21st Annual Columbia Graduate Student Conference on East Asia

Panel titles are currently undergoing revision.

Memory in Postwar East Asia

Discussant: Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University
Friday, 1:45 PM Kent 403

Jin Gong, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Ohel Rachel Synagogue - A Site of Jewish Memories in Shanghai
The Ohel Rachel Synagogue, which is located at today's 500 Shanxi Bei Road, Jing An district, Shanghai, was once the largest synagogue in Asia with a capacity of 700 congregants. It was founded by Sir Jacob Sassoon (1848-?) in his wife's memory, and consecrated in 1920 by Rabbi W Hirsch. The Ohel Rachel Synagogue served the Sephardic Jewish community in Shanghai since its establishment in 1920 until 1952 when Aba Toeg's family, who attended Ohel Rachel, sent the Torahs to Israel and handed over the Synagogue to the Chinese government. From 1952 through the mid 1990s, the synagogue was primarily used as warehouse and office space. With the restoration and revival of the Ohel Rachel since the late 1990s, today the synagogue has become a well-known site of Jewish memories in Shanghai. It is a historical marker against the physical landscape of the city that indicates the once exuberant Jewish life in Shanghai. It alsoprovokes both individual and collective memories of the Jewish past since this place involved a set of social/religious activities and webs of meanings and rituals. The Ohel Rachel is only one of a selection of the sites of Jewish memories in Shanghai. By examining these sites, no matter whether it's a synagogue, a cemetery or a residential house, I intend to relate landscapes with historical memories and also illustrate the significance of these sites in the urban setting of present day Shanghai. The Ohel Rachel is only one of them.

Seung-Cheol Lee, Columbia University

Building the Post-Traumatic Nation: The Representation of the Gwangju Massacre in May 18
This paper explores the filmic representation of the Gwangju Massacre in May 18. The national mourning of the Gwangju Massacre has served as a key point for the foundation of a new nation in the post-military state in South Korea. May 18, released in 2007, portrays the relationship between the completion of mourning for the massacre and the foundation of a new nation. In the film, such completion is manifested via two ways: first, the de-politicization of the uprising; second, the sharp contrast between "good nation" and "bad state." By omitting the historical background of the uprising and massacre, the film displaces the political antagonism into the conflict between "good" and "evil"; as the film proceeds, this opposition is developed into the contrast between "good nation" and "bad state." As a result, May 18 succeeds in creating a coherent narrative of mourning over the massacre. As pointed out by Judith Butler, the question as to whose death deserves national mourning is profoundly related to nation-building. By constituting the victims in the massacre as an object of national mourning, the film celebrates the birth of a new nation. The ending of the film, the sequence of an imaginary wedding party, is an allegory for the birth: the bad state finally is superseded by the new nation that has originated from Gwangju.

Linsen Li, University of Michigan

Contested Ground - The Chongqing Red Guard Cemetery and Memories of the Cultural Revolution
In the summer of 1967, Mao Zedong announced the policy to "arm the left." In Sichuan province, center of the PRC arms industry, large sectors of the province rapidly descended into total chaos. Chongqing in particular saw some of the worst episodes within the entire country. Opposing rebel factions deployed heavy weapons such as tanks, anti-aircraft artillery, and gunboats against each other; thousands perished in two years of fighting. The Chongqing Red Guard cemetery holds more than 400 fallen souls resulted from the factional violence. Built during the fighting years, this cemetery is the largest and best-preserved of its kind in China. Today, the public legacy of the Cultural Revolution is one of infamy; the cemetery, officially ignored, lies in solitude. Nevertheless, many people, including victims, participants, and family members, find the cemetery to be a meaningful site of memory, remorse, and mourning. Existing treatments of the memory of the Cultural Revolution have mostly taken the forms of memoirs, collection of personal interviews, and analysis of perceived trends, often the two extremes of complete negation or nostalgia. In examining this specific cemetery, I look to explore the interplay between the site and memory; to demonstrate the power of a tangible site in shaping and sustaining memory; and in introducing cemeteries and monuments outside China, to explore the themes of monuments and remembrance across cultural and national borders. This paper argues that memories of the Cultural Revolution have not fallen into identifiable trends, as some previous scholarship suggests, but remain hotly contested and often conflicting.

Justine Pak, Columbia University

Raising the Dead: Sainthood in 1970's South Korea
This paper discusses the major questions that arise in post-colonial, post-war South Korean society, and the role certain historical figures play in new, highly politicized contexts. It draws on the relationship between nationalist leadership mandates and asexualized colonial memory through the widely popularized historiography of Colonial Period nationalist heroine Yu Gwansun. Executed for her nationalist activity before her 20th birthday, she is remembered as Korea's Joan of Arc, a figure whose story has been told through numerous films, books, children's textbooks, and national monuments. What is most remarkable about Yu is not her story, but why her story because such an integral part of political culture and the building of nationalist mythos in 1970's Park Chung Hee-era South Korea. This and other moments of the use and abuse of ethnic nationalist ideology are particularly interesting when viewed a nation-centered lens still inexplicably embedded in Cold War politics. Like other re-awakened nationalist-era heroes, Yu Gwansun and her new 1970's image was tweaked to better suit social archetypes that were fitting for a modern, anti-communist South Korea. In this paper, I argue that the resurrection of these personalities acted as a nation-wide call back to the "original nationalist values" that were now re-embodied by the Park regime, whose own political legitimacy was dependent upon his ability to place himself as part of a historically constructed trajectory of nationalist heroes, Yu Gwansun being one of them. This paper explores how Yu's public image - whether through textbooks, films, or monuments, became part of this lineage of "Korea," which was ultimately used to validate Park's presidency.

Fang Xie, Stanford University

The Making of Mao's Model Soldier: Nation-Building, Party Legitimacy, and Cultural Campaigns
To many of us, the "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng" campaign launched by Mao Zedong in early 1963 appeared as a rhetorical attempt to restore faith in the Communist Party of China after the nation had suffered through the debacle of the Great Leap Forward and the disastrous agricultural modernization scheme which caused millions of famine-related deaths. The campaign was also one of the tactics and strategies used by Lin Biao to promote the authority of the state and its leader. However, we know that the campaign was not merely a blatant propaganda ploy for power grab. The main part of this propaganda campaign was an attempt to educate people about the importance of being a new citizen in a new society. Using the "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng" campaign and its various artistic and literary manifestations as a case study, this article explores the Chinese model of nation building. It takes a look at the relations between nation-building and party legitimacy with the cultural campaign to shore up Lei Feng's image during Mao's era, and explores how Maoist ideology along with its red legacy works its way into the language of today.

Security Issues and East/Southeast Asia

Discussant: Charles Armstrong, Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, Columbia University
Friday, 4:00 PM Kent 403

Justine Guichard, Columbia University

Political repression in the name of national security: Institutional contention in South Korean democracy
South Korea's National Security Law (NSL) has been in force since 1948 in order to "restrict anti-state acts that endanger national security and to protect [the] nation's safety and its people's life and freedom." In the context of Korea's division into two states technically still in a state of war (since no peace treaty was signed after the 1950-1953 conflict), the anti-state acts criminalized under the NSL range from espionage on behalf of North Korea to mere praising of the land of Kim Il-sung. One of the main instruments of political repression under South Korea's successive authoritarian regimes, the NSL has remained in use since the country's democratization in the late 1980s. However, its resilience overshadows the changing and contentious understandings that have been developed by multiple institutional arenas about national security and its articulation to democracy. In this paper, three cases of South Korea's Constitutional Court have been selected to expose some of the dynamics at work and at stake beneath the surface of what is often considered as an inherent and immutable feature of South Korea's political culture. This corpus of decisions first provides a privileged medium to analyze how national security and the threat of North Korea have been construed by the Court throughout time to justify restrictions on fundamental rights. The cases are also useful to reveal patterns of institutional contention about the meanings and uses of national security, within the Court itself, as well as between the Court and other institutions, especially the legislature.

Charles Kraus, George Washington University

Brotherhood of Scars: Chinese-Korean Relations during Wartime, 1945-1953
This paper addresses the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War from the vantage point of the Sino-Korean border region and seeks to understand how these conflicts shaped cross-border political and cultural relations between China and Korea. The Sino-Korean border region was essentially trapped in a perpetual state of conflict from 1945 through 1953, and this paper utilizes Chinese and Korean documents and memoirs to highlight significant regional developments and the resulting fluctuations in Chinese-Korean relations. Specifically, the paper introduces new evidence on North Korean aid during the Chinese Civil War and China's extensive involvement in the Korean War to argue that cross-border Chinese-Korean relations were both forged and problematized by the surrounding regional conflicts.

Charles Kraus, George Washington University

Chien Wen Kung, Columbia University

After the Fall: Ford, Carter, and United States-Southeast Asia Relations, 1975-1980
The United States's direct involvement in Southeast Asia declined rapidly in the 1970s, and had more or less come to an end by the time the governments of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were overcome by their respective Communist antagonists in the middle of 1975. It is no great surprise, then, that America's post-1975 relationship with the region receives much less historical coverage than its pre-1975 interventions in Indochina and elsewhere. Equally lacking are historical narratives that treat the U.S.'s relationship with the region as more than just a collection of bilateral relationships. My paper, by contrast, adopts a comparative approach to the history of U.S.-Southeast Asia relations from 1975-1980 -- from the fall of Saigon to the end of the Carter administration -- by which time the principles underpinning America's post-Vietnam regional strategy were in place. Emphasizing the U.S.'s role in an emerging Southeast Asian regionalism and Southeast Asia's significance within the U.S.'s broader Asia-Pacific strategy, I argue that the region's subsequent peace and prosperity had partly to do with a convergence between Southeast Asian and U.S. interests. Southeast Asia wanted American engagement but not meddling, and the U.S. was more than happy to oblige.

Dong Ju Lee, Columbia University

What Influence do Anti-sentiments have on Politics?
In this paper, the crimes and accidents caused by US personnel and the influence of anti-sentiment raged by those incidents on the hosting nations and on each state’s bilateral relationship with the US will be discussed. Lacking any realistic security alternative besides the US, it is highly unlikely that Japan and ROK would let their alliances with the US collapse due to anti-sentiments. However, such continuity of the alliances does not necessarily mean that anti-sentiments do not have any impact. Considering that the anti-sentiments are a kind of public opinion, domestic politics which is closely related to domestic public opinion can be influenced by anti-sentiments. Moreover, policy-makers who are pressured by the anti-sentiments held by domestic societal actors may try to represent the interests of the societal actors. In such case, through the behaviors and decisions of policy-makers, some variation within the alliances with the US can be observed. By observing two cases, the Okianwa rape incident in 1995 and the military vehicle accident in 2002, what kinds of influences anti-sentiments have on domestic politics and the dynamics within the alliances will be analyzed.

Jenny Shin, Tufts University

Maintaining a Strong U.S.-ROK Partnership: An Examination of Anti-American Sentiment in the Republic of Korea post-1980s
When the United States and South Korea forged a military alliance through the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty, both nations did not anticipate the alliance would ever evolve beyond a security pact into a close bilateral partnership. Now, nearly sixty years after the Korean War, relations between the U.S. and the Republic of Korea appear to be at its strongest throughout the history of U.S.-ROK relations. However, the notion that the US-ROK bond is "unbreakable" can be somewhat misleading as historical tensions and fundamental differences have roused anti-American sentiment in the ROK within the past thirty years. Anti-Americanism among the South Korean public has had consequences on relations in the past and may continue to have future implications on the alliance and diplomatic relations as a whole. So, to what effect would anti-Americanism have on the future of the US-ROK alliance; and what factors help maintain favorable sentiment toward the U.S.? This paper will examine the trends of anti-Americanism during the period after the 1980s when public expressions of anti-Americanism emerged over U.S. military presence, South Korea's domestic politics, and U.S. foreign policy. The period after the 1980s provides a lesson on how Korean grievances and sentiment are shaped by certain events and why anti-Americanism should not be ignored as it may have consequences on U.S.-ROK relations in the future.

Guy Snodgrass, U.S. Naval War College

Revision of Article IX for Pacific Theater Security
The United States is in the midst of increasing its political and military investment in the Asia-Pacific region. Piracy, political instability, and competing national interests threaten the continued security of the world's global commons, which serve as a conduit for the movement of a majority of the world's manufactured goods. The only reasonable approach to ensure security is a strong, multilateral partnership that includes the United States and other regional allies. Recent events have highlighted regional security limitations due to Japan's constitutional inability to reciprocate in areas of collective defense, notably due to the current post-World War II framework resident in Article IX. This paper seeks to explore Article IX limitations, with the intent of increasing dialogue and understanding of the U.S.-Japan Strategic alliance.

Art and Material Culture of Early China

Discussant: Minna Wu, Columbia University
Friday, 2:15 PM Kent 424

Glenda Chao, Columbia University

An Uninscribed bo Bell in the Collection of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Comparative Approach to Stylistic Dating
The present study seeks to accomplish two objectives, the first is to identify with as much accuracy as possible, the potential date and location of origin of an uninscribed early Chinese bronze bo 鎛 bell that is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. This bell, standing at 61.9 cm (24 3/8 in.) in height, measuring 44 cm (17 5/16 in.) wide by 34 cm (13 3/8 in.) deep and weighing several hundred pounds, has been in the museum's collection since the early 1900s, but due to the lack of provenance information, has never been put on display. The second objective is to reexamine the traditional paradigm under which bronze artifacts like this bell have been studied in the past; a paradigm that draws an overly simplistic stylistic division between north China, centered on the Yellow River valley, and south China, centered on the Huai River region. According to notes accumulated by museum curators, the Museum of Fine Arts' bell has been identified as belonging to the Huai style of bell manufacture. My study will call into question this designation, as it seeks an alternate paradigm of stylistic dating that will take into account the complexities of the social and political context under which this bell was ultimately created.

Yitzchak Jaffe, Harvard University

Materializing Identity - A Statistical Analysis of the Western Zhou Liulihe Cemetery
Questions of identity are of paramount Importance in research of the Western Zhou period both in the central plain and among its vassal states. Yet most research done to date has focused on the Zhou bureaucratic order and government. These analyses have been very successful in delineating political culture, administration and kinship ties, and have provided important information on elite taste and customs. They have however, paid less attention to uncovering other social groupings and relations, and did not systematically address the ways in which local identities were exercised or displayed. This paper presents a multivariate statistical analysis of the Liulihe cemetery of the Western Zhou state of Yan. Through this analysis new elements are uncovered comprising the complex social makeup and identity of the Liulihe occupants. These findings provide a richer understanding of the Yan society compared with the traditional approach that centered on the delineation of Zhou political elements and ethnic characteristics. A more intricate society emerges, one not solely defined by the amount of Zhou style it exhibited.

Lei Yang, University of Pennsylvania

Jade Suits and Souls: Han People's Immortal Conception
The paper investigates the functions of jade suits in funerary practice and how the Han aristocracy perceives the way to immortality. Through reexamining the famous painting from Mawangdui Tomb number 1 and the texts of Chuci, I interpret that the top part of the painting depicts the residency of Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu) rather than the scene of heaven. From the Mawangdui painting to the jade suits, the tradition of protecting bodies was passed down to ensure rebirth. By setting up the relationship between these two burial practices, I propose that the achievement of rebirth was based on two premises at least: the immortality of body and mobility of souls. The jade suits offer a way of transforming the deceased into jade body and therefore assist the souls of the occupant to enter the Kunlun immortal residency. Moreover, based on the tradition dating back to the inner coffin of Marquis Yi of Zeng and Yangshao culture, the souls could depart from the body, instead of being confined to the cemetery. The hole in the top of jade head and the jade figures discovered inside the coffins further reveal that Mt. Kunlun is their final destination. The jade suits were to prevent decay and signify the rebirth in the Mt. Kunlun, which is known for its jade.

Frontiers and Foreign Lands in Early Japanese Literature

Discussant: Gabriel McNeill, Columbia University
Friday, 2:15 PM Kent 522D

Marjorie Burge, University of California, Berkeley

Under the Same Moon: Early Vernacular Poetry of Silla and Japan
The period of the seventh through ninth centuries saw the flourishing of vernacular poetry on both the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. Although the two polities of Silla and Japan had often clashed throughout the unification struggles on the Korean peninsula from the mid-sixth century, the late seventh century brought unprecedented political stability to both kingdoms, accompanied by sociocultural landscapes that welcomed the fruits of continental civilization. Further, in Japan, large numbers of displaced peninsular immigrants who fled following the victory of the Silla-T'ang forces engaged in the composition of song in Japanese. It is the presence of such poets as well as the sociocultural factors and relative contemporaneity that invite comparison of the vernacular songs of Silla, known as hyangga, and the collection of Japanese vernacular verse Man'yōshū. The amount of extant material is vastly different: limited to just fourteen verses of hyangga with approximately 4,500 verses in Man'yōshū. However, focusing on songs that feature one prominent poetic topos, the moon (appearing in five out of the fourteen extant hyangga verses and approximately 200 of the 4,500 Man'yōshū verses) I seek to illuminate the greater "poetic values" of each kingdom. In Silla, song was a valuable means of communication with distant and otherwise "unreachable" others, ranging from celestial bodies to the monarch, boddhisattvas, and departed spirits. In Man'yō Japan, the origins of song lie in shamanistic incantation, just as in Silla, but over the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, song also shows a marked development toward personal lyric expression, despite still being part of the public, social discourse. I propose that this divergence in the function of song may be related to a continued sense of the separateness of the literary and oral worlds in the case of Silla, while the advent of written vernacular verse invited Chinese literary ideas into the world of Japanese song.

Matthieu Felt, Columbia University

Visions of Kingship in Eighth Century Japan
Until very recently, the prevailing tendency in scholarship of early Japan has been to read the mythological portions of the earliest extant Japanese chronicles Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki (720) as parts of a larger formation called ki-ki (記紀). However, the recent decoupling of these two by scholars such as Kōnoshi Takamitsu has created space to explore their contrasts within the context of each work itself rather than as constituents of an imagined extra-textual body. One such contrasting element of Kojiki and Nihon shoki is the presentation of the states of the Korean peninsula prior to Sillan unification, and I argue that each text's respective idea of kingship is the source of these differences. While the Kojiki treats these territories as a land to be ruled by the descendents of Amaterasu and uses the story of their conquest to showcase the power of the gods and pedigree of the imperial line, the Nihon shoki treats them first and foremost as vassal kingdoms, dominance over which is evinced by documentation and the sending of tribute. Once Jingū's conquest formally incorporates these kingdoms into the realm, they largely vanish from the Kojiki but continue to appear in the Nihon shoki, developing distinct identities vis-á-vis their tributary relations with Yamato that determine the narration of events on the peninsula leading to unification under Silla and beyond.

Stephen Ottinger, Columbia University

Surrounded by Barbarians: Developments in Geopolitical Conceptualization of the Early Japanese State
In the early Japanese state, the Middle Kingdom geopolitical ideology was a dominant form of spatial organization, entailing a realm that included both the center and the periphery, with the surrounding peripheral societies acting as an outer stratum of the larger quasi-state. With the advent of the bureaucratic Ritsuryō system implemented during the 8th century, this ideal geopolitical formation was reframed into a cultural Middle Kingdom with an inclusive geographical border in which the periphery was in name integrated completely into the state. In doing this, the previously fuzzy boundaries between state, periphery, and everything beyond were eliminated, instead establishing a solid border around the freshly integrated state. In this project, I look at the development of this new spatial conception through the Nara and early Heian periods. To explicate this reevaluation in spatial identity, I look at the treatment of the Emishi, a peripheral confederation to the northeast of the early Japanese state, as they are characterized in the Nihon shoki. Throughout the Nihon shoki, the Emishi are presented as the ideal peripheral group of a geopolitical Middle Kingdom. This imagery varies significantly only in the aftermath of the Yamato Takeru narrative, a mythical epic detailed during the reign of Emperor Keiko. Following the Emishi subjugation, Emperor Seimu, who succeeded Keiko, declared the realm pacified and, as an unmistakable "foretelling" of the advent of the Ritsuryō state, divided the country into provinces and districts. In this way, the compilers of the Nihon shoki utilized the Yamato Takeru myth and the Emishi to reinforce the restructuring of the ideal geopolitical organization.

Yiwen Shen, University of Wisconsin

From Folk Hero to Court Hero: On Nihon Ryōiki 1 "The Story of Catching Thunder"
The oldest extant Japanese setsuwa collection Nihon Ryōiki compiled in the early 9th century begins with a thunder-catching story: Chiisakobe no Sugaru captured thunder according to the command of Emperor Yuryaku. In an effort to seek a better understanding of the relationship between the medieval Japanese thunder-related stories and their Chinese precedents, this paper examines this story together with a few Chinese thunder-catching stories from the 4th to the 9th century, as well as the late Japanese story of Sugawara no Michizane's turning into thunder god, and the "Suma" chapter in The Tale of Genji. By analyzing the image of thunder and the characteristics of the protagonists, I conclude that in turning its protagonist from a Chinese style brave folk hero into a loyal court hero, Nihon Ryōiki 1 ""The Story of Catching Thunder"" can be read as a turning point in the development of Japanese thunder-related stories.

Premodern Chinese Poetry: The Book of Poetry and its Reverberations

Discussant: Gregory Patterson, Columbia University
Friday, 2:15 PM Kent 511

Mark Frank, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Poetic Ecomorality: How Early Confucian Scholars Dealt with the Plants and Animals in the Book of Odes
Hermeneutics, moral philosophy and natural philosophy were intimately related in classical Confucian thought. This paper challenges two related arguments concerning early Chinese scholarship: that the Chinese were averse to categorizing things according to their individual attributes, and that as a result there was little interest in nature as an object of study. By looking at how literary scholars in the Old School tradition of poetic commentary wrote about plants and animals in early commentaries on the Shi Jing or Book of Odes, it is demonstrated that moral philosophy during the period of classical Confucianism was intimately related to natural philosophy and the “classification of things.” An examination of some of the major reference works cited by the Old School commentators, including the writings of Lu Ji, shows that Shi Jing scholarship provoked research on plants and animals that was useful for moral inquiry as well as for scientific inquiry beyond the realms of moral philosophy and literary studies. Finally, the very question of the Chinese discovery of "nature" is problematized, and an alternative approach is suggested.

Jing Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Encyclopedic Knowledge and Interpretation: A Case Study of "Guanju"
The study of names and objects in the Book of Poetry starts from Lu Ji in the 3rd century, continues in the Song dynasty and flourishes in the Qing dynasty. The understanding of flowers, insects, animals and birds in the Book of Poetry is important because 1) the modification of explaining the objects would result in the adjustment in explaining the whole poem; 2) it helps increase encyclopedic knowledge as Confucius once notes. Most books of this type of study published in the Song and Qing dynasties are in the form of dictionaries. But are they merely dictionaries? My paper attempts to demonstrate a dynamic relationship between encyclopedic knowledge and interpretation through examining the bird (ju jiu) and the plant (xing cai) in the famous poem-- "Guanju", I shall unfold two crucial stages in the interpretative process: 1) to identify the bird or the plant as a certain bird or plant in reality; 2) to endow the bird or the plant with the best suitable symbolic meaning. Two discoveries are noteworthy here: first, alternative ideas which modified conventional understandings were already been proposed by scholars during the process of compiling dictionaries, second, Qing scholars took the advantage of an easy access to previous ample resource to synthesize different sayings, and developed their novel interpretations. Therefore, I shall suggest books of encyclopedic knowledge of the Book of Poetry serve as a resource for interpreters to modify, select or synthesize old interpretations to produce new interpretations.

Thomas Mazanec, Princeton University

"Deep, deep, the cold mountain way": Repetition in Han Shan
Although repetition appears to be opposed to originality - that quality so highly valued in literary criticism of the West - it is, in fact, central to the art of poetry in classical Chinese. Rather than ignoring or smoothing over acts of repetition in translation, my paper highlights this aspect of the poet's craft. Specifically, I will examine the immediate repetition of one- and two-character verbal chunks (e.g., fen fen 紛紛 or ciyan ciyan 此言此言) in the corpus of the Cold Mountain (Han shan 寒山) poems of the Tang Dynasty (唐朝, 618-907 CE). These instances of immediate repetition, which appear in 133 of the 309 extant Cold Mountain poems (43%), are of three basic kinds: reduplicative binoms, onomatopoeic binoms, and anadiplosis (dingzhen 頂真). All three types of repetition, though often unnoticed by casual readers, have precedents as far back as the Book of Poetry (Shijing 詩經). Through the use of both linguistic and literary analysis, I will demonstrate that such moments of repetition are integral to the works of one of the most beloved author-figures of the Chinese poetic tradition.

Fu Su, Columbia University

Poetry, Remembrance, and the Invention of Yongshi shi -- The Reception of "Huangniao" in Early and Early Medieval China
One poem in the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Songs) that became a subject of interpretation time and again in later periods is "Huangniao" 黃鳥 (Yellow Birds) in "Qinfeng" 秦風 (Airs of Qin). The poem lamented the Three Good Men of Qin who were buried with Duke Mu to accompany him in death according to the Zuo Zhuan 左傳 (Zuo Tradition). This poem and the story of the three men inspired many "Sanliang shi" 三良詩 (Poems on the Three Good Men) from the Jian'an 建安 period (196-220) onwards. Prior to the Tang, the four such poems that are extant are as follows: Cao Zhi's 曹植　"Sanliang shi" 三良詩, Wang Can's 王粲 "Yongshi shi" 詠史詩 (Poem on History), Ruan Yu's 阮瑀 "Yongshi shi," and Tao Yuanming's 陶淵明 "Yong Sanliang" 詠三良. The first two of these peoms were collected in the Wen Xuan's 文選 (Selections of Refined Literature) yongshi 詠史 category. From then on, these poems were continually recognized as yongshi shi. This is the trajectory that "Huangniao" went through in early and early medieval China.

The trajectory is one in which cultural knowledge and didactic comments on "huangniao-sanliang" 黄鳥三良 (Yellow Birds and the Three Good Men) are produced and commemorated. Both the poems ( "Huangniao" and "Sanliang shi") and their interpretations in the historical narratives and commentaries actively contributed to the construction and definition of yongshi shi. However, none of "Huangniao" or the "Sanliang shi" were ever originally defined as yongshi shi. Instead, this category was abstracted from the poems on account of their narrative and discursive qualities. This paper examines these qualities by contextualizing them into three continual stages in this trajectory of reception - the identification of meanings in "Huangniao," the interpretations of "Huangniao" in the shi genre (which is the composition of the "Sanliang shi"), and the recognition of the "Sanliang shi" as yongshi shi.

State and Society in Contemporary China

Discussant: Kuei-Min Chang, Columbia University
Friday, 2:15 PM Kent 628

Charles Starks, Columbia University

Thinking outside the hukou: Small-p policing of migrants in Chinese cities
Most scholarship on state control over migration in China has focused on the inequities of the household registration (hukou) system and migrant interactions with the traditional police who enforce that system. However, in recent years two other municipal agencies have acquired significant responsibility over migrants in cities: civil affairs bureaus (minzheng), which provide aid and services to itinerant populations, and city management bureaus (chengguan), who regulate street vendors. In this paper, I outline the history of these agencies and critically examine media accounts from newspapers and magazines portraying their interactions with migrants. I find that minzheng officials are normally portrayed in a positive light as standing up for the rights of a disadvantaged group, while chengguan officers have become something of a whipping boy, with maltreatment of street vendors and other rural migrants having become a staple of reports sympathetic to the victims. In contrast to these typical accounts, I further identify an unusual account in Jiangsu province, in which chengguan officers help pilot a form of street-level democracy among street vendors. While the typical cases illuminate the contradictions in state policy that seeks to make rural migrant labor available to the market while denying the migrants' basic rights, the Jiangsu case represents a possible step toward reform at the grassroots level by vesting a degree of autonomy in the migrants themselves.

Qingjie Zeng, University of Michigan

Chongqing's Pursuit for Equitable Development and its Implications
In this paper, I conduct a preliminary study of some policy innovations in Chongqing Municipality in China, including using the market earnings of state-owned enterprises to fund the construction of affordable housing, providing peasant migrant workers with welfare benefits previously available only to urban residents, and requiring street-level bureaucrats to visit disadvantaged citizens and resolve their complaints. By analyzing some of the measures taken by the Chongqing Municipal Government to address the problem of rising inequality, I argue that the policy innovations in Chongqing constitute a tentative but conscious attempt by the Chinese government to depart from the developmental state paradigm in search for a sustainable political-economic model. I further argue that, in its attempt to enhance social equity and public wellbeing, the Chongqing Government made heavy use of the intellectual and organizational resources inherited from the Maoist era such as bureaucratic allocation, planning and the nomenklatura system.

Yu Zeng, Columbia University

Participatory Resistance: The 2011 Local People's Congresses Elections in China
This study examines the recent dynamics of social movement by focusing on popular participation in the 2011 elections of local people's congresses in China. The political puzzles in this paper involve the role of elections in single-party states, why citizens compete for legislative positions controlled by the government as independent candidates without sponsorship from the ruling party, and why some of the candidates can win the elections in the face of government manipulation. The paper first explores the reason of the variations of performance among independent candidacies. A cross-case analysis and a comparative case study test the theory and hypothesis, showing that prior experience in community service is a necessary cause for independent candidates to win the elections. The paper then investigates rationales behind individual candidacies from a macro perspective. After examining the behavior of voters, independent candidates, and local officials, the paper develops the concept of "participatory resistance" based on the rising rights consciousness among Chinese citizens, who generally accept the leadership of the party-state but contend their legitimate rights through institutionalized political participation. The study concludes with implications of "participatory resistance" on democratization in China.

History, Poetry, and Historiography in Early Imperial China

Discussant: Tianjiao Yu, Columbia University
Friday, 4:00 PM Kent 511

Nina Duthie, Columbia University

Civilizing Space: Xianbei Origins in the Wei History (Wei shu 魏書)
This paper explores representations of imperial authority as found in historiography of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–535) during China’s Northern and Southern dynasties period (317–589). In an age of barbarians and wildernesses, how did northern non-Huaxia tribes articulate a cultural order in which they cast themselves (or their recent predecessors) as the legitimate curators of the early Chinese civilizational inheritance? My paper will examine the rhetoric in the Wei History (Wei shu 魏書)—the official account of the Northern Wei dynasty, compiled shortly after its fragmentation—that seeks to forge a genealogical connection between ancestors of the nomadic Tuoba Xianbei tribes and the sage-kings of antiquity, thereby ascribing legitimacy and authority to rule to the Northern Wei. I will also trace the significance of Tuoba Xianbei origins in the remote northern wilderness, and the Wei shu’s record of attempts to civilize the land.

Brian Lander, Columbia University

New Sources of Han Environmental and Administrative History
Twenty-three bamboo slips bought on the Hong Kong antiquities market and undoubtedly looted from a Han dynasty tomb are apparently routine administrative texts on the surveying of river dykes in the central Yangzi region. Although they are unprovenanced and fragmentary, they contain new evidence on both the environmental history of the region and Han dynasty administrative practice. Because the process whereby the middle Yangzi wetlands were gradually transformed into densely populated farmland is poorly understood, the place names on these texts provide important evidence on the environmental history of the region. They are also among the only evidence of the dikes that were built to guard against seasonal flooding and of the management of these dikes by the state. An analysis of the surveying calculations shows that the authors of these texts had rather poor math skills, providing a rare glimpse into routine bureaucratic problems of the Han government.

Yue Zhang, University of Toronto

Selection and Canonization of "Yongshi shi"(Poems on History) in the Wen Xuan (Selections of Refined Literature)
The Wen Xuan, one of the most influential anthologies in classical Chinese literature, contains a section called "Poems on History", which were composed between 196 and 479 A.D. What criteria did the editors of the Wen Xuan adopt in selecting twenty-one poems out of a large corpus of one hundred and eighty? I will summarize the main points of the selection criteria through close reading of the preface to the Wen Xuan as intrinsic evidence. To further deepen our comprehension of these criteria, I explore the reception ofZuo Si's (ca. 250-ca. 307) eight "Poems on History" as an example to investigate the factors that contributed to their selection and canonization in the Wen Xuan. Zuo's poems comprise more than one third of the "Poems on History" section, and have been considered essential in the development of this subgenre. I trace their historical reception on three levels: the first emphasizes the poetic practice of intertextual links between Zuo's poems and other literary works in the Six Dynasties, such as Jiang Yan's "Poems of Various Forms"; the second highlights the primary sources of literary criticism to address the evaluations of Zuo Si's poems, such as The Gradations of Poets and Literary Mind and Carving of Dragons; the third focuses on narratives in anecdotal collections or standard histories to reveal the inclinations of general readers, such as the History of the Northern Dynasties. Investigating the three levels allows us to understand how readers, editors, and critics respond to, select, and even imitate Zuo Si's poems on history during the process of their canonization and reception, which informs us that the changing horizons of expectation lead to the shifts of interpretations.

Cartographies of Early Modern Japan and China

Discussant: Prof. Robert Goree, Columbia University
Friday, 4:00 PM Kent 424

Joshua Batts, Columbia University

The Commercialization of Tokaido Cartography: Consumers, Players, and Spectators
The project of mapping -its methods, objects, and audience- grew more varied and complex in Japan during the Tokugawa period. Recent scholarship by Elizabeth Berry, among others, has touched on the transition from official cartographic endeavors to commercial ventures, and the resultant influence of popular texts in defining the spaces and places surrounding residents of the archipelago. I explore the commercialization of space as it relates to the Tōkaidō, Edo Japan's most well-traveled and well-known highway. Tōkaidō maps themselves became consumer objects, as commissioned screens and scrolls were overshadowed by woodblock prints. Additionally, the highway was coded as a popular commercial space defined by cultural and economic consumption. Meisho ("famous places") and meibutsu ("famous things") featured prominently in Tōkaidō maps, encouraging the viewer to identify the road with the consumption of locales through travel and the purchase of specialized local goods. Certain maps doubled as game boards, inviting the owner to travel the road figuratively through play. Others integrated famous verses, scenes from travel literature, and even actors, reinforcing a shared spatial and cultural corpus. Furthermore, through the inclusion of government checkpoints, daimyo and shogunal retinues, and even the emperor, representations of the Tōkaidō incorporated symbols of political authority, pageantry, and spectacle within a broader commercial framework. These commercial images took as their goal not the accurate surveying of Japan's topography and highway, but the mapping of potential connections between a growing audience and the host of people, places, and products one could encounter on the road.

Guillermo Ruiz-Stovel, University of California, Los Angeles

Records of "Barbarian Markets": The South Fujianese Tradition of Economic Geography and Geographical Knowledge in Early Modern China
The production of geographical knowledge in the period from the late Ming through mid-Qing was not the exclusive purview of government-sponsored inquiry. While cartography and ethnography began to be deployed as part of the Qing Empire's inland expansion, there was no comparable systematic collection of data for China's maritime frontier after the suppression of records from Zheng He's exploratory voyages. However, as the South Fujianese network of private traders expanded its presence in the South China Sea in the 17th and 18th centuries, a string of geographical works, which I suggest make up a tradition of vernacular economic geography, were published and subsequently consulted by landbound literati, particularly those stationed in Southern Fujian. Rather than attempting a comprehensive survey, this paper takes as benchmarks two texts at opposite ends of the period in question: the catalog of maritime countries in Zhang Xie's Dongxiyang kao (1617) and the fascicle on "barbarian markets" in the first Xiamen Gazetteer (1839). Though part of an official publication, this section of the gazetteer was fashioned as a revised and updated version of Zhang Xie's catalog, thus relying on vernacular geographies rather than the commissioned translations of Western compendia that dominated after the Opium War. By focusing on the collected knowledge on the "Franks" (Spaniards) and "Red-haired barbarians" (Dutch) contained in these two texts, I explore how conflicting and incomplete geographic information persisted despite sustained contact and commercial interaction throughout the period.

Joshua Evan Schlachet, Columbia University

Reclaiming Dejima: Material Transformation, Historical Trajectory and the Politics of Spatial Relations in Post-1855 Nagasaki
Dejima is often understood as an Edo-period space, the image of which is shaped by the island's place within the "closed country" perception of the Tokugawa social world. Many studies of Dutch-Japanese exchange end their analyses promptly and conspicuously at the arrival of the Black Ships, the treaty signings and the supposedly immediate shift from Nagasaki to Yokohama as the locus of foreign interaction. Such portrayals of Dejima post-1854 impose an air of inevitability and instantaneousness upon Dutch decline in the face of foreign competition. However, the decline of Dutch influence in Nagasaki - and of Nagasaki in Japan more generally - represents a long, piecemeal series of developments that by no means emerged immediately or naturally from the new legal framework of the treaties or ceased with treaty revision. This paper addresses this long transition through the lens of the spatial transformations - land reclamation, construction and public works projects - that took place on and around Dejima in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, because of which it slowly evolved from an island apart to an integrated element of Nagasaki's urban geography. Using maps, records and personal accounts, this paper plots how these changing spatial relations of "islandness" and "Dutchness" informed and interacted with Nagasaki's evolving social meaning. Paying attention to these mundane construction projects and their functions in a geographic and symbolic trajectory can challenge the perception of representative temporalities by which Nagasaki and Dejima have become emblematic of Tokugawa-era exclusionary politics, as atypical of the broader treaty port experience.

Borders of the Self in Inner Asia

Discussant: Daniel Barish, Princeton University
Friday, 4:00 PM Kent 628

Allison Hahn, University of Pittsburgh

Can Nomads Reclaim the War Machine?: Emergent Transnational Identification on the Inner Mongolian / Mongolian Border.
Nomadology, proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, has been widely debated by anthropologists such as Christopher Miller arguing Nomadology ignores historical study of nomads and literary critics such as Paul Mann arguing that Nomadology reduces nomads to romantic outlaws. However, academics have not adequately addressed the lived experience of modern nomads, such as Mongolian pastoralists. My paper addresses how a better understanding of contemporary Mongolian nomadic peoples political struggle against mining projects in the Gobi can inform a reading of the contemporary global milieu as sketched by Deleuze and Guattari. Specifically, I will investigate Mongolian and Inner Mongolian use of new media to oppose mining corporations by investigating the cultural and linguistic adaptations made to articulate a transnational, technological, and nomadic Mongolian identity. This newly articulated identity will be juxtaposed against the official Mongolian identity authorization by the Chinese and Mongolian national governments, in order to illustrate the previously misunderstood connections between maintaining a nomadic identity and engaging new media. I will argue that the emergence of new media in both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia has facilitated a critical transnational identity capable of producing lasting environmental and cultural protections. Further, this adaptation of identity cuts against Nomadology as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining the adaptation of Mongolian identity to create a movement against mining, sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged conflict between Deleuze and Guattari's proposal of Nomadology and the real-world adaptation of identity by Mongolian pastoral nomads.

Raymond Pun, CUNY Graduate Center

The Women's Mosque in China: Questioning Islamic Orthodoxy and Authenticity
In various regions of China, there has been a long tradition of Hui women attending and supporting mosques dedicated to religious education and leadership for women. As early as the eighteenth century, the conception of women's mosques has been largely based on the idea of maintaining an Islamic education devoted to women and children. With the rise and acceptance of Islamic reformist thoughts, the women's mosque has been discredited and denounced as an "unIslamic" tradition. This paper seeks to understand how the women's mosque represents an authentic Islamic institution that embraces feminist values and rights within the framework of the Islamic theology. By looking at the "space" devoted to women's spiritual practices, the women's mosque supports and integrate women's gender, Muslim, Chinese and Hui identities collectively and uniquely as their own. The paper explores the historical challenges of preserving the women's mosques and examines the perceptions of the women's mosque that is largely unknown and unheard of in the Muslim World.

Benny Shaffer, Harvard University

Cinematic Borderlands: Films from Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia during the "Seventeen Years" Period (1949-1966)
Exploring how the notion of "cinema for the masses" played out on China's periphery during the 1950s and 1960s, this paper examines to what extent the establishment of film studios in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia in the late-1950s may have overlapped with larger Soviet-style projects of multiethnic nation-building and discourses of socialist modernization in the early PRC. The paper begins to excavate the under-researched early history of the Tianshan Film Studio in Urumqi and the Inner Mongolia Film Studio in Hohhot, and investigates the production and reception of two popular narrative films: Anaerhan (1962) from Xinjiang, and Morning Song Over the Grassland (Caoyuan chenqu, 1959) from Inner Mongolia. The analysis draws on discussions in a range of recent English and Chinese-language scholarship on the "Seventeen Years" (aka "The Missing Years") period in Chinese cinema, Thomas Mullaney's writings on the history of ethnic classification and nation-building projects in the PRC, along with film reviews and images from the Chinese-language journal Popular Cinema (Dazhong dianying). Ultimately, this project works to build on notions put forth by Yomi Braester and other scholars that the cinema of the "The Missing Years" period was not merely a passive reflection of contemporary politics and ideologies, but an active site of production. I extend and further develop this concept through the cases of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, where I argue that the cinema of these borderland regions became a medium through which a multiethnic nation-state could be actively imagined and constructed.

Consuming Identities: Food, Health, and Ideas of Belonging

Discussant: Tim Yang, Columbia University
Friday, 4:00 PM Kent 522D

Alexis Agliano Sanborn, Harvard College

Flavoring the Nation: The Role of School Lunch in Modern Japanese Society
School lunch, or kyūshoku, is a nationwide system in place elementary schools and most middle schools in Japan. The goal is to provide healthy, satisfying meals to children regardless of socio-economic backgrounds while helping to regulate healthy human growth. For roughly one-hundred years kyūshoku has adapted to a constantly transforming tableau, reflecting the food of the times as well as food the government believes ought to be served. Japanese citizens may see school lunches merely as an accepted rite of passage one is subjected to during primary education; however the political and social nature of food and its distribution is often overlooked. The nationally monitored school lunch system contributes to establishing expected modes of societal conduct while subtly molding national food preferences. Essentially school lunches foster a "national diet." This paper will examine the creation and structural transformation of the school lunch system; how and why it was established, what alterations and adaptations it has seen, and what nutritional and dietary standards of both past and present it has mandated. Secondly, the societal role and "appropriate" behavior that kyūshoku promotes for students, as well as the external participation of the broader community will be discussed. Finally, the use of ingredients and dietary transformation and possible impact of kyūshoku on Japanese citizens' dietary preferences and indifferences will be conducted. In analyzing these three aspects of kyūshoku (system, people and food) the often overlooked yet subversive nature of kyūshoku's political power and great impact on Japan itself will be made clear.

Jamyung Choi, University of Pennsylvania

Physically Strong, Mentally Sound: Student Leisure and a "Healthy" Middle Class at Interwar Tōdai, 1920-1931
This paper examines the way in which student leisure contributed to the production of a "healthy" middle class at Tokyo Imperial University (Tōdai) in the interwar years. By focusing on Tōdai as a central space of the body at play, I explore how leisure directly worked to fashion middle-class identity and the related ideas of hygiene for students and the larger society. The paper first looks at the role of universities in enabling students to enjoy leisure activities and medical services. Tōdai was one of the most privileged leisure communities in Japan, having Japan's oldest sports club (established in 1885), playgrounds, summer houses, vacations, and same-age populations. Also worthy of attention is the Student Medical Center (established in 1926), which provided students medical care and supported leisure activities. I emphasize the economic value of these facilities to explain Tōdai's centrality in the culture of leisure and hygiene in Japan. This project highlights the pervasive influence of student leisure at Tōdai on middle-class life. It sees the state support for student leisure as an attempt at the physical and mental "normalization" of "weak" radical students. The intertwining of leisure and hygiene, I contend, brought about two consequences: collegiate leisure spread to lower-level schools and corporations; student athletes were favored in university entrance and employment examinations for their "soundness." In so doing, the middle class was, I argue, a leading agent in the history of sports and hygiene in interwar Japan and leisure itself was central to interwar middle-class life and beyond.

Vivian L. Wong, University of California, Los Angeles

Global (re)mix: Producing and consuming family, food, and fusion in Japanese European cuisine in the Asian diaspora
"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." - Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

What is your idea of the perfect party you would throw for yourself? How about an intimate gathering of 500 or so of your family and friends at your favorite neighborhood restaurant complete with Japanese Taiko drummers adorned with red headbands and French acrobats dressed in fishnet stockings with knee-high leather spats, and black bustiers hanging from the ceiling as entertainment. And for party food, chew over a buffet spread that includes an abundant supply of oysters on the half-shell, shrimp cocktail, tuna tartare and other lovely nibbles all washed down with free flowing flutes of champagne. Does this seem like a recipe for chaos in an East-meets-West conflict of sights, sound, and tastes that would make your head spin and tummy turn, leaving your body aching with regret the morning after? Not if you are the Tsunoda family and your restaurant was celebrating its 25th Anniversary in Beverly Hills, CA in October 2009. They pulled off and pulled out all the stops for the party described above with seeming aplomb, displaying and demonstrating their signature style of traditional hospitality rooted in their family's over three-hundred year history in the restaurant business, imported from Japan. While the party was an evening of good times, the night's festivities also illustrates what this paper explores as it considers food production and consumption in the Asian diaspora as sites for the convergence of histories, cultures, traditions, and technologies. Food embodies and performs the personal and collective histories of those who make all we eat. It is a cultural record and reenactment in itself of a past that is practiced everyday, as everyone interacts with food daily. Food production as cultural performance re-situated in diasporas is the dynamic presentation and representation of Asian peoples' hybrid and diverse histories of migration, experiences, and multi-ethnic identities: the embodiment of cross- and trans-cultural production and reproduction, remade, served up, and consumed on a combination platter. Using the Tsunoda family restaurant, Chaya, as a case study, this paper shows how personal histories, identities, and experiences are exported from Japan and made to order in a Southern Californian restaurant.

Representations of Disaster in Modern Japanese Art

Discussant: Gloria Yang, Columbia University
Friday, 4:00 PM Kent 522C

Franz D. Hofer, Cornell University

Strings of Time: Ishiuchi Miyako's Photographic Mediations of Iconographic Remembrance
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generated a body of iconic images that has etched itself in the collective memory of each successive generation born after 1945. Many are familiar with Yamahata Yōsuke's photograph of the mother who stares vacantly beyond the camera while her child clutches a riceball. The same holds for Tsuchida Hiromi's stark black and white photographs of personal effects belonging to atom bomb victims - watches, clothing, twisted spectacles - collected by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Ishiuchi Miyako's artistic re-interpretation of both the event itself and its subsequent circulation as photography seeks to engender a different kind of affective resonance in its viewers, a reflexivity that takes us beyond the shock of 'documentary-witness' photography and the detachedness of 'documentary-archival' photography. In a poignant re-capitulation of Roland Barthes' simultaneously problematic and arresting portrayal of the photographic referent - 'that-has-been' - her hauntingly back-lit photographs displayed at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art as part of her Strings of Time exhibition (2008) quietly insist that these personal effects had been worn by somebody who was there on 6 August or 9 August 1945. In this paper, I reflect on the difficulties inherent in the aestheticization of violence and death while considering the following questions: how does Ishiuchi's photography problematize - and is in turn problematized by - 'documentary-witness' and 'documentary-archival' photography? In turn, how do the differential temporalities of experience captured by these various modes of photographic representation help us rethink the ethics of producing or viewing photographs?

Kay Kurashige, Columbia University

Art and Apocalypse: Okamoto Taro and the Myth of Tomorrow
On November 17, 2008, a gigantic mural depicting the devastation of nuclear warfare was revealed in Tokyo's Shibuya train station. Measuring at 16.5 by 90 feet, the piece features as its centerpiece the graphic image of a deformed skeleton with sentient eyes, engulfed in flames. This work of art is the creation of one of Japan's most celebrated artists Okamoto Taro (1911-1996). Titled "Asu no Shinwa" (Myth of Tomorrow), the painting had been lost in Mexico for decades and was found and relocated to Japan through the considerable efforts of the Okamoto Taro Memorial Foundation. In the wake of the March 11th Tohoku disaster, the mural was brought into the spotlight again after an artist collective installed an addition to the mural (without permission) depicting the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown in the style of Okamoto. 40 years after its creation, "Asu no Shinwa" serves as an important reminder of the horrors of nuclear warfare as well as a catalyst and inspiration for a new generation of artists. This paper explores the rich history of Okamoto Taro's masterpiece and relives its journey to one of Japan's busiest transit stations. It will examine how the painting came to be situated in the heart of Tokyo and the sources of inspiration for the piece.

Nozomi Naoi, Harvard University

Dealing with Post-Earthquake Tokyo: Takehisa Yumeji and his Disaster Sketches from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923
The Tokyo Shinsai Gashin (Tokyo Earthquake Sketches) was a series of 21 sketches with short essays published daily in the Miyako newspaper. The modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) had made these observations while walking along the ruins of Tokyo immediately after the devastating earthquake of September 1st, 1923. His visual and literary observations display a mixture of shock, sympathy, and disappointment in the ways of society under the Japanese government. While such sentiment shows a strong resonance with our situation today in post-311 Japan, Yumeji's political inclinations requires us to reevaluate his positioning within the current art historical framework and strengthens our understanding of Yumeji's involvement among avant-garde artists in elevating the status of prints by transforming the reproducible media into a creative form of production. While Yumeji is mainly known for his images of women, even referred to as the Yumeji-style beauties, he also inspired rising avant-garde artists such as Onchi Kōshirō and others involved in the sosaku-hanga (creative print) movement. His appeal to both spheres of young female consumers and avant-garde artists may seem contradictory but Yumeji had started his artistic career through illustrations in socialist newspapers and magazines, creating images with anti-war and leftist sentiment along with his images of beautiful women. The Tokyo Earthquake Sketches presents a side of Yumeji that deserves further analysis as his role beyond a popular graphic artist, and as an artist whose visual and literary response to the earthquake dealt with the national struggle and pain through its recovery process.

Space and Place in Chinese Literature

Discussant: Chelsea Wang, Columbia University
Saturday, 1:00 PM Kent 522A

Allison Bernard, Columbia University

Performative Narratives: Gossip Circulation, Family Space, and Power in Jin Ping Mei
The late Ming novel Jin Ping Mei cihua is perhaps most well-known as a paragon work of Chinese erotic fiction; yet, its depiction of domestic life, its heteroglossic compositional techniques, and its positioning in late Ming print culture have more recently become windows of inquiry into the literary and historical worlds of the novel. This paper draws on these trends in scholarship to further consider constructions of space, character, and family in Jin Ping Mei by examining the novel's narrative paradigms of gossip, rumor, and disseminated knowledge. Gossip-information is employed toward variegated ends in the novel: it is at once an abstracted object of exchange, performative mapper of domestic relationships, (re-)constructor of the novel's household space, embodiment of entropic social energy, and constructive mechanism of storytelling that both generates and interprets the novel's eclectic narrative. By considering the novel's various uses of transmitted information, this paper will demonstrate how manipulating knowledge through gossip is a distinct mechanism of power generation within the family, especially for the novel's infamous female protagonist, Pan Jinlian, who becomes both the physical and discursive centering point for rumors generated within domestic space. With a discussion that relates gossip circulation, the construction of gendered spaces, and the performative narrative functions of moving information, this paper represents part of a thesis-length study on the Jin Ping Mei that will comment on the production and reception of knowledge in an era dominated by a proliferation of information circulating in print.

Di Luo, University of Southern California

Han Rhapsodies and Dynastic Ethos: Reconstructing the Literary Mind on Chinese Architecture
In Wenxuan--the first anthology of Chinese literature compiled in the 6th century, rhapsodies (fu) on imperial palaces, gardens, and metropolises written from the Han Dynasty onward are celebrated as a genre of foremost literary values. These rhapsodies, written by high officials and eminent scholars, not only described meticulously the appearance, vigor, and intricate structure of grandiose palaces and halls, but also conveyed a full range of technical terms and building methodologies, by which experts were able to trace the development of architecture in early China. Examining the literary texts, one starts to reconstruct how architecture was viewed and evaluated by the Chinese literary mind: first, architecture is an integral part of the material culture born into the great syncretic era of the Han dynasty, when building practices become manifestations of a confluence of all knowledge and philosophical thoughts; second, architecture is an indispensable component of the ritual system that promotes and sustains the carefully balanced social order, and is wielded as an important vehicle of the legitimation of emperorship and imperial control; third, the various forms of art in the interior help evoke a fully charged, fantastic microcosm in which the ruler cautions his own behaviors and fulfills the communicative duty of connecting Heaven and human. In summary, the creation of exquisite buildings is in tandem with the increasingly sophisticated and refined cultural milieu--the dynastic ethos of Han China.

Media and Production of Identity

Discussant: Chi Li, Columbia University
Saturday, 1:00 PM Kent 522C

Laura Brown, Columbia University

Filmic discourse on ethnic minority women in Chinese film: Art, the “New Woman,” and the construction of national identity, 1949-1966
The ethnic minority films produced in post-1949 Revolutionary China place minority women in a dual gender role. The image of minority women as “masculine warriors” stresses their servitude to the Communist state and ideological identification with the Han model revolutionary woman. Unlike the de-sexualized model Han females described by Dai Jinhua as the classical revolutionary cinematic mode, however, the focus on the costume, dance, singing, and romantic affairs of ethnic minority women place them as the object of a gendered gaze, underscoring the eroticized femininity of them and the ethnic minorities they represent. Following the work of Dru Gladney on the building of national identity and Louisa Schein on the positioning of Miao women in the context of culture-building, I explore how the bodies of minority women in Chinese films produced between 1949 and 1966 serve as sites for the contradictory methods in which minorities are co-opted in the construction of a socialist China and Han-centered national identity. Female protagonists in films such as Lusheng Love Song (1957) People of the Grasslands (1953), and A Horse Caravan (1954), however, are also endowed with athletic prowess, cunning, and heroics on level with and surpassing male counterparts. I conclude by probing whether the fact that minority women's “femaleness,” a gender identity longed for by their Han counterparts, used as a function of internal Orientalism devalues the seeming versatility and freedom it provides for its onscreen beneficiaries.

Julia Keblinska, Columbia University

Strange Circle: Specters of the Past in the Reform Era City
The Chinese Fifth Generation of directors took on the task of representing national narratives and critique by combining the symbolism of rural, and usually female, characters, with a unique cinematography. These films were legitimated as canonical Chinese avant garde works, exemplary precisely because they artistically superseded other productions. I argue that the celebrated "authentic" content of the avant garde, the social critique of communist ideological collapse and the ambiguities of modernization, is also concurrently produced in 1980s mainstream studio films. The compelling formal aesthetics of these films, particularly in their direct presentation of the urban, do not resolve easily into a legitimate state discourse, but rather suggest that the Reform Era mainstream is problematically fractured. The 1985 film Sacrifice of Youth (dir. Zhang Nuanxin) chronicles the experience of a young Han woman sent down to Yunnan. The film explores themes of female sexuality and subjectivity muted from the hegemonic discourse of the party. The 1986 film Strange Circle (dir. Sun Sha), employs a similar female centered narrative, but it relocates the concerns and symbols of the first film into the city, mobilizing the urban aesthetics of the 1985 Black Cannon Incident (dir. Huang Jianxin). My paper will explore how myth and femininity is manifested in the industrialized milieu of the city, and use the problematic "female" to interrogate the Chinese modern, relocating the critical agency of the geographic and cultural margin to the heart of China's modernization and reform project.

Kristin Roebuck, Columbia University

Japan Gazing on the West: Eroticism and Nationalism in Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
This paper explores war memory and national identity through an analysis of Nagisa Oshima's film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. This film about Japanese soldiers and their Allied adversaries, produced in the 1980s and set in the 1940s, suggests the relevance of both history and the West to contemporary Japanese negotiations of identity. Western critics describe the film as both brutally violent and pointedly erotic, and explain its narrative and conceptual content by reference to the alleged repressed homosexuality of one or more of the characters. I hope to refocus analysis on the question of national rather than sexual identity. By transplanting the erotic gaze onto an all-male field of battle, Oshima complexly depicts how desire, rejection, and unattainability function at the center of self-definition in constant reference to a national and racial Other. Racial 'double consciousness' and the filmic gaze provide analytic points of entry into the film itself, and into Oshima's theory and memory of the war. In his and other Japanese memories of the war, ultranationalism is not hatred of the other but hatred of the self - an internalized racism that postwar developments may have done much to cover but little to resolve.

Grace Ting, Yale University

The Everyday, Girls, and Female Same-Sex Desire in a Comparative Perspective: Yoshimoto Banana's N.P. and Chu T'ien-Hsin's Old Capital
In my paper, I will discuss configurations of female same-sex desire and the everyday in two contemporary novels: N.P. (1990) by Japanese writer Yoshimoto Banana and Old Capital (1997) by Taiwanese writer Chu T'ien-Hsin. While scholars have commented on the everyday depicted in the writing of both authors, these works present drastically different versions of everydayness with their narratives involving schoolgirl love, female same-sex desire, and an engagement with the past. Nevertheless, in Banana and Chu's works, the cultural construct of girls and the everyday remain closely related as aspects of modernity. Particularly for Banana, who is usually read in terms of the shōjo, or girl, in late capitalist Japan, these concepts must be complicated in order to rethink possible biases of existing scholarship. Using a comparative perspective, I will reorient understandings of these works through the lens of female sexuality while widening the scope of research on girls and sexuality.

Tibet: Cosmopolitanism and Modernity

Discussant: Becky Best, Columbia University
Saturday, 1:00 PM Kent 424

Sarah Richardson, University of Toronto

Narrating the Past with the Present: Pan-Asian Cosmopolitanism in Paintings of the Former Lives of the Buddha from 14th century Tibet
The set of mural paintings of the former lives of the Buddha (Jataka) at the Monastery of Shalu in Tibet open a rare window into the visual world of 14th century Tibet. These painted and inscribed narratives showing the Bodhisattva's former lives as numerous kings, merchants and animals creates a rich space for displaying the known and idealized world. Throughout the paintings "otherness" is purposefully and usefully represented through costumes, architecture and painting styles that reveal real knowledge and experience of peoples and places across central, south and east Asia. But what did it mean to display this visual panoply of difference in the paintings? Does this merely reflect the knowledge and origins of the artists working at Shalu or can we also see this as part of an active strategy of display? Arguing that these paintings of an ancient past were made actively "present" through visual and material terms, I will discuss ways that visual tropes of "otherness" enabled the conspicuous display of a pan-Asian cosmopolitanism in style and content. These elements, I will argue, were being not only displayed but re-combined, linking the authority of the temple to a sense of current cosmopolitan elite culture. This display strengthened the authority and authenticity of the rulers of Shalu, who used the space opened up by narrative art depicting the imagined past to celebrate and advertise their close ties with and direct patronage from the Mongol Yuan rulers of China.

Stacey Van Vleet, Columbia University

Children’s Healthcare and Astrology in the Nurturing of a Central Tibetan Nation-State, 1916–24
Scholars have been reluctant to identify early twentieth-century social and medical developments within the Central Tibetan state led by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Tupten Gyatso, with contemporaneous medical innovations and discourses of nationalism. However, assessment has been lacking of many relevant Tibetan sources regarding the most significant internal development in medicine during this period, the founding in 1916 of the Lhasa Mentsikhang or Institute of Medicine and Astrology. I will examine a critical component of the Mentsikhang’s early mission, a children’s health-care (byis pa nyer spyod) program officially implemented between 1916 and 1924, with particular attention to the program’s provision for the mandatory calculation of natal horoscopes, as laid out in a 1916 edict from the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. The program represents a previously unacknowledged effort by the Tibetan hierarch not only to cultivate shared subjecthood and nationalism but also to institute a class-based reform into Tibetan society.

Wu Lan, Columbia University

Building Religious Networks in Qing China’s Centers in 1770s
The present paper mainly focuses on one Tibetan Buddhist monastery (Baoxiang monastery in Xiangshan) in Beijing, and traces its connections to monasteries in pilgrim sites both in Beijing, Mt. Wutai in Shanxi, and Chengde —— the imperial summer palace. The monasteries under discussion were built, or renovated during the Qianlong reign (1736-1794) and they were closely associated with each other. Even though scholars have studied the monasteries under discussion individually, they have not been considered spontaneously. Baoxiang monastery was built to house a stone statue of Manjusri, whose image in Mt. Wutai was so mesmerizing that the Qianlong emperor’s mother actually memorized it by heart on her trip there in 1761, and the Qianlong emperor thus decided to build a monastery in the northwestern side of Beijing for his mother’s 70th birthday. Baoxiang monastery was modeled after Yonghegong, the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the Qing’s capital city of Beijing and itself became the prototype of Shuxiang monastery in Chengde. Baoxiang monastery was thus under the influences of several cultures and was at the intersection of various powers in the politically unsettled eighteenth century of Qing China. Through studying its establishment and its connections to the monasteries in Mt. Wutai and Chengde, I hope to present an alternative map of the Qing that was full of encounter between cultures and powers.

Modern Korea: Experience of Crossings in Gender and Race

Discussant: Jenny Medina, Columbia University
Saturday, 1:00 PM Kent 511

Jae Won Chung, Columbia University

Seeing Black: Identification and Abjectification in Representation of Blackness in Colonial Period Korea
In this paper, I explore the role that the figure of blackness might have played in the Korean colonial imaginary. The language of how the history of African blacks (in particular, the war in Ethiopia) was perceived in publications such as The Independent and Chosŏn Liberation Front reveals how colonial Koreans considered their racial, ethnic and national position, vis-á-vis Japan as well as the rest of the world. In the case of the writer Han Se-gwang, we are provided with the figure of the student migrant on foreign territory (the United States), haunted by Japanese colonialism and state of nationlessness. In Hotel Cone, Han shows an articulation of an anti-imperial Pan-Asianism that strategically excludes Japan from its anti-Western solidarity. Yet at the same time, this articulation exists alongside a failure to penetrate the screen of "blackness" for both Han and his protagonist Thomas. A study of Han's discussion of African-American writers of the period, in light of Cha Sŭng-ki's work on spatio-temporal dimensions of tradition, also reveals how Korean writers and intellectuals might have identified with the call for a more "extended" sense of tradition, as achieved by diasporic African writers across boundaries of nation and language. Finally, by reading a selection of Han's work against the grain, I show how certain porousness of borders can be identified, between public and private space, and between "bodies" of nations - a productive rupture in Han's own ethno-national prejudices as well as the possibility of deferral (rather than extermination) of viable solidarities to come.

Kyeungha Juli Min, Columbia University

Creative Death and Female Authorship
A creative death in literature is one that involves a literal or metaphorical death which produces a creative or constructive outcome. Rape, incest, abortion, suicide: these all can possibly be read as creative deaths if they produce new life, new understanding, or even mutation. Looking specifically at one instance of creative death in modern Korean literature, I focus on the ways in which suicide constructs ideas about female authorship and narrative mode. Because of the nature of death, the constructive consequences are necessarily based in time: in historical context but also through individual experiences of the past, present, and future. For performance artist Mimi in Kim Young-Ha's novel I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, identity is an unceasing performance, and there exists no residue of the past in the speed, technology, and erasure of twentieth century modern Seoul. Mimi searches for authenticity in her world only to find that the only authentic performance lies in the creation of her own suicide. Throughout the paper, I compare Mimi's suicide to the abortion acts of Pak Wanso's narrator in Three Days in That Autumn because the two works represent complicated relationships to the past that represent, respectively, postmodernism and modernism. In Pak's text and time, literary death can be a form of re-writing and progress; Kim's novel places the novel and literature in the context of contemporary art and suggests a kind of death of the novel. It is in the quest for authenticity that does not exist, that is not tethered to the past, that Kim's novel breaks free of history and enters postmodernity.

Haeseong Park, Purdue University

Intellectual Diaspora, Gender, and Nation: Korean Female Students in the United States before 1945
History witnesses that knowledge is a quiet but powerful force. Modern knowledge, with the help of Confucian tradition of putting a high value on education, attracted Koreans as a tool to improve themselves and their nation in the early 20th century when imperialism was sweeping in. The Korean pursuit of modern knowledge first met conservative abhorrence of modernism then Japanese imperial oppression against Korean enlightenment. In women's case, there was another layer of discrimination, sexism. This paper explores the lives of Korean women who studied in American colleges and universities prior to Korean independence in 1945. Under Japan's rule (1910-1945), Korea had only one university which did not allow women to enter. To receive collegiate education, Korean women must cross the ocean, mostly to Japan, the heart of Japan Empire, but sometimes to America. Students who choose America had strong nationalism or missionary connection. Because of the missionary connection, many Korean students first went to small Christian-affiliated colleges in the Midwest, and moved on to bigger universities for graduate work. Temporal coexistence does not promise the same experience of the time. The approximately two hundred women who undertook education in the United States before 1945 experienced their gender, colonialism, imperialism, and modernity in a way different from any others as well as other Koreans. Yet they played an important and influential role in the construction of the Korean nation, the overseas independence movement, and the Korean diasporic community. This new layer of discourse will provide us with much fuller insight into Korea and the early modern period.

Peripheries and Boundaries in the Qing: Identity, Ethnicity, and Empire

Discussant: Sixiang Wang, Columbia University
Saturday, 1:00 PM Kent 522D

Tristan Brown, Columbia University

Heterodox Militias, Merchant Networks, and an Ambivalent State: Chinese Muslims Respond to the White Lotus
This paper will briefly examine the overlooked, critical roles that Muslims played in two of Qing China's most famous White Lotus Uprisings: the Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 in Shandong and the White Lotus Rebellion of 1796-1804 in Sichuan, Hubei, and Shaanxi. Muslims awareness of the events led them to form independent militias which they used to fight the White Lotus; militias that the state ambivalently relied upon or even openly endorsed in its own terms. The presentation will touch upon topics of how the state viewed Muslim participation in the military campaigns, how Muslim communities seemed to have presented themselves to the state, and reasons why Muslims may have known about the unrest - and reacted in such an organized way - so early in the course of the events. These conclusions will help us to understand the implications of the limits of localized state power in the Qing, and the importance of mercantile circuits in providing alternatives to local sustainability and power dynamics. Finally, this study will add to a growing corpus of scholarship questioning our understandings of frontier/borderland distinctions in the Qing dynasty as well as reconceptualizing civilizational clash and cultural tolerance narratives within these two case studies.

Devin T. Fitzgerald, Harvard University

Capital Ideas: The Exile Court in Xi'an During the Boxer Rebellion
In this paper I explore the reorientation of the Qing empire towards Xi'an, the capital in exile, during the Boxer Rebellion (1900-1901). While in Xi'an, the court and its officials saved countless famine victims and created an alternative "Capital" through elite cultural practices, such as touring and poetry compilation, and imperial acts, such as temple patronage and famine relief. The many acts of the exiled court and its officials reinforced the sovereignty of the Qing despite the disaster that had befallen Beijing and its environs. They also demonstrate that the Qing still conceived of itself as an empire with a movable imperial center, one that vested symbolic power in the "Centrality" of the person of the emperor. In this paper, I will specifically discuss court sponsored famine relief and religious patronage in order to reconsider the nature of the court's flight.

Gladys Mac, University of Southern California

The Qing Dynasty's Bannerwomen and Their Marriages
The Manchus of the Qing Dynasty actively segregated themselves from the commoners, or non- bannermen. This was not only limited to physical aspects, such as locations of residence or forms of dress, but also through the regulation of marriage. The Qing government kept detailed records of the banner population, recording all births, marriages, and deaths. This system helped to facilitate the granting of stipends to bannermen, but it also served as a regulation system over the banner population's marriages. Banner membership, most of the time, came with birth. Men and their sons stayed in the same banner for life, but women's membership transferred through marriage. Yet not all banner people are children of bannerwomen, because membership was inherited through the father's side, regardless of the mother's political status, ethnicity, or social status. All bannerwomen, with the exception of imperial princesses, had to marry bannermen, but bannermen could take non-bannerwomen as wives or concubines. Thus, banner membership was semi-permeable due to the different marriage policies for men and women. Through these sex-specific regulations, the Manchus had the advantages of increasing their banner population in a regulated manner, while they were still able to exclude the majority of their empire's population from entering this privileged class. Hence, in this paper I examine the Manchu's attempts to retain banner "purity" through the inclusion and exclusion of certain ethnicities and social classes in the triennial elegant maidens and bondservants drafts.

Picture, Press, and Protest: Considerations on Meiji's Empires

Discussant: Hansun Hsiung, Harvard University
Saturday, 1:00 PM Kent 522B

Colin Jones, Columbia University

Asia for Republicans
This paper explores the emergence of pan-Asianist politics through the thought of Ōi Kentarō, a liberal activist of the Meiji era and one of the earliest proponents of solidarity between Japan and Korea. In 1885, Ōi orchestrated a plot to overthrow the Joseon monarchy and install in its place a group of Korean reformers. Japanese police uncovered the plan before any blood was shed, but this event, know as the Osaka Incident, marked a seminal moment for pan-Asianism. Ōi's defense of his actions was one of the earliest ethical justifications for Japanese intervention in the political affairs of neighboring countries. It became a canonical text for both partisans and critics of the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Previous scholarship on pan-Asianism has attributed Ōi's rationale, and early pan-Asianism in general, to a civilizational paradigm in which Japan, as the most advanced country in Asia, was seen as a vehicle for modernization and progress. This is at best a caricature of Ōi's position. Reading of his testimony, in the context of his other writings, reveals a republicanism that is more interested in justice and civic virtue than material progress. By highlighting these features in Ōi's thought, this essay presents a new look at the origins of pan-Asianism.

Jihyung Kim, Korea University

The Assassination of Queen Min through The Korean Repository in the late 19th Century
The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate how The Korean Repository (1892, 1894~1899) which published by the American missionaries in Korea reported the assassination of Queen Min, and the nature of this report. During the Sino-Japanese War(1894-5) Japanese army occupied Seoul and Japanese ambassador forced King Gojong to promulgate a series of radical reforms. Amidst persistent Japanese threats and pressure, the King and Queen Min decided to actively use Russia as a counterweight to Japan. In order to stop the ebbing of their influence in Korea, Japan tried to eliminate Queen Min, whom they perceived as the leader of the pro-Russia policy. On October 8th, 1895, the Queen of Korea was brutally murdered by the Japanese diplomatic minister, soldiers, and sōshi. The Japanese government and Korean pro-Japanese ministry glossed over the truth by blaming the King's father, Daewonkoon for the assassination, and dethroned the Queen. The truth was never revealed, and the king remained silent with his life threatened. To this end, in the early morning of February 11, 1896, he successfully escaped the Russian legation. It allowed the king more room to maneuver as he played Russia off against Japan however it also caused the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. After the Queen's assassination, Japanese press deliberately misled the public to believe that the Queen's self-interest caused her death, and the Western mass media shared the view. To break from the isolated position of Korea, The Korean Repository, the only English mass media at this time, started to create a public sentiment to reveal the truth behind the assassination of the Queen. It formed an anti-Japanese sentiment by speaking for the victimized Korean King and reporting testimonies of the eyewitnesses of the event. The Korean Repository did not observe rapid changes in Korea as outsider. On the contrary, it demonstrated to the Eastern press the difficulties Korea was facing. Through The Korean Repository, the American missionaries who had a close relationship with Korean royal family and pro-American reformists, spoke for Korea's political and social interest, including its religious values.

Kelly McCormick, Columbia University

Imaging Hokkaido Through Photographs and Maps
In 1873, the Japanese government sent Tamoto Kenzo's photographs of the settlement of Hokkaido lead by the Kaitakushi, or Hokkaido Colonization Commission, to the Vienna World Exposition. These documents, exhibited alongside U.S. photographer Timothy O'Sullivan's images of the Southwest frontier and English photographer Eadweard Muybridge's images of Yosemite, speak to the international fascination with photography's ability to record the development of the new territories of the empire. In addition to new photographic technology, advances in the techniques of map making and geology made describing the frontier possible from new visual perspectives. From 1873 to 1876, the Kaitakushi commissioned American geologist Henry Smith Lyman to create the first geological survey map of Hokkaido's mineral resources. This map represents the beginnings of the use of geological imaging to lay claim to and gain support for extension of government infrastructure in new territories. In this paper, I explore how these experts used new technologies of photography and geologic measurement to produce images that emphasized Hokkaido's developing civilization process. Tamoto Kenzo's photographs and Henry Smith Lyman's land survey map provide specific examples of how the Kaitakushi sought to visually describe the Japanese frontier and further the diplomatic goals of the Meiji government. By making what was once a distant land visually accessible, Tamoto's photographs and Lyman's geological surveys both shrank the physical space of the Japanese empire and expanded the realm of visual possibility.

Reading Religion: Buddhism and Daoism in Medieval and Late Imperial China

Discussant: Helen Qiu, Columbia University
Saturday, 2:50 PM Kent 424

Kevin Buckelew, Columbia University

Expanding Buddho-Daoist Studies Into Late Imperial China: The Case of Wu Shouyang
The field of Buddho-Daoist studies has heretofore focused primarily on the medieval period, neglecting late imperial interaction between Chinese Buddhists and Daoists. Historians of later imperial Chinese religion, on the other hand, often describe a religious climate of "syncretism" beginning in the late Ming, implying that Buddhists and Daoists never interacted prior to this time. In my paper I propose to begin investigating Buddho-Daoist interaction in the late imperial period with an eye to the ways that claims of inclusiveness actually functioned as appropriations of the authority of the other tradition. At the same time, I situate this investigation in the context of a long history of Buddho-Daoist interaction, highlighting both the continuities and differences between earlier and later phases of the relationship between these two traditions. My paper examines the specific ways that the Daoist inner alchemist Wu Shouyang (1552-1641) used various appropriative strategies to subsume Buddhist teachings under the umbrella of Daoist inner alchemy. In the process I hope to offer a new framework through which to expand the field of Buddho-Daoist studies into the late imperial period.

Joseph P. Elacqua, Mohawk Valley Community College

The Master of the Womb Realm
The monk Subhakarasimha (637-735) is credited as the first known esoteric Buddhist patriarch to arrive in China. While in China, he translated several Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and helped formulate a lasting lineage of esoteric Buddhist practice throughout East Asia. His teachings, and those of his successors, are often grouped into what is referred to as the "Womb Realm" lineage. Subhakarasimha is often associated with two other early esoteric Buddhist patriarchs, Vajrabodhi (671-741) and Amoghavajra (704-774), though their teachings differed. The lineage established by Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra is referred to as the "Vajra Realm" lineage. Despite the crucial role that Subhakarasimha played in Chinese religious history, little is known for certain about his life. He is credited with the translation of several Buddhist texts into Chinese, and also for illustrating a series of esoteric Buddhist iconographical images, known today as the Taizo Zuzo. Many of these works led to the creation of the Womb Realm Mandala, one of the most iconic mandalas in all of Asia. Though Subhakarasimha likely only translated a small body of texts, these texts contain scattered clues that help to illustrate the nature of his "Womb Realm" Buddhism. These clues not only establish some of Subhakarasimha's own beliefs, but also provide insight on religious teachings prevalent in India during his life. Furthermore, they provide additional illumination on the creation of the mysterious Womb Realm Mandala.

Noga Ganany, Columbia University

Bao-gong as King Yama in Fiction and Religious Worship
The legendary Judge Bao, popularly referred to as Bao-gong 包公 or Bao-qing-tian 包青天, was celebrated as a paragon of justice in various literary and dramatic genres throughout the last millennium, and he still occupies a significant place in contemporary popular culture across East Asia. Currently, Bao-gong is also the subject of religious worship in roughly two dozen temples in mainland China and Taiwan. The deification of Bao-gong in the last few centuries attests to the close link and mutual influence between popular fiction and popular religion in late imperial China. Furthermore, Bao-gong is sometimes worshiped as King Yama, judging the fifth court of hell. This paper will examine the origins of Bao-gong's identification with King Yama, with a special emphasis on Bao-gong related fiction. I shall argue that Bao-gong's identification with King Yama is not only deeply rooted in the literary tradition in general, but can also be attributed in particular to the influence of the court case stories (gong-an) from the late Ming that elaborate on Bao-gong's position as a judge in hell. In my talk, I will suggest treating the Ming stories depicting Bao-gong as King Yama not only as the zenith of Bao-gong's mythmaking process, but also as a key to understanding his religious worship in the following generations. This talk will be based on a literary analysis of these stories in conjunction with field work I conducted in mainland China and Taiwan in 2009-2010.

Contemporary Chinese Art: Institutions and the Everyday

Discussant: Nicole Kwoh,
Saturday, 2:50 PM Kent 522B

Thomas Chen, University of California, Los Angeles

Censorship and Editions of Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads
Keywords: censorship, China, Mo Yan, translation, fetishism. This paper seeks to examine literary censorship in contemporary China by analyzing the various editions of a formerly banned novel by Mo Yan, The Garlic Ballads. Seldom has literary censorship been theorized in recent scholarship. Instead, news media have effectively monopolized discourse on Chinese censorship, especially of the Internet, and when they do "cover" censorship of literature, the stories sketched often star an artist whose creative juices are Three-Gorges-dammed by a government constantly looking over his shoulders, wielding a gigantic red pen. While it is far from my purpose to deny that authors in China suffer real obstacles and limitations in what they can write about and publish, morality tales pitting a powerless writer against an all-powerful state mask the complexity of the issue. This paper problematizes facile categories. By comparing the various editions of The Garlic Ballads, including the translated edition published in the US, I seek to challenge the traditional definition of censorship itself, questioning the boundaries of where editing ends and where censoring begins, and whether there is such a thing as an uncensored original text. Richard Burt's concept of the "fetishism of censorship" will also be discussed. In our age of transnational capitalism, one must address the possible commodification of "Banned in China."

Yao Wu, Stanford University

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood: The "Two Xu Debate" at the 1929 First Chinese National Fine Arts Exhibition
Mei Zhan of 1929 in Shanghai was the first fine arts exhibition held at a national level in Chinese history. The exchange of opinions on this occasion, documented in a concurrent publication, has become arguably the most influential legacy of Mei Zhan. Because the two figures involved - artist Xu Beihong championing realism, and poet Xu Zhimo defending Cézanne and Matisse - are both surnamed Xu, this event has come to be known as the "Two Xu Debate." In existing scholarship, the debate is typically discussed only in artistic terms, and the two Xus' shared references to European art tend to suggest that Mei Zhan signified Chinese artists' embrace of Western culture. My project expands the discursive boundaries of the debate, which have been conventionally set around issues of the Chinese reception of Western artistic modernism. I offer a close look at Xu Beihong's approved and disapproved artists - European and Chinese - and read the debate as having been concerned with a legitimate painting style in ink as well as in oil. I further situate this exchange in the context of China's avid learning from the West. By relating the debate to the Chinese local efforts to make art more accessible to the public, based on European models, I explore the socio-historical values of Mei Zhan. I finally argue that although the realist style that Xu Beihong advocated would eventually gain the upper hand, Xu Zhimo's historically grounded writing contributed greatly to the development of modern art criticism in China.

Leadership in Japan: Labor, Economics, Security

Discussant: John Leisure,
Saturday, 2:50 PM Kent 522D

Ksenia Kurochkina, Waseda University

Workplace of Young Japanese Farmers
The research focuses on analysis of workplace of young Japanese people who left cities for working in rural areas as farmers. Analysis of data since 1990s in Japan indicates that some young people move from urban to rural areas in Japan contradicting a mainstream move to the big cities from remote areas. The trend is accompanied by mass media boom in agricultural activities and rural life style, as well as a number of governmental supporting programs for youth employment in rural areas. This paper explores the agent of this move back to the land, young farmer, and seeks to deeply analyze workplace of young Japanese people engaged in farming. The study concentrates on reasons why these young people who experienced urban employment opportunities, finally preferred to become farmers in remote regions. Their values with regard to working life are explored. Additionally, social constraints, incentives and substantiality of young farmers' workplace are elaborated. The research is conducted by semi-structured interviews and observations of the working lives of young Japanese farmers. This research will contribute to studies of new working cultures in Japan emerging since 1990s. Implications derived from the research will assist in betterment of relevant governmental policies in enlarging young rural population.

Giulio Pugliese, University of Cambridge

Leaders behind Japan's China Policy
Following Prime Minister Koizumi's resignation in 2006, Japan's government has pursued new engagement and hedging policies aimed at the P.R.C. This study attributes the fluctuation between the engagement and hedging component of Japan's China policy to a number of factors, including the under-analyzed personalization of foreign policy making, particularly the growing influence of individual PMs. In order to assess the role of personality, I analyze the consecutive administrations and foreign policies of four different PMs: Abe Shinzō, Fukuda Yasuo, Asō Tarō, and Hatoyama Yukio. As thoroughbreds of central lineages of the Japanese political establishment, their Weltanschauung, and desired foreign and China policies present strong similarities with those of their illustrious forefathers. Moreover, this study introduces and analyzes non-scrutinized key foreign-policymakers acting in tandem with the PM, such as Administrative Vice-Minister Yachi Shotarō, whose imprint has been decisive. Lastly, the influence of leadership is compared with the role of international and domestic politics in influencing policy preferences and decision-making. Provisional conclusions suggest that leaders do matter in Japan's foreign policy and policy making. The main target of contemporary leaders' foreign policy agenda has been China, and to a lesser extent the U.S. Moreover, rather than domestic and international variables, their personal idiosyncrasies and prolonged interest in diplomacy were central in the exercise of leadership, to the point that concern with foreign policy-making distracted them from the imperatives of politics; failure to stay in power has been partly of their own making.

Rie Taniguchi, Boston College

How was the Japan’s challenge of the Washington Consensus “socially constructed”? : A review of OECF papers between 1984 and 1991
During the heyday of the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese government became a vocal critic of its market-liberalizing prescriptions. Japanese bureaucrats and development experts began criticizing the legitimacy of neoliberal knowledge sponsored by IMF and World Bank. The key event characterizing the challenge surfaced in the late 80s when the bureaucrats from Japan’s Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF) which handled Japan’s oversea development loans began criticizing the World Bank’s famous Structural Adjustment Loans (SAL). Furthermore, they began to advocate alternative knowledge of economic development based on Japan’s own experience.

By interrogating quarterly research papers produced by OECF between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I aim to trace this initial period of “sense making” within the Japanese aid bureaucracy that culminated into Japan’s open criticism of SAL. My data suggests that Japan’s challenge of Washington Consensus did not naturally emerge from unique cultural philosophy or locally-produced economic knowledge that was “indigenous” to Japan. In deed, the challenge was “socially constructed” (Berger and Luckmann 1967) in increasingly transnational and conflicting policy making environments where the bureaucrats and development experts from Japan and the United States increasingly interacted with each other. Overall, I argue that transnational interactions of ideas and institutional meaning making accompanied by political and economic interests of the state drove Japan to shape its own unique policy paradigm challenging the Washington Consensus in the 1990s.

Korean Popular Culture and the Bounds of the State

Discussant: Jon Kief, Columbia University
Saturday, 2:50 PM Kent 522C

Cody Black, Lawrence University

From Cute to Sexy: Formulating the Allegedly Unfair Banning Process of K-Pop Music Videos
The recent banning of HyunA's music video "Bubble Pop" has caused criticism of the seemingly unfair banning process utilized by South Korean media watchdogs. It was stated that HyunA's provocative choreography is no greater than other prominent, unbanned music videos. In this light, this paper investigates the portrayed sexuality in South Korean music videos to aid in formulating the obscure banning process utilized by the media watchdogs. After determining that the sexuality displayed by both banned and highly successful music videos is strikingly similar, the idea of a spectral transition process is presented to help explain how these unbanned videos are unquestionably allowed to pass for public consumption on television music programs. This spectrum states that unbanned music videos naturally progress in the images they display, with the videos transitioning from cute to sexy. Banned videos, however, bypass this transition. Two reasonings are suggested to support this notion. The first is that the images of cute are thought to obfuscate and discredit the images sexiness that the unbanned videos eventually portray, thus allowing these videos to bypass the scrutiny of the media watchdogs. The second reason is purely economical. The transition period allows for an continually increasing fan base, which allows for chronological video releases to be received well and perform greatly in an economic sense. Despite the amount of portrayed sexuality, a video in this condition that is bound to strengthen South Korea's global soft-power image and to profit greatly is likely to stay unbanned without question.

Jae Sang Lee, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Was the 'first' wave from Korea? Or in Korea? : The Korean Wave in China in 1997 and Hong Kong movies in Korea in 1987
The Korean wave, a term coined in China in 1997, is referring to 'the current fad for all aspects of south Korean popular culture' - including but not limited to movies, music, clothes and hair styles. As some scholars would recall, it is sweeping across East Asia like a cultural tempest. However, this is not the first one sighted as an intercultural sensation in East Asia. In 1987, Hong Kong Gangster films swept across South Korea had a strong impact on Korean popular culture. Compared to how the Korean wave was originated in China in 1997, a breakthrough of Hong Kong Gangster films in Korea in 1987 shows strong resemblances in terms of how they were initiated and how much influences they had in China and Korea, respectively. This paper will explain the ideas behind a development of these two different phenomena. While it will pay close attention to the departure points of these two phenomena, juxtaposing similarities and differences, it will eschew from drawing a conclusion entangled by comparisons made in the paper. Instead, considering different time periods and situations, it will concentrate on an analysis with unintentional suggestions that these two cases might have some resemblances. By analyzing iconic stars who initiated each phenomenon, Ahn Jae Wook and Zhang Guo Rong, many parts of their success will be dissected, including how they debuted, the size of their impacts, career strategies and political situations during these times. Since it is these two stars initiated each phenomenon, their cases will be able to detail the startup and the growth of Korean Wave in China since 1997 and Hong Kong movies' influence in Korea since 1987.

Women and the Family in Late Qing

Discussant: Tristan Brown, Columbia University
Saturday, 2:50 PM Kent 511

Laura Warne, Columbia University

Placing the Picture: Photographs of Families in Nineteenth-Century China
Photography has long been preoccupied with documenting the 'other,' be it person, culture, or place. This preoccupation accompanied the emergence of photographic technology on the world stage, just as colonial expansion was bringing unfamiliar people and cultures together with unprecedented intensity. Western photographers were quick to recognize the importance of family in Chinese society and took photos of families for personal, ethnographic, and commercial purposes. A different side to the story of nineteenth-century family portraiture in China comes from the families who embraced photography and played an active role in their own depiction. Since photography was considered synonymous with Westernization and modernization, by participating in the photographic process, Chinese subjects were making a statement, not only about their own perspectives on modern life, but also about their families as active participants in the transition to modernity. In this way, images of 'authentic' Chinese families were also constructions capable of communicating much more than mere likenesses. This paper will consider how nineteenth-century Chinese families were depicted in photography, the role of photography in nineteenth-century visual culture, and what these photographs might have communicated to both the Chinese and Westerners who saw them.

Jessica Moyer, Yale University

Gender and Genre: Transformations of Classics on Women in the Ming and Qing
The Lienü zhuan and the "Nei ze" section of the Li ji were two of the most famous, most-quoted and most-republished texts on women in premodern China. These texts often reflect the ritual and social structures of elite society in pre-imperial China, but they enjoyed a vigorous afterlife in the Ming and Qing dynasties in texts aimed at a broader, popular audience. Whether transformed into vernacular fiction or excerpted in household manuals, Ming and Qing editions of classics on women were presented and adapted in ways that met contemporary needs. They were as likely to collapse the distance between present and past as to venerate antiquity, juxtaposing unlikely sets of heroines and virtues to widely varying ends. This paper examines reworkings of these classics and biographies in household manuals, encyclopedias, women's conduct books, vernacular fiction, and imperially commissioned commentary editions of the late Ming through the high Qing, considering the genres of ritual classic and of biography themselves, the new valences of meaning these classical sources acquire as they are quoted, excerpted, interpreted and retold in various texts, the changing relationship between "elite" texts and "popular" audiences, and the subtle changes in the discourses of gender and virtue from one genre to the next.

Ye Yuan, Columbia University

Women's Work in Ming-Qing China
The economic growth and commercialization in Ming-Qing China posited the women's work in a more visible position and spread it to a wider social space. The economic function of women's work started to be recognized and pursued, rather than be pushed inside the household as merely womanly work. However, the ideal version of family life as well as the ideal womanhood made the concept of women's work complicated. Thus women's work was either neglected as unwomanly labor, or masked as women's part of household responsibility. Hence, in Ming-Qing China, on the one hand, the notion of womanly work and economic growth drew all the women, disregarding their social status, into economic activities. On the other hand, it despised women's work as unwomanly, and avoided admitting the economic function of women's work. This paper, thus, intends to have a closer examination of women's work in Ming-Qing China and women's economic contribution to the household, as well as to point out that the paradox related to women's work generated dilemma faced by, and not limited to, women.

Contestation of Self and Nation in Translation

Discussant: Myra Sun, Columbia University
Saturday, 2:50 PM Kent 522A

L. Maria Bo, Columbia University

A Lost Sheep: Self, Translation, and Affect in Yu Dafu
The translation of the word “self” into Chinese has been well-documented as an integral part of modern Chinese history, but “self-translations” of individual writers amid the overwhelming context of revolution are less theorized. Yu Dafu (1896-1945) presents an intriguing test case among May Fourth writers as the first to write both autobiographically and multilingually: English, German, and French appear interspersed among his Chinese texts. This paper focuses on the multilinguality of Yu Dafu’s works to argue that the many languages in these autobiographic fictions do not just translate literally and culturally between “East” and “West” but also metaphorically between the author and the page. His self-writing engages readers in linguistic interplay as it code-switches between Chinese and Romanized scripts t effectively translate affective states. It is in preserving multilinguality and not translating, in other words, that real translation of self and culture can emerge. Ultimately, this focus on multilinguality can suggest for us new comparative directions for East-West linguistic encounters.

Tyran Grillo, Cornell University

Seeing Red: Semiotic Politics in Ashibe Taku's Murder in the Red Chamber
In 2004, Japanese mystery novelist Ashibe Taku published his Murder in the Red Chamber, a rewrite of Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber. Though ten years in the making and a major bestseller in Japan, Ashibe's homage to the reigning masterwork of eighteenth-century Chinese fiction was met with fairly positive criticism when translated into Chinese in 2008, but not before it caught the attention of right-wing nationalist Die Huayu, who has since sought to boycott the novel as an affront to China's literary heritage. Die's argument is made all the more hypocritical by the fact that rewrites, adaptations, and parodies of Dream - not a few of which are far less respectful - have been produced in China for decades. During its journey from Chinese to Japanese and back again, it seems the novel acquired no small amount of cultural baggage. Is it merely the fact that a Japanese writer "mangled" a canonic work that so upsets Die, or is something more complex going on? This paper seeks to reflect on this question and to speculate on what effects my own English translation of Ashibe's novel (Kurodahan Press, January 2012) might have in the Anglophone world, where such baggage carries little meaning. My diagnosis: Murder in the Red Chamber directly reflects the changing importance of Dream, intensifying rather than undermining its iconic status in China and beyond.

Evolutions in Chinese Economic Development

Discussant: Arthur Pang, Columbia University
Saturday, 4:40 PM Kent 522A

Burak Gurel, The Johns Hopkins University

Changing Relations of Production in Chinese Agriculture From Decollectivization to Agrarian Capitalism
This paper contributes to the study of capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture in recent decades by making three main arguments. Firstly, it proposes that consecutive land tenure reforms since 1978 have primarily intended to promote the development of agrarian capitalism by making land transfers from smallholders to larger farmers and agribusiness companies increasingly easier. Secondly, it identifies the roots of agrarian capitalism in the early years of decollectivization where some individual farmers managed to transform themselves to capitalist farmers by increasing their scale of production through acquiring more means of production. Finally, contrary to the studies which see farmer cooperatives embodying an alternative to agribusiness companies, it suggests that many of the farmer cooperatives in contemporary China are company-like cooperatives that are not very different from agribusiness companies in terms of their shareholding and decision making structures and the production relations they facilitate.

Clemens-Herbert Hofmeister, University of Cambridge / Great Britain

China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA): "New Agreements - Old Games?"
This paper examines the past two years of progress of China's economic ties with the members of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). In 2010, the agreement of CAFTA was launched as part of the Central government's effort to promote trade liberalisation, with a specific focus on accelerating the development of China's south western region (Yunnan, Guangxi AR, Sichuan, and Chongqing). Due to this agreement, roughly 90 percent of all products are freely traded between China and the old ASEAN nations (ASEAN6). By 2015 this will increase to include all ten members of the ASEAN. This article discusses issues of trade deficits, intra regional trade development, and the continued advancement in relation to China's trade with bordering countries - Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. However, what also need to be taken into account are the non-economic geopolitical factors which dampen the optimism for the success of this Free Trade Area. Light is shed on the improvements in the ongoing harmonisation of product standards (testing, labelling, certification requirements) and the survey of reliable statistical data (for trade, FDI, and manufacturing classification) which are comparable across all ten Member States for planning and policy making. An attempt to identify the Revealed Comparative Advantage Indices (RCA) for members of ASEAN is here undertaken in order to highlight the short-term winners and losers. Findings suggest that due to China's rising wages, labour intensive businesses relocated from coastal provinces not into China's backwaters but into ASEAN countries with efficient, sustainable sea ports and logistics networks as well as supply of cheap labour.

Wei Ma, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

From two-sector to four-sector: Analysis of Surplus Labor Migration in China (1949-2009)
Arising from industrialization and urbanization, this research reanalyzes the classic dual economics, and formulates a new four-sector framework to analyze the development of surplus labor migration in China, including urban formal sector, urban informal sector, rural industry and rural agriculture. According to this framework, we find that China has witnessed a unique transformation from dual economy to four-sector: two-sector (1949-1977), three-sector (1978-1991), and four-sector (1992-2009). The differences embodied in the four-sector structure, not only refers to income gap, but also to the disparity of public services and especially social security. Confronted with the four-segmented society, future trend of the structural change is "four into one" integration, which demands the equalization of access to basic public services, especially basic social security, such as healthcare, pension, subsistence allowances. This research would in-depth analyzes the trajectory of urban-rural development, especially focuses on the driving forces; and tries to clarify the way of how to integrate, with special preferences to social security, for The National 12th Five Year Program has put forward the establishment of social security system to bridge the gap, which should cover the basic needs of both urban and rural residents.

Contemporary Japanese Social Issues

Discussant: Chelsea Schieder, Columbia University
Saturday, 4:40 PM Kent 522C

Paul Capobianco, Seton Hall University

Human Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation in Japan
Over the last twenty years Japan has become the largest destination in Asia for trafficked women and children for sexual exploitation. Due to the illicit and clandestine nature of the trafficking business it is near impossible for researchers to procure accurate data or estimates to effectively gauge the severity of the problem. In conjunction with lax visa regulations and negligent law enforcement, Japan experiences one of the most severe human trafficking problems in the developed world. The U.S. Department of State classifies Japan as a ‘Tier 2’ country, which is defined as a country “whose government does not fully comply with the [Trafficking Victims Prevention Act’s] minimum standards but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards”. Japan remains the only developed country to be classified on this level and many experts even argue that this classification is even too generous. This paper is a condensed version of a longer paper which examines various sources of trafficking data pertaining to victims, arrests, and ethnicity. Doing so will explain the complexity of the human trafficking situation in Japan and analyze trafficking trends in the 21st century.

Chizuru Ghelani, York University

Refugee Making and National Identity in Japan: Discourse Analysis of Japan's Newly Established Refugee Resettlement Program
In September 2010, twenty-eight Karen refugees arrived in Japan under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) Third Country Refugee Resettlement Program. They were the first group of people to arrive since the Japanese government launched the program in December 2008. The resettlement program was taken up to be a significant change in the Japan's stance towards refugees issues since the Japanese government has long been criticized for its restrictive refugee admission policy. While the program is indeed a positive change, the question remains as to whether and how Japan is changing its attitude towards refugee protection within Japan. Locating language as a site of examination for this social change (Fairclough, 1992, 2009), this study asks how the public discourse around the newly established program is constructed. In particular, I will focus on the relationship between "refugee" making process and national identity. More specifically, I am interested in examining whether and how historical tension between western hegemony and Japanese nationalist discourse continues to shape refugee protection system in present Japan. In seeking the answers to these question, I conduct a discourse analysis by examining two newspapers - Japan Times Online (English) and Asahi Shinbun (Japanese). Special attention is paid to the articles of these newspapers which were published on September 29th, 2010, the day after Karen refugees arrived in Japan.

Shota Ogawa, University of Rochester

Invention and Persistence: Writing a Zainichi Korean Film History
How can we best study the representations of Japan's Korean minorities (commonly called 'zainichi Koreans') on film? Scholars have attempted historiographic studies that focus on Japanese stereotypes of Koreans perpetuated in Japanese films (eg. Sato Tadao). But films are not only representations based on 'likeness,' but also objects of 'liking' (Jonathan Flatley). Our identity is constructed in dynamic relation not only to our self-images, but also objects that we value. I study films in their connotative and denotative dimensions: films not only document and represent particular events pertaining zainichi Koreans, but also denote a desire for historicity in a manner akin to monuments and heritages. A combination of factors ranging from the impact of film preservation movement to the rise of digital media have contributed to the popular recognition of film’s value as something more than a product of the cultural industry. I argue that the politics of reevaluating the heritage value of films—newsreels, amateur films, and archival materials as well as commercial fictions—must be studied in relation to practices in the margins of cinema. My dissertation studies documentary films, fiction films, and film festival programs that have inventively presented a vision of “zainichi cinema” that includes, as heritage of the Korean diaspora, heterogeneous materials such as colonial-era (pro-Japan) propaganda films made by Korean filmmakers, post-war Japanese studio feature films about zainichi Koreans, and U.S. military footage of Koreans during the Occupation (1945-1952).

Authorship and Legitimacy in Ming Material Production

Discussant: Elizabeth Lawrence, Columbia University
Saturday, 4:40 PM Kent 424

Kyoungjin Bae, Columbia University

Imperial Reign Marks in the Semantics of Ming Material Culture
My paper investigates the changing artisanal signatures on lacquerware from the late Yuan to early Ming dynasty in order to understand the changing nature of craft and authorship. Unlike the conventional argument that artisan's self-consciousness did not appear until the late Ming, many lacquer artisans in Jiangnan area consciously signed their objects in the fourteenth century. The word used in these signatures was zao (造), meaning to be "made" or "invented" by. By using zao, artisans claimed complete and immediate authorship of the entire process of craft. This holistic (self-)perception of craftsmanship changed in the beginning of the Ming dynasty with the establishment of imperial workshops, which segmented the production process and necessitated a higher authority of inspection. Objects manufactured in the imperial workshops bore reign marks that consisted of six highly formalized characters. In these marks, the conventional zao was replaced by zhi (製), often translated as "manufactured." However, the word zhi epitomizes the transforming nature of production and the diverse contexts of consumption, and therefore it is not reducible to the single meaning of manufacture. Hence, I argue that we should think of different translations in different contexts of the object. Specifically, it means to be "supervised" in the context of hierarchical structure of imperial production, and "(re-)authorized" in the context of re-use and gift-giving. Embedded in the word, therefore, is a nuanced sociocultural interplay of object and its environment.

Noa Grass, University of British Columbia

A New Perspective on the Role of Paper Currency in the Early Ming
In 1375, the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) began to print paper bills as the new, centralized, form of currency in China. As they depreciated during the fifteenth century, silver became the preferred medium of exchange, and by the sixteenth century paper was abandoned completely in both government and private transactions. Beyond the assumption that excess printing of money led to inflation that the state could not curb, very little is known about the function of paper currency. While silver and its global circulation remains central in discussions on Ming economy, paper money represents little more than an example of a failed economic policy. But unlike silver, which the state adopted reluctantly in acceptance of economic reality, paper money was a product of the economic and financial thought of the early Ming and as such deserves a deeper analysis. This paper looks at paper currency in one of its primary functions: payment of government salaries. Originally intended to be issued in grain, paper bills began to replace grain payments to government officials since 1386. Despite the appearance of a transition from payment in kind to payment in money, this transition was never complete and paper money remained interchangeable with other commodities. Without a clear distinction between money and commodity, the meaning of money itself in the Ming needs to be reconsidered. Using imperial decrees and essays on the employment of paper currency, this paper will contribute to a better understanding of the administration of Ming state finance and its economic consequences.

Yijun Wang, Columbia University

The Absence of the Artisan's Signature
In the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), gold, silver, and pewter were used to make vessels for everyday use. Those vessels were produced in both imperial and local workshops. In this paper discusses the absence of artisan's signature in local pewter, silver and gold vessel production. The artisan's signature in this paper is either an artisan's name or a workshop name - any mark that can refer to the vessel's producer. The artisan's signatures are commonly found in Song and Yuan dynasty silver and gold vessels, but in the Ming dynasty, they only persisted in the silver and gold vessels in imperial or princely workshops. In local production, most of the vessels have no inscription, and on the few that have inscriptions, the artisan's signature is missing. By making comparisons on artisan's signatures between the pre-Ming vessels and imperial produced vessels to analyze the functions of signature, this paper shows the transition of function of artisan's signature from advertisement to quality control and taking responsibility. And by making comparison on the content of inscriptions between imperial workshops and local workshops, this paper shows the different needs for different customers. By embedding the inscriptions in the a socioeconomic context, the paper shows the absence of the artisan's signature was related to the production technique and consumption mechanism, the nature of silver and gold as money, and the circulation of vessels.

Readership, Writership and Literary Culture in Meiji Japan

Discussant: Robert Tuck, Columbia University
Saturday, 4:40 PM Kent 522B

Christopher Born, Washington University in St. Louis

Confession of Self, Patriotism, and Faith in Uchimura Kanzō's Consolations of a Christian
During Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912), Uchimura Kanzō found himself in the midst of a powerful clash between his Christian convictions and the prevailing Shintō worldview espoused by the government as well as many within the intellectual and literary establishment. Due to his refusal to bow to the image of the Emperor Meiji at a school ceremony at the elite school in which he taught (he considered doing so to be an act of worship), he became labeled as unpatriotic at best, and a traitor at worst. Pariah that he became, he was lambasted in the media and failed to obtain gainful employment. In these dire circumstances, he discovered his voice as a writer, and used personal narrative to create a convincing defense. In this essay, I explore how Uchimura used the Bible, Western history, and personal experience to introduce his own version of patriotism while seeking to legitimize his 'foreign' beliefs in his early works, especially Consolations of a Christian.

Molly Des Jardin, University of Michigan

Collective Authorship and Reception: Rethinking the Meiji Literary World
While literary analysis has traditionally focused on literature attributed to a solitary individual, the reality of how literature was viewed in Meiji Japan (1868-1912) defies this categorization. In fact, assessing literature through the framework of authors as individual writers obscures the system of collective authorship and attribution that was the norm, rather than the exception, at this time. Works of literature were often published within a system of coterie magazines that fostered experimental writing within the context of a group, often anonymously or collaboratively, and an idea of collective authorship as surpassing the sum of individual writers widely accepted. Consequently, literary reviews attributed works to the coterie journal in which they appeared as a kind of primary "author," and even critiqued entire issues or groups as self-contained collections of literature. Looking at the reviews of works as authored by magazines, assessments of groups and entire issues, and coterie journals' active participation in this system, we can conclude that one definition of the Meiji author was that of a publication and its holistic identity. This focus provides a more accurate picture of how literary works were read at the time they were produced, and ultimately can achieve a more accurate understanding and robust theorization of collective authorship at the turn of the 20th century. Here, I analyze reviews of literature attributed to a magazine in Kokumin no Tomo, Bungakkai's reprinted reviews of its own issues, and Mesamashigusa’s re-review of a novel in the media-specific context of its placement in an anthology after the author’s death.

Rachel Epstein, University of Pennsylvania

Expectations for the First Modern Japanese Poetry
In the case of the unanimously designated first modern Japanese poetry, matters of form and content have typically attracted attention. The 'Shintaishishō,' "New Poetry," published in 1882, contained poems that broke rules on both fronts in unprecedented ways. Yet the 'Shintaishishō' was a basis for modern poetry not only by virtue of the attributes of its verse. Its authors followed old practices in assembling their apparatus: The collection's prefaces and forenotes make plain the rationale for composition and for the stylistic choices involved. This poetry was crafted to be read in a circumscribed mode - a mode conditioned by lavish education. Therefore its modernism looks to be a function of the expectations inscribed in the contents. A critical mass of the 'Shintaishishō' audience had not, however, been lavishly educated. The trepidation in the tone of its explanatory prose in fact registers the authors' anxiety about the diversity of readers with which the poetry surely was to meet. Consideration of this tone, and notation of a range of sets of expectations on the part of its audience, make it clear that the collection's significance originated in its public, too. And then there is the matter of present-day scholarship. Today, the adjectives "modern" and "modernist" communicate assumptions about the autonomy of the artist and the work of art. So when we talk about the first modern Japanese poetry, we should take stock of the relation not only between intent and reception in the Meiji years, but also between our expectations for poetry and those that held in 1882.

Science and Law in Qing and Republican China

Discussant: Meng Wei, New York University
Saturday, 4:40 PM Kent 511

Wei Peng, Stanford University

Forensic Science in the stories of the “Oriental Sherlock Holmes”
In 1896, Shiwu bao introduced detective fiction into China for the first time. The story was translated by Zhang Kunde from the story “The Navel Treaty” in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes. Since then, the new genre immediately became very popular and led to Chinese imitations and derivative that flooded the fiction market in 1910s-1940s. Cheng Xiaoqing’s The Huo Sang Cases was the best known among these Chinese detective fictions. Cheng particularly valued the role of science in detective fiction. He emphasized that “detective fiction is a disguised textbook of science.” However, detective fiction’s engagement with science was less investigated in existent scholarship. How is science situated in these stories? In this essay, I investigate the change in forensic science represented in the novel. Focusing on the appearance of the chemical compound ether, I illustrate how forensic methods based on a new body of scientific knowledge established an entirely different connection between the body and the truth. Moreover, I explore further how this new body of knowledge is acquired both within and outside the text. I argue that, instead of directly interacting with experience and practice, it was produced, circulated, and reproduced in the process of reading, translating and wring: a text-to-text process, which echoes the phenomenon of “semiotic modernity” at the beginning of the twentieth century China.

Amanda Brown-Inz, Columbia GSAS

A Curious Science: Elite Reception of the John G. Kerr Hospital for the Insane in Early Twentieth Century Guangzhou
In this paper, I consider the elite patronage of China's first mental hospital, which was established by Protestant medical missionaries in the late nineteenth century, as a novel space for the navigation of Guangzhou elite performance. Examining the hospital's yearly financial reports for 1910-1920, I argue that merchants, medical experts, and civil servants were able to utilize this unique institution in order to establish their elite status, and to distinguish their elite identity from Guangzhou's older landed gentry elite. I frame my argument within the boundaries of Steven Miles' work on the Xuehaitang school, and Michael Tsin's consideration of 1920's labor relations, posing the nineteen teens as a distinct transitional stage in which novel Western medical institutions and discourses enabled new elites to demonstrate their charitable abilities, and to participate in transnational commercial, political, and intellectual networks.

Michella Wing Sze Chiu, Columbia University

Social Implications of Medical Litigation in Republican China: The Reciprocal Influences among Patients, Medical Practitioners and the State
One of the recurring themes in the study of medical history in Republican China is the discussion of the prevailing state-society paradigm and its application to our understanding of the social changes in this period marked by cultural efflorescence but, at the same time, political tensions. In this respect, laws as part of the state-building process should not be neglected. This paper aims at illuminating the social implications of medical disputes and litigation in Republican China, with patients, practitioners of western medicine and the state all playing a role with reciprocal influences. The three parties struggled for the power to define what "medical malpractice" was with different hidden agendas. While medical practitioners aimed at retaining the world of medical knowledge as a sphere closed to laymen, medical procedures became out of patients' control and in turn, contributed to patients' perception of medical practitioners bearing full legal responsibility in accidents unlike their counterparts in Ming and Qing China. At the same time, the state endeavor to control professionals including medical practitioners to consolidate state power. By investigating into cases of medical litigation, this paper asks questions including the how modern "law" as a newly constructed domain of knowledge come to people's mind as a way to settle disputes, and how medical doctors, without legal background, conceptualize "law" at that time.

Mirela David, New York University

The eugenic underpinnings of the debate on birth control sparked by Margaret Sanger's visit to China in 1922
This paper will center on uncovering the attraction exercised by eugenic thought as scientific grounds of justification for birth control, as well as their framing as solutions for the overpopulation problem in 1920s China. While eugenics was regarded as a solution for racial salvation, the views on birth control were divided. Eugenic thought permeated the majority of the debates in the 20s and 30s in China. Renowned social reformers, journalists, and intellectuals were employing eugenic arguments in their search for solutions to immediate social problems, such as the decline of the Chinese nation, overpopulation, disease, weakness, and foreign invasion. They were trying to rationalize these social challenges in biological terms. This paper seeks to situate the debates in China within their proper global context, because salient social movements such as the Birth Control Movement led by Margaret Sanger gained momentum simultaneously in various parts of the world. Margaret Sanger's trip to China in 1922, held a double meaning: it reinforced images of China as an example for the necessity of birth control because of overpopulation and insufficient resources, and it also sparked an intriguing debate around the eugenic quality of birth control in the Chinese press. Margaret Sanger's lecture "The ins and outs of birth control: Past, Present and Future?" challenged the traditional free birth ethic. Some intellectuals doubted the eugenic capabilities of birth control, from the point of view of national betterment, while advocates of birth control sustained they can choose excellence over low quality.

Body and Sexuality in Daoism

Discussant: Prof. Gregory Pflugfelder, Columbia University
Saturday, 4:40 PM Kent 522D

Hsinyi Lin, Columbia University

A Preliminary Examination of the Discourses on Body and Sexuality in the Buddho-Daoist Debates in Early Medieval China
Using the debates between Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism collected in Hongming ji 弘明集, this paper examines how the issues of the body and sexuality in them were represented and argued. It also explores how and in which way these bodily issues were utilized to the best interest by the different sides, and why they mattered for each camp in the debates. Unlike most of previous studies of these medieval debates whose major concern is "Sinicization of Buddhism" or "Indianization of Chinese culture," this paper suggests that this approach not only wrongly assume two distinct unrelated cultural entities, it also reduced various potential issues existing in the debates merely into an issue of cultural reconciliation or cultural confliction. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to reexamine these medieval debates from the perspective of the body and sexuality by drawing on Foucault's insight of the intricate relationship between body, sexuality, discourse and power. This paper contends that these bodily issues not only serve as the media of reconciliation when the purpose of the debates is to compromise the three teachings, they were also utilized to differentiate between the self and the other when the debates aim to strike their opponents and compete for royal patronage. Some Buddhists, by associating Daoism merely with sex and body preservation, branded it as indecent and degraded expression of Dao while exalting Buddhism as pure and authentic form of Dao due to its focus on the cultivation of "spirit" and "mind." As a result, the seemingly dualistic stereotypes of and relationship between Daoism and Buddhism gradually took shape during these debates on the basis of the dichotomy between the body and spirit, immorality and morality, vulgarity and chastity, falsehood and truth, and mortality and transcendence.

Adrien Stoloff, Columbia University

The Daoist Transformation of the Bedroom Arts: From Health to Transcendence
Medical texts dating from the early Han dynasty describe several practices to maintain health and prolong life. These include breathing exercises, calisthenics, dietary regimens, and sexual cultivation. One of the practices, the sexual cultivation technique known as huanjingbunao 還精補腦 ("returning the jing [primal essence] to nourish the brain") was later appropriated by Daoists. Described in esoteric texts such as the Union of Yin and Yang and the Discourse on the Highest Tao Under Heaven, the practice of "returning the jing to nourish the brain" dates from at least the early Han dynasty. However, when Daoists appropriated it, they fashioned it in such a way that it was no longer a method for maintaining health but instead a way to attain divine transcendence. How did the early medical technique differ from the later Daoist one? In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault defines a moral code of conduct not just as a set of rules but also as a way for ethical subjects to form themselves (rapport á soi; the relationship to oneself). I would like to apply Foucault's concept of rapport á soi to the practice of "returning the jing to nourish the brain" in order to better understand how the technique was transformed from one with a goal of health and longevity to one with a goal of attaining divine transcendence.

The Vectors of Power in Chosŏn Korea: the State, Community, and Ideology

Discussant: Sun Yoo, Columbia University
Saturday, 4:40 PM Kent 403

Yoonjung Seo, University of California, Los Angeles

The Confucian Rhetoric of Sage Kingship and Chinese Utopian Images in the Late Chosŏn Court Painting
My paper will examine the political functions of court paintings depicting Chinese sage kings and golden ages in glorying the monarchs' rulership and celebrating the prestige of the ruling class in the late Chosŏn dynasty. Exploring various themes such as Chinese virtuous emperors, court ladies, and palaces, I will analyze how the Chinese sage-king myth and utopian rhetoric were represented in the Chosŏn court and how these subjects were reinvented by Chosŏn elites. First, I will investigate how the theme of Chinese sage kings was depicted in text and visuals and how Chinese sovereignty was demonstrated, focusing on Delegations Paying Tribute to the Court, which depicts King Wu (r.1087-1043 BC) of the Zhou dynasty. I will argue that Chosŏn kings considered the Zhou dynasty an ideal Confucian society and manipulated the images reminiscent of the Zhou to propagate royal authority and re-affirming Confucian orthodoxy. Secondly, noting that Chinese maidens appear not only in paintings of the historically-based Chinese tales but also in paintings to commemorating rites held by the Chosŏn king and high officials, I will propose that the images functioned to elevate contemporary secular events of Koreans to the level of ancient legendary Chinese sages in ritual context. The painting of Han Palace, which depicts palace architecture of the Han dynasty, played a similar role but in a different context. Based on extant paintings housed in the National Palace Museum, I investigate how Chinese civilization was visualized or imagined by Koreans and what messages these paintings delivered to royal audiences. This analysis offers meaningful insights into the Korean's attitude towards Chinese history and the lure of Chinese civilization at that time.

Wenjiao Cai, Harvard University

Negotiating Power at the Local Level: a Case Study of the Community Compact in 17th Century Sangju
This paper examines how the community compact functioned as a negotiating point between the state and local elites, using the community compact of 17th century Sangju, Chosŏn Korea as a case study.Traditional historiography interprets the implementation of the community compact in Chosŏn Korea as a manifestation of the state's devotion to Confucian education and social transformation. Nevertheless, community compacts in the 17th century were mostly promoted voluntarily by local elites in their localities. This paper revises the state-centered narrative by examining: 1) What kind of social changes encouraged Sangju local elites to voluntarily promote the community compact; 2) What kinds of values local elites intended to convey or promote through the community compact?and 3) How the community compact reflects local elites' perception of their relationship to the state and other members of their locality? This paper concludes by suggesting that the community compact, in addition to functioning as a strategy for local elites to disseminate Confucian ideology among non-elites and transform the countryside, served as a channel for local elites to negotiate with state power in the localities. This paper also engages in a comparative study with the local community compact of Ming China and indicates how similar political ideas and institutions were deployed differently in various social contexts.

Misung Kim, Yonsei University

Labor Organization and Monopolization in Late Chosŏn Korea
The purpose of this study is to analyze the role of organizational power in monopoly by focusing on the specific physical labor organizations which got licenses from government in late Chosŏn Korea. Some of the community organizations, which had formed naturally for the ordinary purposes like moving coffins in funeral, transformed to the commercial organizations by specializing some types of labors due to the development of the labor market in Seoul. They even volunteered to take charge of particularly hard statute labors and became the government-hired merchants having licenses for trading some commodities instead. Their responsible works were kinds of hard tasks such as transportations, constructions, processing goods or dredging up the stream bottom. After few decades they started commercial activities, they tended to monopolize their fields. Since their labor fields necessarily demanded strong human organization system, their monopolization was based on the organizational power. By embossing the native private groups who became the government merchants, this analysis intend to overcome dichotomy that sharply dividing government and private merchants. This would discover the role of organizational power adding to the role of political and economic privileges as the grounds for monopolization.

John S. Lee, Harvard University

Protect the Pines, Punish the People: The Social Implications of Forest Conservation in Pre-Industrial Korea, 1600-1876
In Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) during the late seventeenth century, central bureaucrats provoked by the triple specters of wood scarcity, elite land grabs, and commoner slash-and-burn cultivation began restricting general access to pine forests along Korea’s western and southern coasts. Generally known as Reserved Forests (pongsan), these sites numbered in the range of 678 by the early nineteenth century, and their management was tasked to local functionaries such as magistrates, military officials, clerks and wardens. However, these same conservationist policies also empowered local functionaries to transform the Reserved Forests into mechanisms for extracting bribes and smuggling lumber. Meanwhile, in the coastal towns and villages during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, elites and commoners alike resorted to organizational means, notably the formation of community-level Pine Associations (songgye), to better meet the twin pressures of conservationist regulations and local wood scarcities.

Utilizing government records, literati treatises, lawsuit transcripts, and village-level documents, I argue that initial bureaucratic policies aimed at forest conservation actually contributed to growing social and environmental problems in southern Korea during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The government’s emphasis on protecting the Korean Red Pine (Pinus densiflora) proved detrimental to the long-term health of Korea’s coastal forests; the delegation of forest administration to local functionaries generated rural resentment and failed to clarify forest tenure rights; and the rise of local organizations dedicated to pine conservation, while confirming the state’s successful insertion of pine protection into village-level norms, augured other social divides that would turn Korea’s nineteenth century into the “age of rebellions.”

Columbia University in the City of New York

Memory in Postwar East Asia

Jin Gong, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Seung-Cheol Lee, Columbia University

Linsen Li, University of Michigan

Justine Pak, Columbia University

Fang Xie, Stanford University

Security Issues and East/Southeast Asia

Justine Guichard, Columbia University

Charles Kraus, George Washington University

Charles Kraus, George Washington University

Chien Wen Kung, Columbia University

Dong Ju Lee, Columbia University

Jenny Shin, Tufts University

Guy Snodgrass, U.S. Naval War College

Art and Material Culture of Early China

Glenda Chao, Columbia University

Yitzchak Jaffe, Harvard University

Lei Yang, University of Pennsylvania

Frontiers and Foreign Lands in Early Japanese Literature

Marjorie Burge, University of California, Berkeley

Matthieu Felt, Columbia University

Stephen Ottinger, Columbia University

Yiwen Shen, University of Wisconsin

Premodern Chinese Poetry: The Book of Poetry and its Reverberations

Mark Frank, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jing Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thomas Mazanec, Princeton University

Fu Su, Columbia University

State and Society in Contemporary China

Charles Starks, Columbia University

Qingjie Zeng, University of Michigan

Yu Zeng, Columbia University

History, Poetry, and Historiography in Early Imperial China

Nina Duthie, Columbia University

Brian Lander, Columbia University

Yue Zhang, University of Toronto

Cartographies of Early Modern Japan and China

Joshua Batts, Columbia University

Guillermo Ruiz-Stovel, University of California, Los Angeles

Joshua Evan Schlachet, Columbia University

Borders of the Self in Inner Asia

Allison Hahn, University of Pittsburgh

Raymond Pun, CUNY Graduate Center

Benny Shaffer, Harvard University

Consuming Identities: Food, Health, and Ideas of Belonging

Alexis Agliano Sanborn, Harvard College

Jamyung Choi, University of Pennsylvania

Vivian L. Wong, University of California, Los Angeles

Representations of Disaster in Modern Japanese Art

Franz D. Hofer, Cornell University

Kay Kurashige, Columbia University

Nozomi Naoi, Harvard University

Space and Place in Chinese Literature

Allison Bernard, Columbia University

Di Luo, University of Southern California

Media and Production of Identity

Laura Brown, Columbia University

Julia Keblinska, Columbia University

Kristin Roebuck, Columbia University

Grace Ting, Yale University

Tibet: Cosmopolitanism and Modernity

Sarah Richardson, University of Toronto

Stacey Van Vleet, Columbia University

Wu Lan, Columbia University

Modern Korea: Experience of Crossings in Gender and Race

Jae Won Chung, Columbia University

Kyeungha Juli Min, Columbia University

Haeseong Park, Purdue University

Peripheries and Boundaries in the Qing: Identity, Ethnicity, and Empire

Tristan Brown, Columbia University

Devin T. Fitzgerald, Harvard University

Gladys Mac, University of Southern California

Picture, Press, and Protest: Considerations on Meiji's Empires

Colin Jones, Columbia University

Jihyung Kim, Korea University

Kelly McCormick, Columbia University

Reading Religion: Buddhism and Daoism in Medieval and Late Imperial China

Kevin Buckelew, Columbia University

Joseph P. Elacqua, Mohawk Valley Community College