadership across nations (China, South Korea, Myanmar, and Indonesia) and religious traditions (Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity). In particular, the panel sheds light on how state institutions and the political economy of religious authority intersect. Jung argues that Christianity has become the vanguard of right-wing movements in South Korea by accumulating wealth and forging a strong network between church elites and politicians; Chang shows that the contestations over the usage of religious sites in China are structured by the state’s framework of economic development and religious governance; examining Buddhist movements in Burma, Reny discusses three different approaches that the regime used to prevent and control dissent among Buddhist monks; and, investigating the origins of Islamic cooperation and competition in Indonesia, Pelletier discusses colonial legacies that developed two different ways of Muslim elite integration. These papers converge on the idea that institutional approaches are key to understand religious leadership: the state recognizes some leaders, control certain activities, and limits or regulate economic accumulation.
SUNDAY, 3 APRIL 2016 | 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM
What to Eat: Food and Feeding in Twentieth-century Wartime Asia – Sponsored by China and Inner Asia Council
Organizer | Shuang Wen | National University of Singapore
Panel Abstract:
What to eat? A seemingly simple question is a challenge for soldiers and civilians alike during wartime. This panel will explore aspects of the complex question of food and feeding during major twentieth-century wars. Temporally, the papers deal with topics extending from World War I to World War II, and the Vietnam War. Geographically, they cover Japan and Korea in East Asia, Vietnam in Southeast Asia, Syria and Palestine in West Asia, and the U.S.
The first paper features one commodity, the soybeans for civilians and servicemen, in the food supply chain from East to West Asia during WWI. The second paper analyzes the U.S. military’s kimchi provisions for Korean soldiers in the Vietnam War with a special focus on the cultural specificity of military rations and the political economy of their production. Turning from food to feeding, the third paper presents a Chinese author’s attempt to promote “cooking in Chinese” for Americans in order to reduce food waste and stretch rations on the US homefront during World War II. Expanding the scope to a mass civilian population’s struggle to get enough to eat, the fourth paper examines the ways ordinary Japanese dealt with hunger during WWII.
Collectively, this panel will highlight the ingenuity and tenacity of soldiers and civilians in generating creative solutions to the problem of “what to eat,” and examine the political economy of food production and distribution, warfront-homefront dynamics, and the transcultural effects wrought by wartime crisis.
SUNDAY, 3 APRIL 2016 | 10:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Media Mixes, Media Flows: Digital Technology and Transformation in Contemporary East Asian Music Cultures
Organizer | Meredith Schweig | Emory University
Panel Abstract:
East Asian music cultures have long been marked by mixture and flow. Whether along the Silk Road or through silicone cables, sounds have traveled readily within and beyond the region, mingling and giving rise to dynamic hybrid forms. The ascendance of digital media during the twenty-first century has reorganized and greatly amplified these processes, as everything from music- and video-sharing platforms to digital mixing software encourages users to create collaboratively and hear intertextually. This border-crossing panel explores how the development of new technologies is rapidly transforming the production, circulation, and consumption of music cultures from North Korea, China, and Taiwan. We examine how videos of child performers from the DPRK circulate online and become subject to revision and remediation by international netizens; analyze cross-platform media engagement in the deeply entrenched fan culture surrounding Taiwanese pop icon Deng Lijun; investigate how translocal media flows are reshaping industry practices for the promotion of local language music in China; and probe the media mash-up aesthetic that characterizes the soundscapes of Taiwanese Pili Company puppet dramas. Encompassing traditional fieldwork and digital ethnographic research methodologies, our papers are united by their concern for the particular: performers, record labels, Internet sites, and entertainment franchises. We will consider how collisions of new and old media—what Henry Jenkins (2008) has called “convergence culture”—in these contexts give rise to novel forms of creativity, and impact notions of music as local, regional, national, and global.