How Should a Chinese Woman Look? Revisiting 'the Look' and the De-Westernization of Film Studies
Chris Berry, Associate Professor, Film Studies and Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Berkeley
January 25, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Comparative Study of "Institutional Templates" in East Asian Capitalism
Hong Yung Lee, Political Science, U.C. Berkeley
February 1, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
The theoretical framework of institutional templates posits that the economic and social organizations of a given country are isomorphically related. Seen from this perspective, the differences between the economic structures of China, Japan, and Korea, East Asia's principle societies, can be understood by looking at the ways that the three basic modes of human interaction (exchange, authority, and networks) have been enacted and developed in each country, resulting in distinct institutional templates. The lecture will analyze each country's traditional family system, which will then be related to the structural characteristics of that country's contemporary business institutions, their relations to the state, and more general approaches to social organizations.
Hong Yung Lee received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1973). He has been professor of political science at U.C., Berkeley, since 1991 and chair of Berkeley's Center for Korean Studies (1991-2001). He has authored numerous papers on Chinese and Korean politics and the books The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (University of California, 1978), and From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (University of California Press, 1991).
Chinese Phonology Research During The Chosun Dynasty (1392-1910)
Jae Don Lee, Professor, Chinese Language and Literature, Ewha Womans University, Korea
February 6, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Positive Action or Part-time-ization? Japan's Changing Environment for Equal Job Opportunity
Charles Weathers, Economics, Osaka City University
February 7, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Japan is noted for the persistence of gender discrimination in workplaces. Nevertheless, rising concern about declining economic competitiveness and the falling birthrate led the government, business, and organized labor to become more serious about promoting equal opportunity in the late 1990s. This presentation examines the course of policymaking leading up to the Revised Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1997, Positive Action (affirmative action) initiatives and conditions for part timers and other non-regular workers. While prospects for many professional and career-oriented women are improving, a deteriorating economy and the increasing "non-regularization" of the work force may mean worsening conditions for most women workers.
The Brazilian Imaginaire on Zen: Global Influences, Rhizomatic Forms
Christina Rocha, Religious Studies, University of Western Sydney
February 8, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This lecture aims to show that Zen Buddhism in Brazil is not isolated from global trends. Quite the contrary, not only is Zen in Brazil influenced by "centers" which originate the global traffic of ideas, people and images on Zen, but Brazil is also a "center" itself for other "peripheries". Using the concept of imaginaire and Arjun Appadurai's five scapes, the author will analyze how Brazilian media has reported the Buddhist boom, which has taken place in Brazil since the 1990s. She will identify the sources of this media imaginaire and discuss the reasons for the new Brazilian interest in Buddhism.
Literacy and Orality in the Chinese Xiaoshuo Tradition
Timothy Wong, Professor, Chinese, Arizona State University
February 8, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
The American Indictment: The Japan That Cannot Say Sorry
Charles Burres, Berkeley Bureau Chief, San Francisco Chronicle
February 14, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Understanding Korea's Cultural Heritage
Yu Hong-June, Professor, Department of Art History, Myongji University
February 15, 2002 Korean language lecture with English interpretation
Center for Korean Studies
This lecture provides a rare opportunity to understand Korea's artistic and cultural traditions through the eyes of the celebrated author of the hugely successful three-volume travel essays Na ui munhwa yusan tapsagi (My Exploration of Korea's Cultural Heritage). Professor Yu will guide us through the beauty of Korean cultural sites and remains in South and North Korea, focusing on traditional wooden and stone architecture, providing plenty of visual materials. He argues that Koreans have developed a unique perspective of interacting with nature and presents his unique view of the aesthetic characteristics of Korea.
Yu Hong-June is currently Professor of Art History and director of Korean Studies at Myongji University in Seoul, Korea. His diaries recording his travels to North Korean cultural sites, recently published in two volumes, have also drawn public attention. His other publications include Korean Paintings in the Choson Dynasty, Biographies of Eight Great Painters in Korea, and The Art and Life of Kim Chong-hui (forthcoming).
Analysis of China's Macroeconomic Performance
Guangjian Xu, Professor, Economics, People's University, China
February 20, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Women, Youths, and Men: Male-Male Eroticism and the Age/Gender System of Tokugawa Japan
Gregory Pflugfelder, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
February 21, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
The Archaeology of Han Sichuan
Michael Nylan, Professor, History, UC Berkeley
February 22, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Bungalows and Culture Houses: Westernization in Early Twentieth-Century Japan and the Imperial World Order
Jordan Sand, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Georgetown University
February 25, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
The small, inexpensive houses known as "bungalows" were at the height of their popularity in the western United States in 1908, when Japanese reformers discovered them and began promoting them as the ideal dwelling type to bring Japan closer to modern standards of living in the West. Although these simple buildings made no significant contribution to the high tradition of modern architecture, the story of their importation to Japan reveals much about the formation of modern bourgeois class culture, and about the international position of the Japanese bourgeoisie in the early twentieth century. "Culture houses" (bunka jutaku) — the new hybrid style dwellings that appeared in the Tokyo suburbs of the 1920's — were similarly humble, and similarly expressive of class culture and national consciousness. While bungalows failed to gain a mass market before World War I, the success of the culture house after the war suggests the new cultural milieu of the first generation of urban consumers to grow up in imperial Japan.
Reasserting Imperial Power? Britain and East Asia in the 1930's
Yoichi Kibata, International Studies, Tokyo University
February 27, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Sustainable Environment of Our Civilization - From Japanese Perspective: Agriculture and Industrialization
Koyu Furusawa, Economics, Kokugakuin University
February 28, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
The author will review the traditional Japanese agricultural system and modern ecological movement from cultural, social and historical aspects, and examine comparatively the prospects of sustainable agriculture in Japan, East, South and Southeast Asia in an attempt to find a holistic perspective for a new sustainable industrial system.
Conjuring "Comfort Women": The Mediated Affiliations of Korean/American Trans-nationality
Laura Kang, Literature, University of California, Irvine
March 1, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
Korean Cinema and Society in Transition
March 7-8, 2002
Regional Seminar
Center for Korean Studies
Unprecedented democratization, rapid economic growth, and the globalization of Korean society have been reflected in far-reaching transformations of Korean cinema over the last two decades. Thus to understand Korea's emergence as a vibrant film culture requires understanding of the changes that have taken place in Korean society at large. Korean Cinema and Society in Transition will investigate the rise of Korean cinema as a new force in the international film scene. We will explore the film community's struggles with institutional obstacles which ironically received critical momentum by the financial crises in the early 1990s and the trans-nationalization of world cultural productions within which recent developments in Korean cinema have been realized, focusing upon such issues as:
- Democratization of Korean society and film censorship
- Shifting ideological perspectives on Korean history and their cinematic treatment
- Introduction of North Korean media products and public responses
- The role of cinema in constructing/ deconstructing Korean identity
- The disintegration of traditional family life and its portrayal in film
- Changing gender relations in Korean society and the role of female directors
- Korean cinema in local and global markets
- Screen quota controversies and their implications
- Artistic freedom and the diversification of film genres and styles
- Technological developments and the changing look of Korean film
- The growing voice of independent filmmakers
- The changing audience and its role in Korean cinema
Guest Speakers and Topics
Chris Berry, "The Korean Blockbuster: A Success Story?" (Program of Film Studies & Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, UCB)
As the global Hollywood machine has followed the WTO, knocking down trade barriers, taking over national markets, and leaving ruined national film cultures in its wake, one exception has appeared Korea. After an initial shock in the late eighties and early nineties, the Korean film industry has clawed back its market position and become, for the first time, a substantial exporter. Leading this counter attack has been the so-called Korean Blockbuster. By contrasting the story of the Korean blockbuster with the more dismal picture presented by the Chinese film industry, and the different ways in which the blockbuster is spoken about in both film cultures, this paper hopes to highlight the special significance of the Korean success story, and ask what price Korean film culture has paid for this success.
Chris Berry is Associate Professor in the Program of Film Studies and the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. He has written widely on both Chinese and, more recently, Korean film. In 1994, when he was teaching in Australia, he curated the first Korean film week there. In 1997 and 1999 he was Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the Korean National University of Arts, where, together with Professor Kim Soyoung, he coordinated an extensive collection of essays and documentation on the late Korean director Kim Kiyoung, The House of Kim Ki-young. He has helped to translate the subtitles on a number of Korean documentary films and also worked to help the Seoul Queer Film and Video Festival, an experience he has written about for the e-journal Intersections.
Soyoung Kim, "On Koryu: Southern Women" (Korean National University of Arts)
This documentary explores eulogies in pre-modern Korea, written by women in Korean (Onmun), which offered women in Confucian culture a rare chance to participate in male-privileged literary tradition, since the eulogy was associated with funerals, the highest form of Confucian ritual. Because only aristocratic women could learn onmun (Korean), non-aristocratic women often asked them to write eulogies for them. In that sense, onmun eulogies were a collective writing of women. On Koryu also documents contemporary transcultural processes taking place in the lives of modern Korean women as they are forced to move from the country to the city and beyond the border, their lives increasingly shaped by a diaspora existence, often as migrant worker within a postcolonial situation governed by globalisation. The film presents women temporarily dwelling in alien lands, in man's land. As an expression of national-transcultural cinema, it occupies the borders of feminist avant-garde cinema and third cinema at large.
Soyoung Kim is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Korean National University of Arts, chief editor of Trans: Journal of Visual Culture Studies, and editorial collective member for Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Traces: A multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation. Author of Specters of Modernity: Fantastic Korean Cinema; Kim Soyoung's Film Reviews; Cinema: Blue Flower in the Land of Technology, editor of Cine-Feminism: Reading popular Cinema; and director of Koryu: Southern Women and South Korea, opening film for the 3rd Seoul Women's Film Festival and in competition at Yamagata documentary Film Festival, 2001; and other short films made for women filmmakers' collective in late 80s. She is currently a visiting professor teaching Film 160 and Film 240 at U.C., Berkeley.
Hyang Soon Yi, "Evolving Aesthetics in Korean Cinema: From 'Literary' to 'Art' Films" (University of Georgia)
With the wide diversification of subject and style in recent Korean cinema, art cinema has emerged as an important issue for the film industry as for critics. The term is often associated with works that do not fare well at the box-office due to unconventional formal features or the artists' uncompromising visions of life and art — and thus has become the antithesis of films produced for mass consumption. Despite their lack of commercial appeal, the growing body of art films has acquired a growing audience. Professor Yi will revisit the "literary" films of the late 1950s and early 1960s as possible precursors of the art cinema today. An analysis of representative art films and their directors reveals the complex relationship between literature and cinema in the Korean cultural milieu.
Hyangsoon Yi received her Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University, minored in Film Studies, received a second Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in foreign language education, and teaches Korean and comparative literature, Korean and Japanese cinema. A member of the Film advisory Committee of the Georgia Museum of Art since 1997, she has directed U. Georgia's Korean Language Program, organized two Korean filmfestivals for the Georgia Museum of Art, and is currently an advisor for its East Asian Film Club. Her publications include: "Reflexivity and Identity Crisis in Park Chulsoo's Films" (Made in Korea: Cinema and Society Since 1945, forthcoming); "The Traveler and Irish Drama" (Erin's Sickbed, forthcoming); "Kurosawa and Gogol: Looking through the Lens of Metonymy" (Literature/Film Quarterly); and "The Homecoming of a Traveller: A Sense of Place in Brian Friel's Faith Healer" (The Journal of English Language and Literature). Her papers on Korean and Japanese language education appear in Foreign Language Annals, Korean Language in America, and Nihongo Kyoiku.
Rob Wilson, "Globalizing the Korean Uncanny: Trans-Pacific Ruminations, Gingko Bed to Chunhyang" (UC Santa Cruz)
We have to wonder if the Korea uncanny expressed in myriad films of the 1990s has not come to re-visit present-day South Korea to remind the county of what has been bypassed and lost but not fully abolished in the furious making of the postwar modern city and capitalist nation. What Heidegger called the life-world of "tranquilized familiarity" and the idle speech of a by-now-globalized capitalist modernity has been disrupted, wounded, haunted and reconfigured by the return of the dead, the call of tormented spirits, repressed forces, and unpaid debts to the Korean past. That in any event is the general framework of the uncanny cinematic apparatus this talk will outline. But the talk will also aim to trace the global/local dynamics under the current telos of globalization, and affirm the trajectory of recent Korean cinema in its turn toward tracking an alternative path of cinematic globalization via an uncanny localism.
Rob Wilson is the author of a book of poetry and trans-cultural speculations called Waking in Seoul (1988) and has published essays on Korean film, Korean-American literature, and US/Korean cultural politics in Korean Culture, boundary 2, and Inter-Asian Cultural Studies. He has taught at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where he was a long-time participant in the International Film Festival at which Korean films were often first featured globally. From 1982 to 1984 he was Fulbright professor of American literature at Korea University in Seoul. His works include Reimagining the American Pacific (2000) and American Sublime (1991) and has co-edited Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (1996) and Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (1995). He is currently professor and graduate chair of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Hyangjin Lee, "The mid-1980s democratization movements and the birth of South Korean new-wave cinema." (University of Sheffield)
The strong traditions of social commentary and political engagement are two familiar phrases by which South Korean cinema is characterised. The issues of de-colonisation, national division, class conflicts, military dictatorship and democratisation movements have inspired the creative imaginations of the politically conscious filmmakers since the establishment of South Korea in 1945. Whereas contemporary Korean filmmakers still seek to communicate the suffering of the masses to a wider audience as previous generations did, filmmaking in a fast changing society is no longer subject to ideological intervention or economic sanctions by the state. More importantly, the majority of the contemporary audience is made of apolitical teenagers who want to spend their pocket money on light entertainment. In this presentation, I will explore the conflicting relationships between film, state and society, by discussing the changing ideological perspectives of Korean films made in the 1960s and 1990s from a comparative point of view. These two decades are the most politically violent transitional periods during the compressed modernisation of Korea, denying the past in favour of an uncertain future.
Hyangjin Lee, currently teaching at the University of Sheffield, received her Ph.D. in Communication Studies in 1998 at the University of Leeds and Ph.D. Certificate in Sociology from Yonsei University. She has co-authored The Development and Diffusing of a New Leisure Culture in Contemporary Korea (1991) and authored Contemporary Korean cinema: Culture, ideology and politics (2000), Chunhyangjon, Cinematic Texts of the Era of Division, (2000), Tongil Shidaei Pukhan Yonghwa Iilki, (An Interpretation of North Korean Cinema in the Era of Unification) (2000) Conflicting Working Class Identities in North Korean Cinema (2000).
Schedule
Thursday, March 7, 2002
4:00-7:00p
Special Cinema Screening
"The Day a Pig Fell into the Well" (Directed by Hong, Sang-Soo, 1996)
Location: 117 Dwinelle Hall
U.C. Berkeley Campus
Friday, March 8, 2002
Morning Session
9:00-10:40a — Welcoming Remarks, Clare You, co-chair, Center for Korean Studies
"The Korean Blockbuster: A Success Story?" — Chris Berry, Program of Film Studies & Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, UCB
Questions and Answers
10:40-11:50a — Coffee Break
"The mid-1980s democratization movements and the birth of South Korean new-wave cinema" — Hyangjin Lee, University of Sheffield
Discussant: Rob Wilson, UC Santa Cruz
Questions and Answers
11:50a-1:30p — Lunch Break
Afternoon Session
1:30-3:10p
"Evolving Aesthetics in Korean Cinema: From 'Literary' to 'Art' Films" — Hyang Soon Yi, University of Georgia
Discussant: Soyoung Kim, Korean National University of the Arts
"Globalizing the Korean Uncanny: Trans-Pacific Ruminations, Gingko Bed to Chunhyang" — Rob Wilson, UC Santa Cruz
Discussant: Hyangsoon Yi
3:10-3:20p — Coffee Break
3:20-5:00p
"Koryu: Southern Women" — Documentary screening and presentation — Soyoung Kim
Discussant: Hyangjin Lee
Questions & Answers, General Discussion
Saturday, March 9, 2002
The Film Studies Symposium
"Look Who's Talking Now: Globalization, Film, Media, and the Public Sphere"
142 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley Campus
Anthropology in and of China: A Cross-Generation Conversation
March 8-9, 2002
Annual Symposium
Center for Chinese Studies
Description Anthropological studies of (greater) China have gone through several phases, each of which involved a certain model of analysis and a certain conception of reality. This Symposium will bring together a large group of anthropologists, of different generations, to engage in a dialogue about the past and present of our field as well as its possible future directions.
Format:
The Symposium will be organized to focus on a number of issues. No formal papers are required, however, each participant will be asked to present a five-to-ten page speech note beforehand, which, hopefully, will be read by all the participants in advance.
Three themes:
1. Where are we? In terms of our theoretical orientation and energy, where do we stand at this moment of disciplinary history, say, in relation to the intellectual shifts taking place in the human sciences as a whole? For example, how are we to understand the intellectual location of anthropology in the landscape of the Western social science tradition? Or is it relevant to ask such a question? What is happening in the field and how are we able to evaluate it? What kind of methodological concerns need to be (re)addressed?
2. Where did we come from? In order to move ahead, we need to turn around and look at the footsteps we have left behind us. What was the relationship between anthropology and social theory in the past? What were the main models of analysis and conceptual concerns? How did the field of anthropological studies (of greater China) change and evolve? How have the actual social and political changes in China affected our approach to it? These are not new questions but they seem to require new reflections. Every new generation tend to believe that they have discovered a new America. Have we?
3. Where are we going? In terms of training students, for example, what appears to be a good itinerary for us? Or simply possible schemes? What are the visions that we are trying to cast onto the future? For example, what kind of research are we planning to carry out? Where are the necessary areas of intellectual inquiry that we must not avoid engaging, both within and outside the field of anthropological studies of (greater) China?
Schedule
Friday, March 8, 2002
9:00-10:00 — Coffee and Registration
10:00-10:30 — Opening Remarks:
Frederic Wakeman, Professor of History, Berkeley
William Hanks, Department Chair, Anthropology, Berkeley
10:30-12:00 — Panel One
Moderator: Frederic Wakeman, Berkeley
William Skinner, UC Davis
Myron Cohen, Columbia
Stephen Feuchtwang, University of London
12:00-1:30 — Lunch Break
1:30-3:15 — Panel Two
Moderator: David Johnson, Berkeley
James Watson, Harvard
Kwong-ok Kim, Seoul National University
Jerry Eades, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan
Steve Sangren, Cornell
3:15-3:45 — Coffee Break
3:45-5:30 — Panel Three
Moderator: Michael Nylan, Berkeley
Judith Farquhar, University of North Carolina
Stevan Harrell, University of Washington
Susan Greenhalgh, UC Irvine
Helen Siu, Yale
Saturday, March 9, 2002 9:00-10:00 — Coffee Break
10:00-12:15 — Panel Four
Moderator: Kevin O'Brien, Berkeley
Rubie Watson, Harvard
Elizabeth Croll, Univeristy of London
Frank Pieke, Oxford University
William Jankowiak, University of Nevada Las Vegas
Daming Zhou, Zhongshan University
Rob Weller, Boston University
12:15-1:45 — Lunch Break
1:45-4:00 — Panel Five
Moderator: Tom Gold, Berkeley
Joseph Bosco, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Susan Brownel, University of Missouri
Lili Nie, Tokyo Women's Christian University
Dru Gladney, University of Hawaii
Mayfair Yang, UC Santa Barbara
Shih-chung Hsieh, Taiwan University
4:00-4:30 — Coffee Break
4:30-6:45 — Panel Six
Moderator: You-tien Hsing, Berkeley
Louisa Schien, Rutgers University
Yunxiang Yan, UCLA
Ellen Hertz, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland
Gregory Ruf, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Lisa Rofel, UC Santa Cruz
Zhang Li, UC Davis
6:45-7:00 — Closing Remarks:
Wen-hsin Yeh, Professor of History, Berkeley
Parody and Pathology in Mori Ogai's "Vita Sexualis"
James Reichert, Asian Languages, Stanford University
March 8, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
During the first decade of the 20th century, Naturalism dominated the Japanese literary scene. The movement served as lightening rod for various ideological battles. Some praised Naturalism for its "truthfulness"; others dismissed Naturalist literature as near-pornography. One prominent participant in these debates was Mori Ogai, who waged a 20-year campaign against Naturalism. The culmination of this extended campaign was Vita Sexualis (1909), a work that strove to discredit Naturalism and its founding principles. This talk will consider how Ogai mobilized two strategies to attack Naturalism: history and science. Specifically, the author will explore the way that these two strategies work with and against each other.
Look Who's Talking Now: Globalization, Film, Media, & the Public Sphere
March 9, 2002
Film Studies Symposium
Center for Korean Studies
Introduction
This symposium considers how the role of film and media in constructing the public sphere is changing in an era of globalization. Until very recently, it was assumed that both the media and the public sphere they shaped were national - national cinemas, national newspapers, state-owned public television, etc. Furthermore, national public spheres are often assumed to resist commercialization. If our current era is characterized by unprecedented globalization and commercialization of the media, how is this reconfiguring the public sphere(s)?
Does the national still anchor the public sphere for filmmakers and television producers, or do we now participate in a variety of global and local, commonly shared and specialist public spheres? What public(s) are global satellite television channels, internet websites, and international film festival circuit directors addressing and constituting? How is public and private space being reconfigured by new media such as the internet and WAP phones? What counter-publics do commercialization constrain, and what counter-publics does it enable? How do specialized independent film and video distribution circuits, websites, and satellite channels constitute specialized public spheres that cut across national structures? These are the questions animating this symposium.
Timetable
9:45 — Opening Remarks
10:00 — Panel 1: Transnational Cinema Publics
Zhang Zhen, "From Festivals to Cine-clubs and beyond: The Location of an Alternative Chinese Cinema and Its Audiences."
Deniz Gokturk, "Anyone at Home? Itinerant Identities in European Cinema of the 1990s."
Kim Soyoung, "Contructing Trans-Cinema: South Korean Blockbusters, Film Festivals, and Net Movies."
12:15 — Lunch
1:45 — Panel 2: Global Connections and Sub-National, Local Publics
Chair: Linda Williams, UCB
Lynn Spigel, "Entertainment Wars."
Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, "A New Public Space? New Media in Algeria."
Chris Berry, "Can Film and Video Production Be a Public Sphere? Independent Film and Video Documentary in China and South Korea."
4:00 — Cheese and Wine
Speakers:
ZHANG Zhen, Assistant Professor, Department of Cinema Studies, New York University
"From Festivals to Cine-clubs and beyond: The Location of an Alternative Chinese Cinema and Its Audiences."
Since the early 1990s the landscape of film culture in mainland China has radically reconfigured. While the state-owned studios are faced with the dire reality of tackling both financial and ideological constraints, there has emerged within and without the walls of the studios an alternative or "minor" cinema mostly represented by what I call the "urban generation" filmmakers and their supporters. What makes this generation uniquely different, beside its preoccupation with the drastic urban transformations and the accompanying social upheavals, is its independent production method and cosmopolitan outlook. This paper presents some of my recent research on the historical conditions for this nascent cinema and the multiple and often "mobile" locations of its audiences. If major international festivals in the West have in the past helped place the Fifth Generation filmmakers in the center stage of the international film scene but have also resulted in a certain political imbalance in terms of transnational reception, the new alternative cinema, while also making forays into the ever increasing number of specialized festivals around the world, is actively cultivating a domestic market, however limited at this point. The appearance of movie bars and cine-clubs, together with semi-independent exhibitors and distributors, are intimations of an emerging public sphere in an area that has been under strict official control. Undoubtedly, these new formations are intimately connected with larger historical forces in the contemporary global cultural production and as such are locally anchored instances of "grassroots globalization."
Deniz GOKTURK, Assistant Professor, Department of German, University of California, Berkeley
"Anyone at Home? Itinerant Identities in European Cinema of the 1990s."
My paper grows out of ongoing research on "migrants in the picture", looking at identity discourses mobilized in and around films on subnational, national, and transnational level. I shall address the following questions: How are minority filmmakers adopted and co-opted by national broadcasting channels? What does a panel discussion on "New Indian Cool vs. British Asian Masala", staged at Channel Four in London, tell us about the changing geography of second and third cinema? How does the trend to depict migrancy and multilingual polyphony in European co-productions (and, more generally speaking, in the new category of "world cinema") relate to practices of minority filmmaking in Western European countries such as Germany (i.e. recent road movies by Hamburg based Fatih Akin or Ayse Polat)? Are we observing divergent developments - transnational visions on the one hand, and subnational "ghetto speak" on the other, or are these trends more intricately interwoven? What are the effects of European funding schemes on film production at the margins of Europe, for instance in Turkey? Do Eurimages and other transnational funding schemes engender critiques of "peripheral" nation states and enable subnational minority politics, for example in Yesim Ustaoglu's "Journey to the Sun" (1999), a film questioning segregationist views on Turkish and Kurdish identities, which was awarded the Peace Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, at a time when Kurds were demonstrating against the arrest of Abdullah Ocalan in the streets of Berlin? Do international festival films and domestically popular cinema fall into separate categories, or is there actually some common ground and correspondence between Yesim Ustaoglu's "Journey to the Sun" and Sinan Cetin's border comedy "Propaganda" (1999), featuring Turkey's unforgettable comedian Kemal Sunal? What are the points of access to funding and distribution networks? Are some types of itinerancy and mobility celebrated while others acquire less currency in the arena of global culture?
KIM Soyoung, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema Studies, Korean National University of Arts
"Contructing Trans-Cinema: South Korean Blockbusters, Film Festivals, and Net Movies."
As the Korean-style blockbuster hits the box office both at home and in some Asian film markets, a certain desire is brewing at the heart of the Korean film industry bombarded by venture capital. Reclaiming the industry's position as something in/between Hollywood, Asia, and Korea, South Korean blockbusters desperately seek out ways to make this incommensurability rest at peace with the optical/aural unconscious of the audience. It shouldn't come as a surprise that their existence largely depends on the mobilization of digital effects, marketing and promotion, and saturation booking. Low to mid-budget films simply don't find screening venues at multiplexes, which provide 200 screens in Seoul. At the same time, film festivals have been proliferating in South Korea. As well as the three international film festivals at Pusan, Puchon, and Jeonju, women's, queer, labor, and human rights film festivals all find audiences. The Cinephilic culture of the 1990s has continued even after the IMF (International Monetary Fund) crisis of 1997. Issues centering on the global/local, gender, and class, in articulation with cinematic specificity, appear unduly and unruly in the public spheres known as film festivals. Furthermore, as the drive to construct the Internet as an alternative public sphere grows, some filmmakers have turned to digital video, which is easily transferable to streaming technology on the net. The Patriotic Games (www.redsnowman.com) is as forceful attack on nationalism, which has been a taboo area even among progressive intellectuals since the 1980s. Taking a cue from The Patriot Games, I would like to propose a notion of "Trans-cinema" as a form that should unsettle the dominant interpellation of cinemas as either national or transnational. It might also indicate a shift in the production and distribution mode for a counter cinema. But of course, this is only a glimmer on the net, which it shares with blockbuster culture and state censorship.
Lynn SPIGEL, Professor, School of Film and Television, University of Southern California
"Entertainment Wars: TV Culture After 911."
This talk looks at the television industry's reaction to 911, focusing on the way the industry tried to promote national narratives and cultural citizenship. In the immediate weeks following 911, the industry trade journals and television/film executives continually expressed their sense that US culture would change forever after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Attempting to promote a tasteful image to the public, television (as well as film and music) executives began to censor everything they perceived to be in bad taste (which meant much of what was on TV before 911). Television networks instead began to distribute historical documentaries and "event" TV (such as the celebrity telethon) that attempted to promote a return to patriotism with the ethos of public service. Yet, just one week later, the industry began to return to its routine flow of programming, so much so that by early October one TV executive even said that 911 was "a positive" for the TV industry. This talk speculates on this rapid transition in industry thinking about the effects of 911 on US culture. I argue that in a post-network global media environment, national narratives and myths of patriotic of unity simply cannot work. Instead, television went back to its "normal" routines largely because in the post-network multi-channel system, television audiences are no longer gathered as national citizens for three networks. In a multi-channel post-network system, the new forms of narrowcasting demand taste cultures rather than national cultures. The aftermath of 911 demonstrates that media culture is relatively autonomous from national politics. It also begs us to ask how — if at all — this new post-network system mobilizes audiences as cultural citizens.
Ratiba HADJ-MOUSSA, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto
"A New Public Space? New Media in Algeria."
How can we reflect on the political in the Maghreb when the reference, be it at the level of thought or "experience," comes from elsewhere? It is not the point to deny the importance of other experiences, particularly those of the Western world, but to look at what Maghrebian societies have to teach us on their construction of the political. Focused on the study of the State as the structural form of the political, numerous interpretations from the social sciences refer implicitly and explicitly to the "missing link" of the political. This is the case, for example, with studies on the "destiny" of the concept of patrimonialism, which seems to create a consensus for a sociology that has difficulties with what J.Dakhlia calls the "common loci." How can certain practices, such as uprisings that were in the past confined to the infra-political, open up new ways of conceiving the political? In this paper, I would like to address this issue by linking it to the introduction of new media technologies, in particular satellite TV in Algeria. Indeed how can we assess the transformations of public space produced by satellite television not only in territorial terms but also in terms of the recomposition of identities as well as the relationship that individuals establish with the institutions?
Chris Berry, Associate Professor, Program in Film Studies and Department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley
"Can Film and Video Production Be a Public Sphere? Independent Film and Video Documentary in China and South Korea."
Film and video in general are considered to be "representations" of reality. In consequence, many discussions of documentary ethics proceed from the assumption that the key issue for documentary is how to represent reality as accurately as possible. They ask how to minimize the impact of the documentary making process on the reality that it is meant to represent. However, an independent documentary practice has developed in East Asia that works from completely contrary assumptions. It understands documentary making as a part of life, not a representation separate from it. Furthermore, the documentarians see their work as part of the lives of their subjects, and they are concerned that their documentary making should be a social practice that helps those people. Does this engaged mode of documentary realize a form of "public sphere" in the societies where it is practiced, and how does it do it in different ways in different East Asian societies? This mode of production is associated with the legacy of the late Ogawa Shinsuke and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan, attended by many of the major practitioners of the form. However, in this presentation, I would like to begin to explore these questions outside Japan, by comparing the situation in South Korea, which has a long history of social movements and deep political commitment, and China, where any effort to organize a social movement is impossibly dangerous. I will argue that in the Korean context, the film and video making, raising of funds, and exhibition of these films and videos help to construct counter-publics. But in the Chinese situation, how should we understand the sustained enthusiasm of both documentary makers and subjects for this mode? Is this activity a proto-public sphere, or only a pseudo-public sphere?
Legitimation of Chinese Grass-Roots Associations
Bingzhong Gao, Professor, Institute of Sociology and Anthropology, Peking University
March 13, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
French influence on Korean Poems
Claire Lyu, University of Virginia, and Santiago Colas, University of Michigan
March 15, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within
March 15-16, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This two-day colloquium will focus on the recent dramatic changes in the nature of the Japanese/non-Japanese boundaries within Japan, including what some have called "internal internationalization" (kokunai kokusaika), dealing with the growing paradox of increasing political conservatism and retrenchment vs. private open-mindedness and liberal attitudes. The emphasis will be on the existence, nature, components and permeability of these sociocultural boundaries and their on-going modification.
All of the presenters - please note almost all were trained or associated with Berkeley - have carried out contemporary research on topics related to sociocultural boundaries at the grass-roots level as seen and felt by different kinds of Japanese people and their neighbors.
The participants are multinational, with four from Japan, three faculty members, four present and three former graduate students from Berkeley. The resulting collection will be submitted for publication in both English and Japanese.
Friday, March 15, 2002
4:00 - 6:15 pm
Andrew Barshay, Chair, CJS, UCB — "Introduction"
Nelson Graburn, Anthropology, UCB — "Opening Remarks"
Junko Habu, Anthropology, UCB — "Recent Boundaries in the Past: The Definition of the Japanese, and the Boundaries between Jomon and Chulmun Cultures"
John Nelson, Religious Studies, Univ. of San Francisco — "Traversing Religious and Legal Boundaries in Postwar Nagasaki: an Interfaith Ritual for the Spirits of the Dead"
Tomoko Hamada, Anthropology, William & Mary — "Internationalization in Japanese Business Ventures"
Saturday, March 16, 2002
9:30 am - 11:45 am
R. Kenji Tierney, Anthropology, UCB — "Outside the Sumo Ring? Foreigners and a Re-thinking of the National Sport"
Yuko Okubo, Anthropology, UCB — "'Newcomers' in Public Education: Chinese and Vietnamese Children in a Buraku Community"
Jeffrey Hester, Kansai Gaidai, Osaka — "The Crossing Korean/Japanese Boundaries in a mixed community in Osaka"
Yasuko Takezawa, Kyoto University — "Tabunka Kyosei" and Community-Rebuilding After the Kobe Earthquake."
Lunch Break
1:15 pm - 3:30 pm
John Ertl, Anthropology, UCB — "Internationalization and Localization: Rethinking Identity in Japan's 'Age of Decentralization'"
Nelson Graburn, Anthropology, UCB — "Domestic-International Tourism: Two Cases from Kyushu"
Mitzi Uehara Carter, Anthropology, UCB — "Race and Gender in Japan"
Shinji Yamashita, Anthropology, Tokyo University — "The Exodus of Japanese Women and Brides from Asian Countries: Changing Boundaries of Contemporary Japan"
4:00 pm - 6:15 pm
Gaku Tsuda, Migration Studies, UC San Diego — "Crossing Ethnic Boundaries: Nikkeijin Return Migrants and the Ethnic Challenge of Japan's Newest Immigrant Minority"
Keiko Yamanaka, Asian American Studies, UCB — "Transnational Community Activities of Undocumented Nepalese in Japan: Agency, Resistance and Governance"
Chen Tien-Shi, Anthropology, Tokyo University — "Statelessness and Boundaries in Japan"
George DeVos, Anthropology, UCB — Conference Discussant
*This conference is one of a series of events celebrating the Centennial of the Department of Anthropology. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Anthropology and the Institute of East Asian Studies.
Accession into the WTO: External Pressure for Internal Reforms in China
Ick Soo Kim, Associate Professor, Korea University
March 19, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Japan and the Nobel Science Prizes, 1901-1949
James Bartholomew, Ohio State University
March 21, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Nature and Ethics in the Philosophy of Xunzi
Eric Hutton, Center for Chinese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow
March 22, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
The Institutionalization of Unemployment in Urban China
Xin Gu, Center for Chinese Studies Postdoctoral Fellow
April 1, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Korean Composers and Western Music: How much of the tradition remains?
Hi Kyung Kim, UC Santa Cruz
April 12, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
Hi Kyung Kim, Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, will talk about the role of the western and traditional composers in the modern Korean/western society, and purpose and direction of development of Korean traditional music. Demonstration by Eun-Ah Kwak, professor at Ewha Women's University, on kayakeum Sun-Ock Lee, Secretary General for Asia-Pacific Performing Arts, Dance & Choreography.
Open to the public. Admission free.
Art as Propaganda: Shanghai Poster Designers before the Cultural Revolution
Kuiyi Shen, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford
April 17, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
From the Age of Growth to the Age of Sustainability: Paradigm Shift Turmoil in Japan
Gavan McCormack, Professor, East Asian History, Australian National University
April 18, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This lecture will examine Japan's "construction state," its institutions and practices, and the Koizumi "reform" agenda and its likely consequences, with particular attention to two large-scale regional "development" projects on the island of Kyushu, and to the political and social movements generated around those issues.
The Japanese Constitution After 55 Years: The Revision Debate
Gavan McCormack, Professor, East Asian History, Australian National University
April 19, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
In January 2000, Constitutional Reform Councils were set up in both houses of the national Diet to debate the constitution and its possible reform. The inherent implausibility of the notion that Japan's constitution, drawn up under American occupation, would remain unchanged for so long is such that dispute is hard to avoid. The debate is no mere narrow or legal matter, but goes to the heart of how Japan should see itself and its role in the coming century. This seminar will analyze this debate and its implications.
Gavan McCormack is Professor of Japanese History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. He was educated at Melbourne and London universities, with a Ph.D. in History from London University in 1974. He taught at the Universities of Leeds (UK), La Trobe (Melbourne), and Adelaide, before being appointed to his current position in 1990. He has lived and worked in Japan on many occasions since first visiting as a student in 1962, and has been a visiting professor at Kyoto and Kobe universities. He has written a dozen books on aspects of modern Japanese, Korean, and Chinese history. He is well known in Japan (where many of his works have been translated and published) and his work has also been translated and published in Chinese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, and the main European languages.
The Local Dynamics of Social Transformation in Rural Vietnam in the 1990s
Hy Van Luong, Professor, Anthropology, University of Toronto
April 19, 2002Center for Chinese Studies
Domestic Violence and the Law in Rural China
Paul Pickowicz, History and Chinese Studies, UC San Diego
April 23, 2002
Center for the Study of Law and Society
Phantom Women: An Examination of the Disappearing Acts of Female Bodies in Contemporary Japanese Performance
Katherine Mezur, Dramatic Art, Georgetown University
April 25, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Dumb Type, a contemporary theatre collective from Kyoto, Japan, uses its female roles to emphasize a creation of illusionary phantom women. These "phantom women" appear as part human, part ghost/fantasy, and part machine and perhaps reflect a different consciousness that attenuates identity and gender roles. Do they ironically substantiate "new desires" and fluid identities for contemporary Japanese women or do they merely sustain the traditional practices of the male-created role? This presentation suggests that women are indeed exploiting phantom women roles in order to create fissures in iconic traditions through their outrageous and ephemeral critique of those structures. The presentation will include video excerpts from Dumb Type's performances from 1992 through 2002.
Collaboration, Colonial Modernity and Twentieth-Century Korean Thought
Kyu Hyun Kim, UC Davis
April 26, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
In last fifteen years or so, "colonial modernity" has emerged as one of the central and most controversial concepts in the field of modern Korean history, in both Korean and English-language scholarship. Even though the scholarly debates and discourses on Korean colonial modernity have revealed some fundamental disagreements among the students of modern Korean history in terms of methodologies, approaches and interpretations, they have also illuminated significant advances and paradigm shifts in Korean-language historiography since late 1980s, allowing for the possibility of the postcolonial perspective, challenging the dominant nationalist and Marxist narratives of "modernization." This lecture is presented as a contribution to this ongoing debate.
US-Japan Relations: How Will the Next 10 Years Differ From the Last 50?
Steven Vogel and Keith Nitta, Political Science, UCB
April 29, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Keith Nitta and Steven Vogel will report on their work on a new edited volume entitled U.S.-Japan Relations in a Changing World (Brookings, 2002). The book examines eight factors that have driven the U.S.-Japan relationship over the past 50 years, and that will continue to shape the relationship in the future.
Nitta will focus especially on U.S. and Japanese foreign policy paradigms. Vogel will discuss the volume's conclusions and the implications for the future.
The reform of China's political system and the CCP's self-imposed system
Siyuan Cao, President, Beijing Siyuan Research Center for Social Sciences
May 1, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Korean Officials in the Land of the Kami: Diplomacy and the Prestige Economy, 1607-1811
Nam-Lin Hur, Asian Studies, University of British Columbia
May 3, 2002
Center for Korean Studies, Center for Japanese Studies
From 1607 to 1811 Choson Korea maintained an official diplomatic and trade relationship with Tokugawa Japan. During this period, to the Tokugawa Japanese Korea was a powerful source of "otherness" — both an object of curiosity and an alien presence that remained forever outside the cultural ambit of the country of the gods (kami). In contrast, to the Koreans Tokugawa Japan, despite its status as Korea's only equal diplomatic partner, was no more than a country of "pirates and barbarians" — a country beyond the reach of Confucian teachings.
In this presentation, which will be based upon analyses of reports, government documents, travelogues, diaries, literary works, and gazetteers, the speaker will explore how the Korean-Japanese relationship was molded by the diverging values of Confucianism and Shinto (interestingly, Buddhism was absent) in imagination and in practice. Professor Nam-lin Hur (Ph.D., Princeton) teaches premodern Japanese history at The University of British Columbia. Having published Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Sensooji and Edo Society (Harvard University Press, 2000), he is now working on a monograph entitled Funerary Buddhism and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: The Danka System and the Cultural Politics of Ancestor Worship. A first draft (about 480 pages) of this project has been completed and is currently under revision for publication. Professor Hur also writes on the issues of Korean-Japanese relations in premodern East Asia.
Visual Representation of Ritual Dances in the Ming and Qing
Nicolas Standaert, S.J., Professor of Chinese Studies, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
May 7, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
The US-China Security Relationship - Past and Future
Mike Pillsbury, Member of the Policy Advisory Group, Office of the Secretary of Defense and Adjunct Research Associate at the National Defense University
May 8, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
China's Entry into the WTO and its Implications for Japan
Ryosei Kokubun, Professor, Political Science, Keio University
May 10, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies
Northern Policy of South Korea
May 17-18, 2002
Special Seminar
Center for Korean Studies
Anime and Techno-Orientalism
Freda Freiberg, Visual Dept., Monash University
May 23, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
This presentation argues that anime texts of the late 1990s reveal the reemergence of a brooding melancholia constitutive of a critical approach to history that has been absent from the Japanese cinema since the sixties. This mood of mourning has not been previously evident in anime, which has been generally marked by its exuberant vitality and (ahistorical and apolitical) postmodern pastiche. Freiberg will examine the return of history and the political repressed, with detailed reference to Jin-Roh and some attention to Princess Mononoke and Blood-The Last Vampire. She will suggest possible reasons for the shift, and raise questions about its extent and maintenance, given the industrial, generic and commercial constraints of the industry. The lecture will be illustrated with clips from the films.
Wonhyo and the making of a Korean Buddhist identity
Eunsu Cho, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan
September 6, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
Remembering and Representing the Inextinguishable: The Trauma of Imprisonment in the early PRC
Klaus Muhlhahn, Assistant Professor, Free University, Berlin
September 13, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Japanese Silent Cinema and the Art of the Benshi
Midori Sawato
September 16, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Contradictory Scenarios: Various Media Versions of China
Orville Schell, Professor and Dean, School of Journalism, UC Berkeley
September 18, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Law and Society in China
September 20-21, 2002
Friday 9:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Saturday 9:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Special Fall Workshop
Center for Chinese Studies
Description
The aim of this conference is to produce a volume that will broaden and deepen the way we understand the interaction of law and society in contemporary China.
Such an inquiry seems timely. The "reform and opening up" period in the PRC began over two decades ago, but only recently have we reached a "critical mass" of new findings (largely based on intensive fieldwork) that would justify such a volume. This rethinking is also long overdue. The field of legal anthropology, whose methods and insights will provide the basis for some of the papers in this conference, was itself given new energy with the publication of Laura Nader's conference volume Law in Society and Culture (1969). Somewhat closer to home, Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip Huang's conference volume Civil Law in Qing and Republican China (1994) was the first salvo of what has become a sustained effort by UCLA's History Department (see Sommer 2000, Reed 2000.Bernhardt 2001) to revise previous interpretations of Chinese law and how Chinese interact with the legal system. Thanks to this scholarship on the Ming, late imperial and Republican periods, the conventional wisdom that Chinese law did not deal with civil matters, and that Chinese generally eschew dealing with the legal system has been much modified. To date, however, despite the accumulation of studies by political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and anthropologists working on some aspects of contemporary Chinese law and society, we do not have anything remotely comparable to the Nader and Bernhardt and Huang volumes. The aim of this conference is to produce a book that brings together new field-work based scholarship on Chinese law and society — a volume that will show scholars working in related fields and on similar topics elsewhere just how much Chinese sociolegal studies can contribute to theory and comparative analysis.
The timing for a conference devoted to exploring how law and society relate to one another in China is propitious. Throughout the reform period, state elites have legislated and enforced (with different degrees of success) numerous new laws regulating economic, political, and social activities. These laws give legislative expression to rights that had previously been unknown in the PRC and create institutions for enforcing such new rights. Unlike the pre-reform period, when legal implementation was haphazard and spotty at best and downright oppressive at worst, law in contemporary China seems to be everywhere, and its impact is not entirely negative. For some analysts, increased access to law and the "rights consciousness" that results from this might even be a harbinger of democratization. This scenario might not pan out for any number of reasons, but, even without democratization, the growing awareness of law and rights is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored.
In conjunction with law, legal institutions in China have also proliferated, as have legal services and professionals. In some respects, plaintiffs in the Chinese legal system are now "recognizable" to those whose frame of reference is Western legal systems: Using private funds, for example, plaintiffs can hire a lawyer; they can go to courts or arbitration committees; they can cite laws that support their claims; they can mobilize family, friends, community members, the media and the higher reaches of the state. While by no means "Western," it is clear that the growing diversity and pluralism of Chinese society is reflected in the diversity of ways that law works in society. Such pluralism has not gone unnoticed among scholars of Chinese law and society, and can be seen in venues as far-flung as Chinese cinema (in Zhang Yimou's Qiu Jiu Goes to Court) as well as fiction (Ha Jin's Waiting, Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads). For the most part, however, this scholarship has not yet been presented in a way that allows both specialists and non-specialists to evaluate these changes in light of our knowledge of China's historical legal traditions, the Maoist period, and, equally important, the comparative study of law and society.
These multiple threads (rather than any presumed "convergence") allow us, much more so than in the past, to take advantage of, and to contribute to, several important literatures. The most obvious is the new scholarship on Chinese legal practice in the Qing. To what extent do new findings about Chinese law in the Maoist and post-Mao period confirm our sense that China remains a society in which third-party dispute settlement was common and many disputes were resolved in a "third realm" (Bernhardt and Huang, 1994), neither formal nor informal? In a similar vein, how might we conceptualize law and society in China from 1949 to 1978, a period not usually associated with rights consciousness and plurality in legal venues? Was this period an aberration, or a continuation of long-standing patterns of interaction between Chinese citizens and the state?
But more important, in terms of potential audiences and possibilities for fruitful theoretical exchange, the conference can help integrate the Chinese experience with law with two fields which, at least to date, have not paid much attention to China. The first, law and society studies, was established in the 1960s by those whose interdisciplinary interests in law, culture, and society were not easily accommodated by law schools, political science departments or other existing disciplines. The Law and Society Association publishes a journal, The Law and Society Review, which often deals with the more nitty-gritty issues of law, such as legal access, mobilization of law, lawyers' interaction with plaintiffs, property rights, race and gender and their role in securing justice, as well as occasional piece on law and society in developing countries. Over the last twenty-five years, however, this journal has published only a handful of articles about China. Fortunately, this is not owing to lack of interest on the part of law and society scholars, who are an eclectic bunch in terms of methodology and substantive interests. Rather, "law and society" has not been developed as a sub field within China studies, and as a result few have seen any need to build bridges between the two fields. Now is an opportune time to begin building these bridges.
Two examples demonstrate how insights from the law and society literature might illuminate Chinese legal processes. In Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization, Michael McCann found that even though many court cases attacking wage discrimination failed, the networking and mobilization that accompanied lawsuits paid off (unintentionally) by raising the awareness of discrimination and laying the foundation for significant political victories. McCann's emphasis on courts and the social, political and psychological processes that accompanied them - law and its mobilization - as well as the unintentional outcomes of legal processes, can easily be applied to studies of law and society in China. What sort of tactics - judicial and extrajudicial - do environmental activists or workers in China employ? To what extent does community or family play a role in legal mobilization? How do lawyers interact with the media in mobilizing community support? Similarly interesting questions emerge from Charles Epp's, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective. Epp's major finding was that the ability of plaintiffs to muster sufficient material and financial resources critically affected their ability to take advantage of new rights. In India, for instance, progressive laws, a virtual army of lawyers, and a liberal, westernized Supreme Court were not enough to break longstanding patterns of discrimination simply because plaintiffs could not afford to keep a lawsuit going. Because India is very hierarchical, poor mostly rural plaintiffs received little assistance from society at large. China, like India, is a large, developing country, but in China many rural people are able to muster sufficient resources to file lawsuits or find other ways to grab the state's attention. Why is there such a difference between these two countries? Answers to this and related questions would surely interest Sinologists, and quite likely scholars of law and society, too.
In addition to building bridges to Law and Society, the other sub field where we see much opportunity for intellectual cross-pollination is "state-society" relations. The connection here is less obvious because of the conceptual overlap between "law" and "state" in China. In a system where the state clearly dominates so many legal processes, how should one differentiate "law and society" from "state and society"? Although conceptually confusing, these fields are in fact quite different, and we see the proposed volume as straddling the boundaries between them.
Law and Society looks at "law" in a narrow but nevertheless broad sense: narrow in its focus on "law," but broad in its explicit recognition that law is everywhere, not confined to courts, judicial interpretation of statutes and the like. The notion of state-society relations covers far more terrain, but sometimes becomes unwieldy due to its breadth and vagueness. More useful, a relatively new approach to the study of state-society relations draws upon some of the best features of Nader's Law in Culture and Society. Much like Nader, who sought to embed "law" in local social structures and cultural understandings across time and space, scholars such as Joel Migdal, Atul Kohli, Vivienne Shue, Kevin O'Brien, Elizabeth Perry and others have advocated understanding the state in disaggregated terms (policies formulated at the top are often distorted beyond recognition below), while focusing on the mutual interpenetration of state and society. In order to avoid reifying the state, participant observation, case studies, and ethnographies are the preferred method for many of these scholars. This literature is highly relevant to our conference, as it enables us to study law within the context of a one-party state (unlike some law and society research), and at the same time understands "law" as operating in variety of arenas and in a "space" between state and society that involves a wide range of interactions.
This approach to state-society relations, for example, calls our attention to the issue of judicial implementation (are decisions distorted?), legal recruitment and training (do lawyers in the PRC share certain cultural predispositions?), and decision-making (does the behavior of plaintiffs make any difference to the decisions handed down?). Scholars working on various aspects of Chinese law during the 1980s and 1990s have broached these topics, but this literature is generally not well known outside the field of legal studies. By placing our volume somewhere in the middle of law and society and state-in-society approaches, we have an opportunity to benefit from the accumulated knowledge and insights from both these fields, as well as to bring to these fields new findings from recent fieldwork in China, a country that is often given short shrift in comparative studies of law and politics
Schedule
Friday, September 20, 2002
9:30 - 10:30 — Opening Remarks
Chair: Stanley Lubman, Lecturer and Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley
School of Law: John Dwyer, Dean
Institute of East Asian Studies: T.J. Pempel, Chair
Center for the Study of Law and Society: Robert Kagan, Chair
Center for Chinese Studies: Liu Xin, Chair
10:30 - 12:00 — Rural Conflict Resolution: Land Disputes and Administrative Litigation
"Forest Land Expropriation: Collective Complaints and the Role of the Local State in Conflict Resolution" — Elisabeth Grinspoon, U.S. Forest Service
"Suing the State: Administrative Litigation in Rural China" — Lianjiang Li, Hong Kong Baptist University and Kevin J. O'Brien, UC Berkeley
Discussant: Marc Galanter, University of Wisconsin
12:00 - 1:30 — Lunch for conference participants
1:30 - 4:00 — Labor Relations: Legal Mobilization and Pension Disputes
"Use the Law as Your Weapon: Legal Change and Labor Relations in China" — Mary Gallagher, University of Michigan
"From Law to Facts, From Facts to Norms: Mobilizing the Labor Law in Arbitration Committees and in Letters and Visits Bureaus" — Isabelle Thireau, Centre d'Etudes sur la Chine Moderne et Contemporaine, Paris
"'There Ought to be a Law': Evading Fees, Diverting Funds and Resolving Disputes Over Pension Management in China" — Mark Frazier, Lawrence University
Discussant: Robert Kagan, University of California, Berkeley
Saturday, September 21, 2002
9:00 - 10:30 — Police and Police-Administered Sanctions
"Rethinking the Law-Society Relationship: New Views of Social Protest and Policing" — Murray Scot Tanner, Western Michigan University
"Punishing for Profits: Profitability and Rehabilitation in a laojiao Institution" — Fu Hualing, Hong Kong University
Discussant: Robert Kagan
11:00 - 12:00 — Lawyers and the Law
"Talking the Talk Without Walking the Walk: Obstacles to Collective Action Among Chinese Lawyers" — Ethan Michelson, University of Chicago
Discussant: William Alford, Harvard Law School
12:00 - 1:30 — Lunch for conference participants
1:30 - 2:30 — Intellectual Property
"Shifting Legal and Administrative Goalposts: Chinese Bureaucracies, Foreign Actors and the Evolution of China's Anti-Counterfeiting Enforcement Regime" — Andrew Mertha, Washington University
Discussant: William Alford, Harvard Law School
3:00 - 4:00 — Minority Rights
"Grinding the Wheat and then Killing the Mule (Momian shalu): The Politics of Rights and Identity among PRC Veterans and Disabled Soldiers" — Neil Diamant, Dickinson College
Discussant: Marc Galanter, University of Wisconsin
4:30 - 5:30 — Concluding Remarks
Discussion of possible conference volume with Muriel Bell, Stanford University Press
In the Vortex of Confucianism, Christianity and Science: Coming Out in Contemporary South Korea
Michael J. Pettid, Department of Korean Literature, Ewha University and Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley
September 20, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
This talk will explore a literary account of "coming out" in South Korea and hopes to establish the importance of this small rebellion against accepted notions of what is "correct" in regards to sexual orientation. While in the Chosôn dynasty (1392-1910) there were certainly same sex sexual relations, sexual activities were not part of the public sphere, and as such, such behavior was largely ignored in literary works. Moreover, there was not a label such as "homosexual" in pre-modern times as there had not yet developed a strong binary opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality. In contemporary society, however, coming out for gays has become increasingly common and thus merits close inspection. My primary source material for this paper will be a narrative entitled "K'ôming aut" (Coming Out) contained in the recently published e-journal, Kei munhak (Gay Literature). I will investigate the difficulties experienced by gays as conveyed in this narrative. My talk will demonstrate that gays in South Korea face not only pressure from the traditional Confucian elements of society, but also the widespread condemnation of Christians and scientific discourse. As such, the battle for recognition of personal rights and the elimination of discrimination against a sexuality deemed as peripheral is all the more difficult.
A Conversation on U.S.-Korea Relations
Yang Sung Chul, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to the United States
Thomas C. Hubbard, U.S. Ambassador-Designate to the Republic of Korea
September 23, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
The Korea Economic Institute (KEI) Korea Caravan annually takes the Korean Ambassador to the United States and the U.S. Ambassador to Korea on tours of major U.S. cities. This year, the Institute of East Asian Studies and the Center for Korean Studies are pleased to host Ambassador Yang Sung Chul and Ambassador-Designate Thomas C. Hubbard, in a discussion of U.S.-Korean relations.
Yang Sung Chul, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to the United States, is a well-known political scientist and author with a long and distinguished career in academia and politics. He served as a member of the Korean National Assembly, as President of the Unification and Policy Forum, and Chairman of the International Cooperation Committee for the National Congress for New Politics. He has served such academic institutions as Eastern Kentucky University, the University of Kentucky, Northwestern University, Pembroke State University, Indiana University and Seoul National University. He was Dean of Academic Affairs at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, 1987-1994. Ambassador Yang received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky.
Thomas C. Hubbard, U.S. Ambassador-Designate to the Republic of Korea, was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from August 2000 to July 2001. Previously, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines and to Palau, has held posts in Japan, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic, as well as at the Japan and Philippine Desks in the Department of State and as Country Director for Japan. He served the U.S. Mission to the OECD in Paris as Executive Secretary to the Delegation and as Energy Advisor. Ambassador Hubbard graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Alabama. He joined the Foreign Service in 1965.
Stone Tools and Cognitive Patterns in Japanese Palaeolithic Assemblages
Peter Bleed, Professor, Japanese Palaeolithic Archaeology, University Nebraska-Lincoln
September 23, 2002
Joint Colloquium
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Anthropology
Chinese Immigrant Wives in Hong Kong: Adjustment and Marital Happiness
Julian Chow, Assistant Professor, School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley
September 27, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Tradition and the Contemporary: Korean Composers Speak
Hilary Vanessa Finchum-Sung, Center for Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Korean Studies, Department of Music
New compositions for traditional Korean music (ch'angjak kugak) became part of South Korea's musical landscape in the 1940's. Beginning with Kim Ki-Su, efforts to expand the sound of Korean traditional music encouraged developments in traditional instruments and allowed musicians to explore possibilities outside of the traditional repertoire. Encouraged by composition competitions and institutional support, newly composed pieces were part of the overall trend of modernization and important to the quest for a national identity in post-war, developing Korea. The past century has seen many changes in traditional music performance, and composers have been central figures in discussions about the place of composed music in both the traditional repertoire and contemporary society.
This presentation will focus on the ways by which composers seek to capture a Korean essence (uri chongso) in their compositions through compositional techniques. Some composers consider themselves to be traditionalists and seek to re-incorporate traditional sounds and aesthetics into the modern soundscape. Others place traditional instrumentation and themes into a western classical framework, using conventional Korean style as a foundation for creativity. The compositional approaches vary depending on the training and aims of individual composers, but the language used to describe pieces serves to unite the works in an effort to rationalize contemporary compositions' connection to tradition. Thus, the language about music is an equally important part of the composition and performance process. I will discuss how composers use traditional forms in their compositions and how their creations fit within debates concerning new compositions.
Travel and Research in Rural Tibet
Shannon May, Graduate Student, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
October 2, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Atmospherics
Jun Aoki, Architecture, Aoki & Associates, Tokyo, Japan
October 2, 2002
Joint Colloquium
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Architecture
Korean Writers, Reading Forum: My Life and My Literature
October 4, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
Agenda
4:15p — Greetings by Clare You, Co-chair, Center for Korean Studies
4:20p — Reading: My Life and My Literature
Poet: Kang, Un Kyo (20 minutes)
Poet: Kim, Seung Hee (20 minutes)
5:00p
Kay Richards, Department of East Asian Languages, U.C., Berkeley — Commentary on the Poems
Novelist Hwang, Seok-Young: Reading: My Life and My Writing
Comment by Kim, Seong Kon on the lives and the writings of the writers
6:00p — Q & A: Open Discussion, Dialogue with the Authors
Participants' Profiles
Hwang, Seok-Young was born in Chang Chun, China in 1943, and graduated from Dongguk University. As a high school student, Hwang received the Promising Young Writer Award from Sasangge (1962) and the Spring Literary Awards for Fiction from the Chosun Ilbo (1970) for his short story "A Tower." Hwang emerged as one of the leading contemporary Korean writers with A Strange Land (1970) and Jang Gil San (1984). He participated in the Kwangju Uprising and anti-government cultural movement against the military dictatorship, visited North Korea in 1989 at the invitation of the Literature and Art Union of North Korea, and went into exile in Germany and the United States. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for violating the National Security Law. In March, 1998, he was released on a special government pardon. His works include A Strange Land (1974), Bukmang, a Lonely Place Far Away (1975), The House of Judgment (1977), The Uninvited Minstrel (1978), Jang Gil San (1984), The Shadow of Arms (1988), a collection of plays, Jangsangot Mae (1980), Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of Our Age, and There Were People Living There(1993), travel essays on North Korea. Hwang has received the Manhae Literary Award (1989), the Danjae Award and the Yi Sang Literary Award (2000) and Daesan Literary Awards in 2001.
Kang, Un-Kyo received her Ph.D from Yonsei University. She won the prize for New Writer (in poetry) from the Sasang-ge and the Hankook Munhak and Hyundae Munhak Prizes. Her publications include 'Grass Leaves', 'Diary of the Poor,' 'Voice,' 'A Lamplight walks towards me,' 'Time has walked on one silver star in purse.' Essays: 'A Letter to a Young Poet,' 'When Snails run,' 'Between the Mesh-s.' She is currently professor in the college of Korean Literature at Dong-A University.
Kim, Seong-Kon studied at Columbia University and received the Ph.D.in English from State University of New York, has taught at Pennsylvania State University and Brigham Young University, has been Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Oxford and Toronto and is now Professor of English and Executive Director of the Language Education Institute at Seoul National University. Hispublications include Literature and Film, Hollywood: A Mirror of Twentieth-Century Culture, Interviews with Postmodern American Writers, and Literature in the Age of New Media. He has co-authored Simple Etiquette in Korea published in England. Formerly the founding President of the Korean Association of Literature and Film, he is currently President of the International Association of Comparative Korean Studies.He also edits the prestigious literary quarterly Twenty-First Century Literature.
Kim, Seung-Hee. Born in Gwangju (South Cholla Province) in 1952, Kim Seung Hee graduated from the Department of English Literature at Sogang University and received a Ph.D. in Korean Literature from Sogang University (1992). She received a Spring Literary Awards from the Kyung Hyang newspaper for her poem "The Water in the Picture" and began her career as a poet in 1973. In, she received a Spring Literary Awards for Fiction from the Donga Ilbo newspaper (1994) for her short story "People Going to Santa Fe" and the Sowol Poetry Award (1991). In 1999, Kim became a professor of Korean Literature at Sogang. Kim has published numerous collections of poetry: Sun Mass(1979), A Concerto for the Lefthand(1983), A Song for the Unfinished (1986), Life inside an Egg (1989), How Can I Break Free? (1992), The Worlds Most Burdensome Fight (1997), Riding and Laughing on a Broom (2000). She has also published several collections of short stories: People Going to Santa Fe (1997), The Bird whose Left Wing Feels a Bit Heavier (1999). Kim has also published a collection of essays, The 33 Year-Old Pensees (1986), and edited an anthology of poems written by female poets, What Men Do Not Know.
This forum is made possible by support from the Daesan Foundation, the Berkeley Korean Alumni Association, and the C. K. Cho Foundation.
After the Bubbles: Linking the Recoveries of America and Asia
Barry Eichengreen, Director of Institute for European Studies, UC Berkeley
Shijuro Ogata, Former Deputy Governor for International Relations, the Bank of Japan
Chantale Wong, Former U.S. Acting Executive Director, Asian Development Bank
T.J. Pempel, IEAS Director, UC Berkeley, moderator
October 7, 2002
Lunch and program, registration required
Bubbles in the Japanese banking, stock and land markets burst in 1990-91 and the country has yet to recover. Rapid growth across Asia's developing economies collapsed in 1997-98 and recovery there has been uneven at best. China did well in 1997-98 but now faces a massive non-performing loan problem that many are warning is about to explode into a full scale banking crisis. Americans riding the wave of the most spectacular stock market boom in their nation's history may have felt a wave of temporary triumph until the recent puncturing of the Dot.Com and NASDAQ bubbles. Meanwhile, Enron, Imclone and World Com make it clear that Asian economies are hardly alone in the need to confront "crony capitalism."
The time is right to address a number of questions that grow out of the economic difficulties that have hit both sides of the Pacific and to search for solutions sensitive to the interconnections between these economies rather than for unilateralist approaches that attempt to ignore them. What are the dangers to Asia of America's technology slowdown? What's the latest on financial deregulation, liquidity shortage and deflation? What are the virtues of creating a new region-wide Asian financial architecture? Who will serve as the engine of trans-Pacific recovery — Japan, China, ASEAN or the U.S.? Please join Shijuro Ogata, former Deputy Governor for International Relations of the Bank of Japan, and former Deputy Governor of the Japan Development Bank, for a luncheon discussion.
Registration 11:30 AM
Lunch and Program 12:00 - 2:00 PM
$40 Members of Co-sponsoring Organizations
$45 Non-Members
Co-sponsored by the Japan Society of Northern California, UC Berkeley Institute of East Asian Studies, the Commonwealth Club of California, the Asia Society, the Asia Foundation, Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Northern California.
Register by email to programs@usajapan.org
Becoming Ukifune: Sarashina Nikki and a Performance of Self
Sudeshna Sen, Postdoctoral Fellow, Classic Japanese Literature, University of Oregon
October 10, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
In Sarashina nikki the narrator articulates her desire for monogatari and her fascination for Ukifune emphasizing her own rusticity and failure to achieve goals of worldly and romantic success. Garnering evidence from the narrator's descriptions of her marriage, her love affair, and her experiences at court, Dr. Sen argues that the narrator's identification with Ukifune, assertions of marginality, and social ineptitude successfully locate her as a vulnerable heroine in her reenactment of her own life.
This event is free and open to the public.
The Rise of Touristic Consumerism and Tourist Citizenship in Urban China: A Sociological Perspective
Ning Wang, Professor, Sociology, Zhongshan University, China
October 11, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
A Bilingual Reading of Contemporary Korean Fiction
Yun Hûng-gil, novelist
Kang Sôk-kyông,, novelist
Bruce Fulton, University of Washington and UBC, translator
October 15, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
Readings in Korean and English translation from selected works, with commentary, questions and answers, and audience discussion with the authors.
KANG Sôk-kyông (b. 1951): author of fiction, essays, and travel writing; translated works include the story "Days and Dreams" and the novella "A Room in the Woods" in Words of Farewell (1989), and the novel The Valley Nearby (1997); has traveled extensively in India and written important works on gender issues.
YUN Hûng-gil (b. 1942): one of the most important fiction writers in South Korea today; translated works include the story collection The House of Twilight (1989); one of the best-known Korean writers in Japanese translation; has written perceptively on contemporary Korean social problems and the legacy of the Korean War.
Fulton, Bruce (b. 1948): Young-Bin Min Professor of Korean Literature and Literary Translation, Department of Asian Studies, U of British Columbia; co-translator of Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers (1989), Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction (1993), Wayfarer: New Writing by Korean Women (1997), and A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Modern Korean Fiction (1998).
Foreign Direct Investment and IT Industrial Clusters in Southern China
Yanshu Hao, Associate Professor, Business Administration, Meiji University
Chensheng Shi, Visiting Scholar, Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
October 16, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Assessments of the Kogal Identity
Laura Miller, Associate Professor, Anthropology/Sociology, Loyola University of Chicago
October 16, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Among the many styles which contemporary youth may adopt, perhaps none has become the focus of such mass media anxiety and voyeuristic interest as the so-called Kogals, young women with bleached hair, dark tans and extreme make-up who create dramatically different hybrid looks. Drawing from popular culture sources, this presentation will examine critiques and displays of schoolgirl subculture, with a particular focus on the way their use of language challenges longstanding norms about gendered speech.
China's Changing Policies Toward the U.S.
Xuetong Yan, Director, Institute of International Studies, Tsinghua University
October 17, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies
On Recent Work
Waro Kishi, Professor, Architecture, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Kyoto
October 21, 2002
Joint Colloquium
Center for Japanese Studies, Department of Architecture
Waro Kishi's work offers unusually rich sectional and spatial variations which are studied and admired around the world. He is known for crisp, elegantly detailed Modern buildings, often unbelievably tiny, but with a sense of great openness and light. Externally, his buildings are cool compositions of steel and glass, but he nonetheless takes full advantage of the crafts of the Kansai area of Japan, and his interiors incorporate tatami, wood, and even stone, and are frequently interwoven with elegant gardens of a traditional style. He struggles in his work to reconcile tradition and today, and makes an effort to be responsible to heritage but aware of the new materials and economic forces that have led to change.
Is Democracy Moving Forwards in Korea? The Prospect of Democratic Consolidation in Post-Three Kims Era
Hyug Baeg Im, Professor of Political Science, Korea University, Visiting Professor, Stanford University
October 24, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
In this presentation, I would like to talk about constitutional structure, representative system and political culture in the last days of Three Kim era, the first generation of democratization, and then to assess whether Korean democracy is moving forwards or backwards in terms of democratic consolidation in this critical transition time from Three Kims era to Post-Three Kims era.
Professor Hyug Baeg Im received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1989). He is the author of The Market, the State, and Democracy: Korean Democratic Transition and the Theories of Political Economy (in Korean) (Seoul: Nanam, 1994) and Democracy in the Era of Globalization: Realities, Theories, and Reflections (in Korean) (Seoul: Nanam, 2000), and numerous articles including "The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in South Korea," World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 2 (January 1987), "Politics of Democratic Transition from Authoritarian Rule in South Korea," in Choi, Sang Yong (ed.), Democracy in Korea (Seoul: Korean Political Science Association, 1997), and "From Affiliation to Association: The Challenge of Democratic Consolidation in Korean Industrial Relations," in Dennis McNamara (ed.), Corporatism and Korean Capitalism (London: Routeledge, 1999).
Mirror, Map, and Medieval Chinese Virtuality — Transformation Tableaux in an Eighth-Century Buddhist Cave-Shrine at Dunhuang
Eugene Wang, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard
October 25, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
The 10th Annual Bakai バークレー大学研究大会
October 28, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Agenda
2:10 — Welcome / Announcements
2:15
Performative Memories: On Postwar Japanese Theatre and Culture" — Miryam Sas, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures/Comparative Literature
"Fractured Memory, Split Memoir: Containing the Past in Tamakiwaru, a 13th-Century Court Memoir" — Miki Wheeler, Graduate Student, East Asian Languages and Cultures
"Contextualizing Heian Screen Poetry" — Joseph Sorensen, Graduate Student, East Asian Languages and Cultures
"New Elementary Japanese Textbook" — Yoko Hasegawa, Associate Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures
"Opposition Disappearance in Japan: Post-Realignment Evidence Supports Theoretical Pessimism" — Robert Weiner, Graduate Student, Political Science
"Japanese Labor Relations in Transition" — Steven Vogel, Associate Professor, Political Science
3:45 — Break
4:00
"Gender, Community Activism and Grassroots Transnationalization in Japan" — Keiko Yamanaka, Lecturer, Ethnic Studies
"Crime Situation after a Natural Disaster: Do Crimes Increase or Decrease after a Disaster?" — Hideyo Matsubara, Visiting Scholar, Law School
"Japan's Provincial Tourism Market" — John Ertl, Graduate Student, Anthropology
"Kudara no Sato" — Nelson Graburn, Professor, Anthropology "On Digital Map Project" — Yuki Ishimatsu, Head Librarian in Japanese Selections, East Asian Library
5:15 — Further Questions / Closing Comments
Party-peasant relations in the Communist base areas in the 1930s
Nobuo Takahashi, Associate Professor, Political Science, Keio University
October 29, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Pungsu or Chinese geomancy in Korea: Its nature and impact on the Korean mind-set and social behavior
Hong-key Yoon, School of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Auckland
November 1, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
Geomancy or pungsu (feng-shui in Chinese) is a unique and comprehensive system of evaluating the landscape in selecting auspicious places for graves, houses, temples or cities and other settlements. Geomancy has played a critical role in the formation of Korean mind-set and social behavior. The prominent Sirhak scholar, Chong Yakyong once commented that about half of litigation in the courts during his time were due to assaults and disputes over geomantically suspicious sites. Almost all Korean settlements were influenced by the idea of geomancy and Koreans sometimes endeavored to secure an auspicious site even by laying down one's own life. The oral literature including legends and folktales are excellent sources of revealing such Korean social behaviors and world view.
Hong-key Yoon is currently Associate Professor in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He was born and brought up in a South Korean village, which has been a source of inspiration for him. He received a PhD degree at University of California, Berkeley where he studied cultural geography. He has written a book on Korean geomancy and another on Maori cultural geography in New Zealand. His research interests include geomancy in Korea, Korean folk literature, environmental ideas of the East and West, Maori culture in New Zealand, Chinese cave dwellings, and Japanese Monzenmachi (temple town).
Post-9/11 Views on Engaging South East Asia
Simon S.C. Tay, Singapore Institute of International Affairs and 2002 Eisenhower Fellow
November 4, 2002
Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Professor Tay is a law lecturer at the National University of Singapore and a former Nominated Member of Parliament. An eloquent speaker and respected thinker, Professor Tay is an emerging leader in the think-tank circuit. He is concurrently chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, a non-governmental think-tank, and chairman of the ASEAN Institute of Strategic and International Studies, a grouping of nine regional organizations that advise on international issues. He is also chairman of the National Environment Agency of Singapore. As an Eisenhower Fellow, Professor Tay will connect with U.S. think tanks, foundations, and NGOs involved with international policymaking.
China's Future in the Light of the 16th Party Congress
Panelists:
Rick Baum, Professor, Political Science, UCLA
Gaye Christoffersen, Professor, Naval Postgraduate School
Lowell Dittmer, Professor, Political Science, Berkeley
Jing Huang, Shorenstein Fellow, A/PARC, Stanford; Associate Professor, Political Science, Utah State University
Harlan Jencks, Visiting Scholar, Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley; Analyst, Non-Proliferation, Arms Control, and International Security Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lyman Miller, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Susan Shirk, Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, UCSD; Research Director, IGCC
James Tong, Associate Professor, Political Science, UCLA
Wing T. Woo, Professor, Economics, UC Davis
November 5, 2002
Special Fall Workshop
Center for Chinese Studies, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation
Cherry Blossoms and the Tokkôtai: Aesthetics and Totalitarian Ideologies
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Professor, Anthropology, University of Wisconsin, Madison
November 6, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
How did the Japanese military state come to use the master trope of falling cherry blossoms in order to aestheticize its soldiers' sacrifice to the emperor? In what ways did the Tokkôtai pilots, 85% of whom were university students, reproduce this "totalitarian" ideology in action or perhaps even in their thoughts? This paper assesses the impact of the state's use of education and popular culture through a close examination of these pilots' diaries. The queries it poses are placed in broader comparative perspectives on the role of aesthetics in totalitarian/authoritarian/fascist ideologies.
The Human Rights Issue in US-China Relations post September 11th
Rosemary Foot, Professor, International Relations, St Antony's College, University of Oxford
November 8, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
The China Historical GIS
Ge Jianxiong, Director, Institute of Chinese Historical Geography; Professor, Center for Historical Geographic Studies, Fudan University
November 11, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies, Geographic Information Science Center
The Paradox of Korean Globalization
Gi-Wook Shin, Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
November 12, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
This presentation will examine the interplay of global and nationalist forces in contemporary Korea. (South) Korea is a leading nation in globalization but at the same time its people still maintain a strong sense of ethnic and national identity expressed in a shared bloodline and ancestry. The talk will address these seemingly contradictory trends from historical and comparative perspectives. It will be shown that globalization can be appropriated for the nationalist agenda and that ethnic/national identity can be intensified in reaction to globalization processes. Theoretical and policy implications will be addressed as well.
Gi-Wook Shin is associate professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is also acting director of Asia/Pacific Research Center and in charge of building Korean studies program at Stanford. He has written numerous articles and books, including Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea and Colonial Modernity in Korea (co-editor), and is currently writing a book on ethnic nationalism in Korea. His co-edited volume on Kwangju uprising of May 1980 is in press. Before coming to Stanford, Shin taught at the University of Iowa and UCLA. He served as acting director of the UCLA Center for Korean Studies, columnist for The Korea Central Daily and The Korea Times, and sits on many councils and advisory boards in US and Korea. Shin received BA from Yonsei University in Korea and MA and Ph.D from the University of Washington.
Religious Systems in Prehistoric Japan: Clay Figurines in Jomon and Yayoi Periods
Hiromi Shitara, Archaeology, National Museum of History in Sakura
November 14, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Clay figurines appeared around 12,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the Incipient Jomon and simultaneously with the appearance of Jomon pottery. This presentation will discuss three themes: First, the role of clay figurines and their symbolic meaning in the male and female principle; second, the change of meanings of clay figurines and tattoo custom from the Jomon to Yayoi period, and the cultural transformation from the one of hunter-gatherer to the agricultural; third, the possibility of using clay figurines to concretely reconstruct the clothes and customs of the people of those days.
Evolving Business-State Clientelism in China: The Institutional Organization of a Smuggling Operation
David Wank, Associate Professor, Sociology, Sophia University
November 20, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
The E-Historical Atlas of China and the Chinese Historical GIS System
I-Chun Fan, Project Director, GIS Research Program, Academia Sinica
November 21, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies, East Asian Library, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, Center for Information Research in the Interest of Society
The Impact of International Law on Japan: Comparing Trade and Human Rights
Keisuke Iida, Professor, International Politics and Economics, Aoyama Gakuin University
November 21, 2002
Center for Japanese Studies
Thinking through chaos: who was to blame for the fall of the Ming Dynasty?
Jonathan Spence, Professor of History, Yale University
November 22, 2002
Center for Chinese Studies
Are Humans Enough? Or must we have more?
Jonathan Spence, Professor, History, Yale University
and a panel of graduate students
November 23, 2002
Special Fall Workshop
Center for Chinese Studies, Department of History
TimeMap Korea: a 'moving map' of the history of Korea in the first millenium C.E.
Roland Fletcher, Department of Archaeology in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Syndey
December 2, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
TimeMap Korea, an advanced computer visualization of 2000 years of Korean dynastic history, conveys the growth and transformation of Korean states in their geographical context to illustrate the development of a unified Korean state. The system presents the geographical growth of states in a visually attractive display. Advanced computer mapping creates animation sequences that represent the spatial histories of states. These "moving-maps" can be overlaid on detailed satellite images of the surface of the planet to allow instant appreciation of historical geography. This is the first such presentation of a national history. Map of each state at any period will allow manipulation of dynastic history data, lists of rulers, plans of the capital, illustrations of architecture and any textual material, old or modern, about specific places and events. Video clips, animations, sound and virtual reality models can be included. The database structure permits continual addition of new data. Such maps will become gateways to a world-wide, comprehensive database of Korean history.
Roland Fletcher completed his PhD at Cambridge University (UK) and is active in the theory and philosophy of archaeology, the study of settlement growth and decline and the analysis of large scale phenomena over time. He published The Limits of Settlement Growth: a theoretical outline and analysis of the past 15,000 years (Cambridge UP 1995). He is researching pre-industrial urbanism with field work at Angkor Wat, TimeMap, and the development of methods of producing "moving maps" of the history of cities and countries. He established the Archaeological Computing Laboratory in the University of Sydney. He works with Dr Ian Johnson on the development of TimeMap and in association with ECAI (the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative).
Why the monumental iron Buddha image was popular in the Unified Silla period of Korea
Junghee Lee, Department of Art, Portland State University
December 6, 2002
Center for Korean Studies
By the middle of the 8th century, esoteric Buddhist iconography appeared in the Unified Silla period. However, these are not the main Korean Buddhist images in the late Silla period (i.e. 9th-early 10th century). The center of the Buddhist activities spread from Kyongju to the remote mountain areas with the introduction of Son (Ch'an) Buddhism. It is very surprising to see the great number of the Buddha images in the quiet remote mountain temples. The iron Buddha was the main statue of the Ch'an monasteries of Korea. Most of these were the Vairocana Buddhas in the wisdom-fist mudra of the Hwaom (Avatamsaka) sect in monumental size. The local warlords patronized them; strong rustic iron materials seem to have been the special favorites of the militaristic warlords in Korea. The iron images show the strong emphatic carvings of the drapery folds and mysterious, awe inspiring expressions. These forms may have strong relationship to the Japanese Buddhist sculptures.
Junghee Lee received her Ph.D. from UCLA in Korean and Chinese Art (1984). She has received many awards and fellowships and has written extensively on Korean, Japanese, and Chinese art. She is currently Associate Professor of Art and Portland State University and visiting scholar at the Center for Korean Studies, U.C., Berkeley.
The Wen of the When: Contemporary Chinese Historiography
December 7-8, 2002
Saturday 9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Sunday 9:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon
Center for Chinese Studies
Description This conference aims to explore the extent to which a new Chinese historiography has emerged over the past few decades, along with the roll-back of state control and the emergence of a market economy. We also want to explore the ways in which the Chinese past is being reconfigured from beyond the confines of the modern nation-state. The linear, teleological and modern professional historiography associated with the Chinese nation-state and the academic institutions it funds and controls no longer exert the same degree of dominance over the way people approach and interpret the past. Engagement with the past is now more varied and more contested, as can be seen, for instance, in new local gazetteers, in film and television as historiography, in the way historians borrow literary modes, in school textbooks, in oral historiography, and in the considerable appeal of biography and autobiography. History produced within academic institutions is now also more diverse and contested. These new developments demand attention to the discursive nature of historiography. What kinds of conventions are shaping these new histories? How are they being determined by the institutions producing them (ranging from television stations to local government institutions)? And how do they relate to the general social and political changes that are occurring throughout the Chinese-speaking world today?
Abstracts
Tani Barlow, University of Washington — "'Society' at Work"
I propose to show the category of "society" at work in three different genres in the late 1990s. These three genres are the new academic sociology, popular women's autobiography, and smut (a banned and very popular reading material). I will begin with a discussion of the reconstitution of sociology in the nineties. But my object in thinking sociology is first, to establish the foundational importance of the concept of "society" and, second, to suggest that "society," now unlinked from the nation-state and Party narrative is being mobilized in a wide range of genre. This is not a break but an extension of modernist ways of exploring the past. The difference is that in history of sociology, female autobiography and smut the category of "society" is foundationally both national and international. Generically, that is "society" works well both within and outside the Party-state narrative. I will focus attention in this paper on how elite history of sociology, middle brow histories of the female subject, and low brow theories of the pleasures and terrors of the rural to urban sojourn are being conventionalized.
Chris Berry, University of California, Berkeley — "History as Exchange: Time, History, and Film in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Taiwan Trilogy"
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Taiwan trilogy consists of City of Sadness (1989), Puppetmaster (1993), and Good Men, Good Women (1995). With these films, he moves from the autobiographical and biographical memories of Taiwan's past that characterized his early work to the domain of what is usually considered public history - the 2.28 Incident, the Japanese Occupation, and the White Terror. However, his films still use the exchange of memories between characters and with the audience to construct narratives of these events, rather than presenting transparent and linear narratives of "public figures" and "public events." Commentators are agreed that Hou's work is related to the emergence of subaltern accounts of the past in the wake of the 1987 end of martial law in Taiwan, and they also note that his mode of cinematic narration constitutes a unique discourse that breaks with conventional historical films. However, what is less explored so far is the precise mode of historical narration that his films constitute. By paying close attention to who tells these stories, in whose name, and with what narrative structure, I hope to get a firmer grasp on the specificity of Hou's historiographic practice, and determine how he uses the film medium to construct unique temporal and historiographic modes that frustrate those who would harness subaltern memories to new projects of domination.
Leo Ching, Duke University — "Mass Culture and Historiography: On Kobayashi Yoshinori's Taiwanron" Bruno Latour has suggested that we might be leaving the time of time, that of successions and revolutions, and entering a very different time/space, that of coexistence. Disorder, changes, divergence, convergence, multiplicities, and entanglements are just some of most prominent and consequential tropes of the globalizing present. As a result, the once dominant form of historiography, usually produced for the benefit of the nation-state and through the ideological apparatus of the university, is being questioned, contested, and reconfigured. What has emerged in the past few decades is a whole range of "other" historical accounts: women's histories, black histories, queer histories, children's histories, etc. Furthermore, the professional historians are no longer considered the only capable and viable source for the production of knowledge. Recently, distinctive forms of mass culture have become the nexus in which different representation and interpretation of histories are produced, transmitted and disseminated. Theme parks, cinema, television, comic books, popular songs, and department stores are just few prominent examples. The decline in the claim of expertise of the professional historians and the growing role of mass culture in historical representation coincides with the crisis of the humanities and the social sciences in the emerging corporate universities all over the world. To better understand the relationship between mass culture and historiography, this paper will focus on the recent controversy surrounding Kobayashi Yoshinori's Taiwanron, a comic book that depicts the history of Taiwan and its relationship to China and Japan. Whereas in Japan Taiwanron is mostly read as a comic book, in Taiwan it has been taken seriously as history. If comic book is the medium through which certain perspective of history is narrated, depicted and circulated, how do we begin to theorize about spectatorship/readership in the reception of historical content? Furthermore, Taiwanron embodies two concurrent relationships between Taiwan and Japan: the historical reinterpretation of Japanese colonialism and the contemporary popularity of Japanese mass culture. How do we interpret this "coexistence"?
Mary Farquhar, Griffith University — "History on Trial: Courtroom Drama and the Trial of Jiang Qing" "History on Trial" approaches new Chinese historiography through the law and literature paradigm, adopting "literature" as a broad term that now incorporates the visual media. A central concept in this paradigm is revenge. The exemplar is revenge in the Trial of the Gang of Four, with a focus on Jiang Qing as the dark star. The trial was a media event that popularized and revised Chinese history after the death of Mao. The trial is situated at the interface of two periods of Chinese historiography: revolutionary history as teleology dominated by the Party and State and "history at large" (to adapt Appadurai's oft-cited term) in Deng Xiaoping's open-door China.
The televised trial of Jiang Qing and her Gang encapsulates Party-dominated histiorography in the post-mao period. It was staged and selectively televised as a drama of good and evil played out against Chinese history from 1966 to 1976. However, the trial moved towards "history at large" in several ways. First, it adopted the genre of courtroom drama as a global format absorbed early on into the Chinese cinema and now post-Mao television. Second, the trial was sensationalized as real television drama, open to a local and global public. Third, the trial was played out through the metalangue of law, allocating historical praise and blame according to a pre-written script that included codified law. As we see from the television footage, the courtroom performed revenge as recent history and history in the making.
Miriam Lang, Monash University — "Ch'iung Yao and the romantic past"
At the end of the 1980s, the best-selling Taiwan romance novelist Ch'iung Yao began to set her love stories in the past rather than the present. This paper will discuss 'the past' (particularly that of the late Qing/Republican era) as it is presented in some of Ch'iung Yao's historical romances, and will consider some of the connections between this romantic past and issues of class, ethnicity and place.
Ralph Litzinger, Duke University — "Shangri-la Dreaming: Towards a History of the Dianxibei Present"
The northwest corner of Yunnan Province - or dianxibei - is an area known for its stunning natural landscapes and its diverse cultures and ethnic traditions. It is also known for its complex place in the history of Chinese imperial expansion, for its history of Western colonial botanical exploration and Christian missionary work, and as one of the last sites of struggle in the anti-communist Tibetan resistance movement of the late 1950s. This is also the area through which passed the famed chama gudao - the Tea-Horse Caravan Route - linking Tibet and central Asia with Yunnan and the south of China in complex trade networks throughout much of the Qing and early twentieth century.
Prior to the early-1990s, there was astonishingly little research done on this region by Han Chinese and minority nationality scholars, especially in the predominantly Tibetan populated counties of Zhongdian and Deqin. This situation began to change dramatically in the mid-1990s, when a Kunming-based tourist guide, educated in Beijing, got the idea that Zhongdian County was the very place described in James Hilton's 1930s best-selling novel, Lost Horizon. Borrowing from Hilton's novel, and from the writings of the famed American botanist Joseph Rock, the provincial and prefecture government began to use the term Shangri-la in order to develop what has become of the fastest growing scenic tourist destinations in all of China. More recently, Zhongdian County was officially given permission to change its name to Shangri-la. Finally, dianxibei has been the site of a wide range of provincial and international environmental conservation projects; environmentalist in China and international conservation advocates recognize the region as a "biodiversity hotspot."
This paper will explore popular, journalistic, and academic writings on the cultures, peoples, landscapes, and ecologies of dianxibei. What kinds of histories are being imagined in new forms of experimental academic writing, in media productions that probe histories of government sponsored ecological devastation, and in tourist imaginaries that celebrate nature as a sublime object of visual fascination? How are different understanding of regional difference, ethnic conflict, and state development agendas circulated and debated in these histories and popular accounts? And what role is the international environmental presence having in promulgating new understandings of the history of this region? What happens when "nature" displaces the "nation" as the subject of history? How, in short, might one begin to write a history of the dianxibei present?
Sheldon H. Lu, University of California, Davies — "Rewriting Socialism in Contemporary Chinese Films" The legacy of Chinese socialism has been a hotly contested issue both inside and outside China from the vantage point of the postsocialist, postmodern, post-Cold War present. Chinese socialism, through such experiences as the Cultural Revolution, had been an inspiring movement in worldwide anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist struggles as well as academic Marxism in the West. Yet inside China, since the death of Mao, a series of political campaigns in the Mao era, such as the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), have been denounced by the official party line as "past party mistakes" and castigated by intellectuals and critics as "traumas" and "wounds." The humanism of the New Chinese Cinema (Xie Jin, etc.) in the early 80s as well as the international showcase of the 5th generation (To Live, Farewell My Concubine, etc.) rest on their relentless criticism of the excesses of past political movements in the Mao era.
I want to focus on a cluster of new films that revisits and rewrites the history of Chinese socialism from a different point of view in light of unbridled commercialism, commodification, and capitalist pursuit in contemporary post-socialist China. It seems that it is only possible after some 20 years, after the historical wounds and traumas have been healed, that a new critical distance can be reached in regard to the past.
The critique of the present consumer society thus comes in the form of nostalgia for the past in contemporary Chinese cinema. Socialism in the 50s, 60s, and 70s conveniently signifies what is absent today — idealism, egalitarianism, community, and youth. I will examine how a number of recent films possibly narrate revisionist histories of Chinese socialism. Zhang Yimou's The Road Home makes a strong contrast between business in drab commercialized contemporary China and the bygone days of innocence, naivety, and love, and cinematically between darkness and vibrant colors! Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun (or more appropriately translated, The Sunny Days) rewrites the later years of the Cultural Revolution in the early and mid-70s as a time of carnivalistic merriment, as rites of passage, in the absence of the Father. Huang Jianxin's film Who Said I Do Not Care? (Shui shuo wo bu zaihu, 2001) fully takes on the effects of amnesia, schizophrenia, psychosis, and madness that beset the generation of Chinese who grew up in the Cultural Revolution and were sent down to the countryside as "educated youth" (zhishi qingnian). These people, now in their 40s and 50s, cannot seamlessly integrate memories of their past experiences with the new reality of contemporary China, and cannot pass into middle age without marital and personal crises. Hence the schizophrenic postmodern present (read: postsocialist China) is a marked departure from the historical fullness of the past despite the indignities. Zhang Yang's Shower describes the imminent demolition of a communal lifestyle characteristic of the socialist era, a destruction that causes a new kind of "historical trauma." Any visitor to China would notice the physical change in urban landscape, the disappearance of traces of history, the destruction of the past.
Chinese socialism was seen and represented often in their most horrifying and inhuman forms in many literary and filmic texts in the New Era, an era of "Reforms and Openness." The success of two decades of intense economic reforms and social changes in the post-Mao era reveals in due time the failure of such success, or what is lacking in the present moment. Hence the nostalgia for the disappearing past, for what socialism promised to be. Such is the dialectic and "cunning" of history.
Lewis Mayo, University of Melbourne — "Philology, Dance and the Production of Historical Sense: Dunhuang Culture in Post-Cultural Revolution China"
This paper will look at the interplay between two forms of historical engagement from post-Mao China: document-focused philological scholarship and historical dance. It explores the dialectic of objectification and embodiment in relation to the past and to contemporary relations of social power. The core area of examination will be the cultural production of the last two decades that relate to the arid regions of North Western China and Central Asia - above all the oasis of Dunhuang. The paper addresses two seemingly opposed modes of historical appropriation - the "disembodied" scholarly reading of old pieces of writing excavated from the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (in particular, those which are thought to relate to "social and economic history" -contracts, registers and administrative orders), and the attempt to recreate the past in bodily form through historical dance. Superficially these two forms of historical appropriation seem to be guided by radically contrasting ideologies and forms of practice. Philological-style history appears to be dominated by the ruling fictions of a scholarly objectivity that deals with history as an exercise in the scrutiny of documents, while dance is understood as an emotional and physical attempt to incarnate the past as a living, moving form in the present. One past seems to be part of the order of writing (conceived of as an intellectual or mental domain), and the other is associated with the order of images and physicality (conceived of as emotional and bodily). I will however argue that both kinds of historical production are linked by projects of moral governance. In this study I try to view the question of wen not simply as a matter of how pasts are textualized, but as an issue of the formation of dispositions within a social order, and of struggles over ceremonial form.
Brian Moloughney, University of Otago — "The Time of One's Life (or Waiting for Shanghai Dancing)"
One of the driving forces behind the "new history" movement of the early twentieth century was the belief that past historical writing amounted to little more than the biographies of emperors and officials. A retreat from biography was integral to the emergence of modern academic historical writing in early twentieth-century China. Yet in recent years the "market" for historical writing has been swamped with historical biography, with the lives of emperors and officials once again the staple fare. This paper will explore the relationship between historical and biographical writing. It will consider issues of form and new developments in life-writing from within the Chinese diaspora.
The twentieth century saw a transformation in the nature of Chinese biographical writing. Inherited forms were discarded, including the zhuan of the standard histories, the various forms of funerary writing, and the nianpu, or "register of years", a form that was increasingly dismissed as simply providing the materials for a biography, not the thing itself. Instead, the zhuanji, or "life-and-times" biography, which was explicitly modeled on Western biographical writing, became the dominant form of Chinese life writing as well. Thus, despite the diversity of inherited practice, written lives came to be shaped in a particular way. But what about other ways of understanding and writing the "time of one's life"? Writers from the diaspora, such as Brian Castro, have been re-imaging the relationship between an individual life and the communal past. This paper will attempt to set these new developments within the context of the relationship between history and biography in twentieth century China.
Ban Wang, Associate Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University — "Realist History in the Age of Simulacra"
The notion of historical imagination envisages a different reality in the present in anticipation of a different future. In its tentative, "artistic" or visual mode the historical imagination has not been formalized into "historical discourse." In China this imagination could be invoked as a counter-memory in the face of the reining discourse of the "end of history" and the end of ideology. It questions the manifest historical destiny of free market, postindustrial and consumer society on the one hand and a strident defense of defunct components of socialism on the other. In its attempt to break out of the "normative," atrophied historical narratives, the historical imagination may take on a realist guise, brushing history against the grains of glamour and spectacle.
In investigating how memory disturbs the reigning narrative of history, it is timely to take a new look at the notion of "material" and consider it together with the related notions of realism and the documentary in filmmaking. These assumptions and practices ebbed and flowed since the 1980s through the advent of the discourse of globalization in the late 1990s. I will explore how the realist impulse manifests itself in a form of history writing marked by a stance against the received, reified aesthetic conventions and cultural forms. Rather than simply register a chunk of reality out there, the realist gestures toward an interactive, performative involvement with the material process of history, fraught as it is with contradictions, catastrophes, traumas, uncertainty as well as possibilities. When Walter Benjamin attempted to bring photomontage into the reconstruction of history, he meant a "material" or realist turn to traverse the unwieldy field of conflicting forces as they impinges on sensory and sensuous life, and to present a contradictorily articulated space of experience — the experience of modernity in the making. This paper will analyze the discussion of neo-realism in the eighties, and proceed to explore the realist impulse in documentary filmmakers in the 1990s and its variations in Jia Zhangke's film Xiaowu and Lou Ye's Suzhou River.
Yeh Wen-Hsin, University of California — "National Learning and International Study: Travel and Translation in the Writing of Chinese History"
In the 1990s there was a revival in China of scholarly interest in "national learning (guoxue)" or classical studies of Chinese history and culture as practiced in the 1920s and '30s. Dunhuang studies, pioneered by European archaeological explorers and historical linguists, became a major area of Chinese studies in China. Research associations appeared and leading universities claimed direct intellectual descent from master classicists of the Republican era. The latter in turn had developed the Chinese "national learning" while interacting with Orientalists in the West.
This paper examines the guoxue phenomena at both ends of China's 20th century. It draws attention to an interesting paradox, that guoxue in the 1920s was developed by cosmopolitan intellectuals working out of national traditions, while guoxue in the 1990s served national agenda despite the growing internationalization of the academic institutional context. By examining the early works of the historian Chen Yinke, this paper shows that Chinese Dunhuang studies had its multi-ethnic perspectives and multi-linguistic moment in the Republican period. This openness to border-crossing factors and sensitivity to cultural diversity within the Chinese universe have been displaced over the course of the century by a renewed interest in national tradition and historical continuity.
Schedule
Saturday, December 7, 2002
9:30-10:00 am — Coffee and welcome
10:00 am-12:00 pm — Panel 1
Chris Berry, Chair Yeh Wen-hsin, "National Learning and International Study: Travel and Translation in the Writing of Chinese History"
Lewis Mayo, "Philology, Dance and the Production of Historical Sense: Dunhuang Culture in Post-Cultural Revolution China"
Ralph Litzinger, "Shangri-la Dreaming: Toward a History of the Dianxibei Present"
12:00-2:00 pm — Lunch Break
2:00-4:00 pm — Panel 2
Yeh Wen-hsin, Chair
Chris Berry, "History as Exchange: Time, History, and Film in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Taiwan Trilogy"
Miriam Lang, "Ch'iung Yao and the Romantic Past"
Brian Moloughney, "The Time of One's Life"
Tani Barlow, "Asia, Reregionalization, Gender and Scholarship"
Sunday, December 8, 2002
9:30-11:30 am — Panel 3
Brian Moloughney, Chair
Sheldon Lu, "Rewriting Socialism in Contemporary Chinese Films" Mary Farquhar, "History as Spectacle: The Trial of the Lin Biao-Jiang Qing Counterrevolutionary Cliques (1980-1981) and Turandot in the Forbidden City (1999)"
Ban Wang, "Realist History in the Age of Simulacra"
Leo Ching, "Mass Culture and Historiography: On Kobayashi Yoshinori's Taiwanron"