Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

What does it mean to be free? Is freedom just about breaking external barriers set by others, or does it also involve overcoming our own internal barriers like undue desires and self-centered attitudes? What is the real essence of autonomy? 

To address these questions, Bhatt explores the challenges that decisions and actions of religious practitioners pose to secular liberal understanding of autonomy. As a case study, he will examine how modern interpretations of premodern Hindu sacred texts, such as the Bhagavad Gītā and Vacanāmṛta, both shape and are shaped by the processes of self-formation within a transnational organization, BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha. Drawing from his extensive textual and ethnographic research, he will argue that genuine agency not only involves removing external barriers in the realms of society, politics, economics, and beyond but also entails addressing the internal barriers rooted in human nature, which often arise from egoistic and selfish motives. Bhatt will show that personal autonomy as self-governance encompasses three key facets: first, it synthesizes both external and internal autonomy; second, it entails the realization of inherent aspects of the self, such as peace and happiness; and third, it is deliberately directed towards refraining from causing harm to others and actively fostering their well-being. Enhancing personal autonomy by returning the gaze to within in order to negotiate freedom without marks the “internal turn.” 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kalpesh Bhatt is an assistant professor of Asian religions at the University of Mary Washington. Synthesizing the fields of anthropology of religion and textual studies, his works examine how modern interpretations of premodern Hindu sacred texts and practices shape and are shaped by secular conditions, everyday concerns, and the ethical subjectivation of those who practice them. His projects have interrogated dynamics of agency and autonomy, religious differences, communal tensions by studying diasporic Hindu communities and temples in North America as well as Hindu festivals like the Maha Kumbh Mela in India. Kalpesh’s research interests include lived Asian religions, religious and cultural pluralism, and Hindu-Christian studies. He is also committed to enhancing public understanding of religion by disseminating scholarly findings to common people through visual anthropology methods.

Before earning his PhD from the University of Toronto and obtaining a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, Kalpesh pursued a Masters in Physics and a Bachelors in Computer Science at BITS Pilani, India. His diverse interests in religion, science, and art have led him to direct several films, including an IMAX film on India, and state-of-the-art multimedia shows such as a grand watershow based on an ancient story from the Upaniṣads, highlighting the interplay between religion and technology, tradition and modernity.

Description

Please joins us for a reception after the performances from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM

ABOUT THE EVENT

How are Asian, particularly queer and/or trans Asian, bodies consumed in Canada? Featuring three queer and trans Asian Canadian artists from Vancouver and Toronto, this event will include live performances and a Q&A panel. Each of their works are an embodied reflection of queer and trans experiences in the Asian diaspora, particularly by using food and associated sensations and metaphors. Janice Jo Lee is a folk artist that will open up the event with a performance and land acknowledgement which will be followed by a showcase of new works by three drag artists. In YOU AND I ≠ WE, an experimental performance co-created by Romi Kim and Kendell Yan, their drag personas SKIM and Maiden China explore the weight of representation, the complexities and intersections of gender, culture, sexuality, and what it means to be in their Asian (Korean and Chinese) bodies with queer and trans identities in public and private spheres. The performance shares insights into intimate experiences through nonlinear storytelling and gestures of refusal in being consumed by the audience’s gaze. In a Drag Horror Cooking Show, “Sarap” (tasty), drag artist Ms. Nookie Galore combines Filipino dishes and ingredients with Philippine history and folklore to create an immersive experience for the audience.

These four artists will perform their works while also creating a space of collective reflection and dialogue on drag, performance, and the body for queer and trans Asian Canadians.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

김새로미 / Romi Kim, or SKIM in drag, is an interdisciplinary artist currently living on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Kim is a nonbinary, trans-masc, second-generation Korean lesbian. They identify themselves in using these words as verbs rather than nouns or adjectives—constantly in action, and in flux. Their artistic practice is explored through an interdisciplinary approach and intersectional feminist queer theory. Kim has shown works in South Korea, the United Kingdom, Edmonton,  and Vancouver in Canada. SKIM is the only Drag King in the House of Rice and he is the producer of his own drag show called King Sized. They have been a part of producing and performing in various theatre shows such as The Transform Festival’s Opening Bash, Cultch Theatre, The ReVolver Festival, and The Array.

甄念菻 / Kendell Yan (she/they), is a second-generation Chinese, trans-femme, non-binary artist living on the lands of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her practice includes performance, visual art, sculpture, digital media, makeup, writing, and costuming, and is primarily centred around her drag identity, Maiden China. Through this lens she explores themes of vulnerability, queer ritual, the concept of the “hyphen”, and liminal experience, by incorporating elements of classical Chinese opera, glamour, punk, and intimate contact performance art. Performing since 2016 in so-called “Vancouver, BC”, Maiden holds the pageant titles of Mr/Ms Cobalt All Star, and the Dogwood Monarchist Society’s Entertainer of the Year 2018. They perform regularly as a member of the House of Rice, Vancouver’s only all-Asian drag family, and is also a part of the non-binary drag performance collective, The Darlings. Their work has been featured by many film and art festivals, including the PuSH International Performing Arts Festival and the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival.

Patrick Salvani, having been raised to fear everything, Ms. Nookie Galore has an un/comfortable relationship with stories that haunt us. She/They/He have been spotlighted in CBC Arts, the documentary “No Fats, No Femmes, No Asians,” and showcased at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Royal Ontario Museum, Gardiner Museum and Varley Art Gallery of Markham. She has been published in the book “Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginiaries” and her work analyzed in the academic journal, “Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 4.” Nookie is the Co-Director of the Queer Asian Love Party, New Ho Queen, AKA she knows how to make a party feel like home. As the Creator of drag plays SARAP: A Drag Horror Cooking Show, The Abularya, and Scary Stories People of Colour Tell in the Dark, Ms. Galore’s DRAG reminds us that dreaming is part of our survival and that nightmares are dreams, too. Get more Nookie in the PBS Docuseries "Brave Spaces" out now!

Janice Jo Lee is a dynamic artist. She is a second generation Korean-Canadian settler based in Tkaronto (Toronto), Ontario. She is a folk-soul-jazz singer songwriter, composer-sound designer, spoken word poet, theatre maker, and arts and anti-oppression facilitator. 

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Camille Sung is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow for the Department of East Asian Studies, and a Research Associate for the Centre for the Study of Korea, Asian Institute. Sung received a Ph.D. in art history and theory with her dissertation on the object- and action-based art of Korea between 1960 and 1980. Currently, she works on expanding her doctoral project by including experimental film and focusing on the relationship between aesthetics and politics of the practice during the period. Her research interests also include modern and contemporary art of the world, curatorial of BIPOC, continental philosophy, and queer and feminist art practice/theory/activism.

Samuel Yoon is a PhD Candidate in Women & Gender Studies Insitute and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Yoon’s research interests include Asian American Critique, Queer Diaspora, and Queer Performance.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

In her most recent film Elegies (2023), Ann Hui documents Hong Kong’s poetry through several of its leading lights. Although the film focuses on living poets, its English-language title points to a poetic form defined by loss and retrospection. In exploring Hui’s mobilization of elegy as that which connects poetry and cinema, this talk develops a critical reassessment of the role of nostalgia in the cinema of Hong Kong – as a persistent thematic thread, an orientation to history, and a condition of reception both locally and abroad. At once evoking and breaking from a structure of feeling that links the colonial and post-handover periods, Hui’s cinematic elegy sets into clear contrast the double edges of nostalgia as both an obstruction to and source of historical insight.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jean Ma is the Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-ying Professor in the Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Her books include Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema; Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography; and Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema. She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her recent monograph At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (available in an open-source digital edition) was a finalist for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards and the 2023 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize.  

Jixin Jia is a PhD Student at the Cinema Studies Insitute, University of Toronto.

Jiaqi Wang is a PhD Student at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.

Elizabeth Wijaya (Chair) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and in the Cinema Studies Insititute, University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Southeas Asia Seminar Series and the Interim-Director of the Dr David Chu Speaker Series, Asian Institute. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

This talk presents the first book-length biography of Kim Soo-Gyong (1918-2000). A gifted linguist with extraordinary life trajectories, Kim is known in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for his central role in establishing the national orthography and standardizing the official Korean grammar.

Born in 1918 in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, Kim moved to North Korea in 1946 with hopes of revolution and joined the faculty of the newly founded Kim Il Sung University. He became a leading figure in Korean linguistics at a young age, studying the history of the Korean language through structuralist linguistics. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, Kim was separated from his family. (Some of his family members later emigrated and have lived in Toronto.) Although Kim disappeared from the academic scene in 1968, his honor was restored twenty years later. Even a novel featuring Kim was published in the DPRK during his lifetime.

Historical anthropologist Itagaki Ryuta published Kim’s biography in Japanese (2021), which was then translated by his colleague and linguist Ko Young Chin and published in Korean (2024). Much more than a personal biography, the book cross-examines multiple contexts and issues – including colonialism and the Cold War, structural linguistics and Marxism, and family separation and reunification – to bring to light the tumultuous twentieth-century history of the Korean peninsula and beyond.

Description

Please note this event is only open to University of Toronto affiliates. Please register using your utoronto email address. 

ABOUT THE EVENT

Student workshop with Thai independent Film Director, Screenwriter, and Producer, Anocha Suwichakornpong.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her thesis film, GRACELAND became the first Thai short film to be officially screened at Cannes Film Festival. MUNDANE HISTORY, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK, Anocha’s second feature, which centers around a student massacre that took place in 1976 by Thai state forces in Bangkok has been screened in festivals such as Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam. The film won Best Picture and Best Director at Thailand National Film Awards and was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded the non-profit Purin Pictures. Through these organizations, she supports emerging voices in independent Southeast Asian Cinema.

Anocha is a Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency recipient. She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 2018-2020. Her latest film, COME HERE, premiered at Berlinale 2021. In 2022, Anocha directed her first live performance, FREETIME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. She received the Creative Capital Award in 2024 for her upcoming film, FICTION. Anocha currently teaches directing in the MFA Film Program at Columbia University.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

How does Beijing make and change policies? Do authoritarian governments truly make public policy and how is it the process distinctive? Join a panel of preeminent China experts to reflect on the opaque process of how decisions get made and overturned.  From economic policy to health to tech & science, the panel will decipher it all.

ABOUT THE PANEL

Anna Lisa Ahlers is the founder and head of the Lise Meitner Research Group at the MPIWG which explores the many facets of China’s rapid and extensive ascent in the global system of science. In her current research projects, she analyzes authoritarianism and democracy as environmental factors for science and academia, the evolution of science policy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and science-policy interactions in China’s (local) governance. She does so with a general interest in the global structures of science and their local varieties in the twenty-first century.

Jessica C. Teets is a Professor at Middlebury College, and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Political Science.  Her research focuses on governance in authoritarian regimes, especially the role of civic participation.  She is the author of Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and editor (with William Hurst) of Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (Routledge Contemporary China Series, 2014), in addition to articles published in The China Quarterly, World Politics, Governance, and the Journal of Contemporary China.  Dr. Teets is currently working on a new book manuscript (with Dr. Xiang Gao) on changing governance under Xi Jinping, and a forthcoming edited volume (with University of Michigan Press) developing a theory of how to lobby dictators (with Dr. Max Grömping).

Kenneth G. Lieberthal is a senior fellow emeritus in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, where until 2009 he was the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Political Science and William Davidson Professor of Business Administration. He was director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies from 1986 to 1989, and on May 15, 2014, the university’s board of regents renamed the center as the “Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.” Lieberthal was special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council for 1998 through 2000.

(Moderator) Diana Fu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science at The University of Toronto, and Director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is a Non-Resident Fellow at Brookings Institution, a China fellow at the Wilson Center, and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. Her research examines civil society, popular contention, state control, and authoritarian citizenship in China.

Description

Please note: this event has limited space and requires registration to attend.

ABOUT THE EVENT

Screening of Come Here with director Anocha Suwichakornpong, and a post-screening discussion.

ABOUT THE FILM

Come Here

Four young travelers embark on a trip to Kanchanaburi to see the museum, but pass the time in other ways when they find out it’s closed for refurbishment.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her thesis film, GRACELAND became the first Thai short film to be officially screened at Cannes Film Festival. MUNDANE HISTORY, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK, Anocha’s second feature, which centers around a student massacre that took place in 1976 by Thai state forces in Bangkok has been screened in festivals such as Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam. The film won Best Picture and Best Director at Thailand National Film Awards and was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded the non-profit Purin Pictures. Through these organizations, she supports emerging voices in independent Southeast Asian Cinema.

Anocha is a Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency recipient. She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 2018-2020. Her latest film, COME HERE, premiered at Berlinale 2021. In 2022, Anocha directed her first live performance, FREETIME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. She received the Creative Capital Award in 2024 for her upcoming film, FICTION. Anocha currently teaches directing in the MFA Film Program at Columbia University.

Description

Please note: this event does not require registration but seats are limited and only available on a "first come, first serve" basis.

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us for a screening of By the Time it Gets Dark with director Anocha Suwichakornpong, and a post-screening discussion.

ABOUT THE FILM

By the Time it Gets Dark

A film director and her muse who was a student activist in the 1970s, a waitress who keeps changing jobs, an actor and an actress, all live loosely connected to each other by almost invisible threads. The narrative sheds its skin several times to reveal layer upon layer of the complexities that make up the characters’ lives.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Anocha Suwichakornpong is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her thesis film, GRACELAND became the first Thai short film to be officially screened at Cannes Film Festival. MUNDANE HISTORY, her first feature, won numerous awards including the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK, Anocha’s second feature, which centers around a student massacre that took place in 1976 by Thai state forces in Bangkok has been screened in festivals such as Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam. The film won Best Picture and Best Director at Thailand National Film Awards and was chosen as Thailand’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film.

Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded the non-profit Purin Pictures. Through these organizations, she supports emerging voices in independent Southeast Asian Cinema.

Anocha is a Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency recipient. She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 2018-2020. Her latest film, COME HERE, premiered at Berlinale 2021. In 2022, Anocha directed her first live performance, FREETIME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. She received the Creative Capital Award in 2024 for her upcoming film, FICTION. Anocha currently teaches directing in the MFA Film Program at Columbia University.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Courtesy of the Duke University Press

In Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference—that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. For Davé, indifference is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life.

With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naisargi N. Davé is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Davé’s research concerns emergent form of intra- and interspecies ethics, politics, and rationality in contemporary India. Davé’s latest book Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being (Duke 2023), examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, I show how human-animal relations manifest through care and violence, but also, crucially, an ethic of indifference— that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. Indifference, the book demonstrates, is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Davé is a 2023-2024 Martha LA McCain Faculty Fellow at the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the University of Toronto’s Bonham Centre, embarking on a book project titled Murder: The Social Life of Violent Death in Queer India.

(Discussant) Kajri Jian is a Professor of Art History and a Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. Professor Jian is interested in how the efficacies, affects, and values associated with images arise not only from what goes on within the picture-frame but also from the production, circulation, and deployments of images as material objects. She therefore finds it useful to bring ethnographic sensibilities and methods to the study of images. Her work on popular images in modern and contemporary India encompasses the bazaar icons known as “calendar art;” monumental statues; theme parks; and representations of “nature” in temples, gardens, zoos, and popular cinema. It has largely focused on a vernacular business ethos where religion has been the primary site for adopting new media and expressive techniques.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Following Mao Zedong’s passing, Chinese policymakers and economists embarked on intense debates regarding the overhaul of the country’s centralized planned economy. Past experiments with decentralization and the rural household responsibility system were influential, yet Eastern Europe’s economic reforms served as significant reference points, too. Notably, Chinese delegations were dispatched to Yugoslavia to scrutinize enterprise reform and to Hungary to grasp the intricacies of price liberalization. These visits aimed to dissect both the successes and failures of economic policies. Moreover, Eastern European economists were welcomed to China, engaging in discussions with party officials and leading economists, their insights transcending academic boundaries. Their works were also translated and disseminated widely in the public arena. With a focus on the transnational intellectual history through historical documents and academic journals, this talk probe why Eastern Europe’s economic reforms failed to avert socialism’s collapse, while China’s "Reform and Opening" policies thrived.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Felix Wemheuer is Chair Professor for Modern China Studies at the University of Cologne. His publications include Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union (Yale UP 2014) and A Social History of Maoist China: Conflict and Change, 1949-1976 (Cambridge UP 2019).

(Moderator/Chair) Yiching Wu teaches East Asian Studies, modern Chinese history, and anthropology at the University of Toronto. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, his research focuses on the history, society, and politics of Mao’s China, in particular during the Cultural Revolution. His main scholarly interests include historical anthropology, critical social theory, populism and social protest, modern Chinese history, Chinese socialism and post-socialism, and politics of historical knowledge.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Strangers in the Family is a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). Departing from male-centered narratives of Overseas Chinese communities, the book tells the history of community-formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Strangers in the Family  showcases women’s moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women’s place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guo-Quan Seng is an Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of Chinese societies in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in race, gender, and sexuality formations in the region, and how they have been shaped by empires, migration, and global capitalism. Published in November 2023 by Cornell University Press, Strangers in the Family is his first single-authored monograph. He is now working on a second book project tentatively titled, “A Diaspora of Shopkeepers: Empire, Race and Chinese Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1870-1970".

ABOUT THE PANEL

(Discussant) Su Yen Chong  is a PhD student in The Department of Art History at the University of Toronto.

(Moderator) Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and in the Cinema Studies Insititute, University of Toronto. She is the Director of the Southeas Asia Seminar Series and the Interim-Director of the Dr David Chu Speaker Series, Asian Insitute. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian  Programs.

Description

ABOUT THE BOOK

Courtesy of Columbia University Press

Co-winner, 2023 AIPS Book Prize, American Institute of Pakistan Studies

From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.

Isabel Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.

Huacuja Alonso traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of “radio resonance” to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners’ letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.  

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Isabel Huacuja Alonso is a historian of media and an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). Her recent book, Radio for the Millions: Hindi Urdu Broadcasting Across  Borders ( Columbia University Press, 2023) won the 2023 American Institute of Pakistan Studies best book award. She recently co-edited a special journal Issues for Modern Asian Studies titled, "Rethinking the Second World War in South Asia: Between theaters and beyond battles" ( September, 2023).

(Chair) Rakesh Sengupta is an Assistant Professor for the Cinema Studies Insitute, University of Toronto, and an Assistant Professor of English at University of Toronto Scarborough. Sengupta’s research and teaching focuses on South Asian cinemas, film history, media archaeology, critical theory and global media cultures. His current book project, An Archaeology of Screenwriting: Archives, Practices and Epistemes of Indian Cinema, 1930-1960, plots the history of screenwriting in South Asia outside Western epistemological frameworks of cinema. His work interrogates universalist ideas of film archives, aesthetics and audiences to imagine an alternative history of the medium and offers a decolonial model of film historiography from the Global South. His research is based on historical materials in four languages across formal and informal archives in several countries, as well as interview-based fieldwork in Mumbai.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

Fashioning Monogamy: Constitutional Rights of Gender Equality and Marriage in Postcolonial South Korea

In postcolonial South Korea, one of the areas that the state prioritized in the nation-building process was to construct modern monogamous marriage (ilbuilch’ŏ) based on gender equality. Article 20 of the Founding Constitution stipulates, “Marriages shall be based on the equality of men and women. Purity in marriage and the family’s health shall be under the special protection of the state.” By constitutionalizing “purity in marriage,” the state banned the old customary practice of concubinage that existed for centuries in Korea. Article 20 of the Founding Constitution was later instrumental in passing the gender-neutral adultery law at the National Assembly in 1953. This new gender-neutral adultery law penalized men’s concubinage practices and their extramarital affairs for the first time in Korean history. By examining Article 20 of the Founding Constitution and the legislation of the adultery law during the Syngman Rhee period, this presentation demonstrates how the constitutional language of gender equality in marriage played a critical role in establishing modern monogamous marriage and criminalized the long customary practice of concubinage in postcolonial South Korea.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jisoo M. Kim is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University. She is Founding Director of the GW Institute for Korean Studies (2017-Present) and Founding Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2018-Present). She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She specializes in gender, sexuality, law, emotions, and affect in Korean history. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Criminalizing Intimacy: Marriage, Concubinage, and Adultery Law in Korea, 1469-2015. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.

(Chair) Andre Schmid is an Associate Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Schmid’s research and teaching focus on 19th and 20th century Korea and East Asia, as seen in the broader context of global, comparative history. He is currently working on a book about the early formation of North Korea after the devastation of the late colonial and Korean wars. This book focuses on the turn to the heteronormative nuclear family by both the population and the Party-state as a primary site for postwar reconstruction and decolonization. In this gendered, socio-economic history of north Korean urban families, he examines how issues such as advice literature, apartment construction, divorce, and consumption established norms that while explicitly revolutionary often enabled, implicitly, a conservative politics that has always remained at the core of North Korean political culture.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

In this book talk Perry discussed the process of editing and translating his MLA volume Han’guk ŭi k’wiŏ munka: han segi and its accompanying volume of English translations, A Century of Queer Korean Fiction. He also read from some of the selections, which range from Yi Kwangsu’s 1918 short story "Yunkwangho" to Park Sang Young’s 2017 "Yundo is Back" and include both canonical works as well as pieces found in the archives.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Samuel E. Perry is associate professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His interests include literary translation, queer studies, and revolutionary fiction from the early and mid-20th century. He is now working on two book manuscripts: “From Across the Genkai Sea: Japanese Literature During the Korean War” and “Bad Gays in Japan”.

(Chair) Janet Poole is an Associate Professor, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities & Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies. Poole’s research and teaching interests lie in aesthetics in the broad context of colonialism and modernity, in history and theories of translation, and in the creative practice of literary translation.

Description

This talk presents the emerging themes from a larger book project on China’s relationship-building with African elites through training programs and immersive experiences sponsored by the Chinese government. Drawing on rich empirical data, including interviews and ethnographic observations in China and Ethiopia, this study challenges the popular depictions of China as exporting its model to developing countries. Instead, it demonstrates the dynamic and multi-directional co-optation, persuasion, and disciplining efforts aimed at African elites. The talk highlights how these efforts yield both, a public acknowledgment and even promotion of China by the participants, as well as somewhat ambivalent private reflections about China and its future in Africa. 

Maria Repnikova is an expert on Chinese political communication, an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. This year, she is also a non-residential Wilson China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has written widely on China’s media politics, including propaganda, critical journalism, digital nationalism, and soft power. Dr. Repnikova is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2017), as well as the recent, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series). Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic, amongst other outlets. Other than working on China, Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia. Most recently, she has been researching and completing a monograph on Chinese soft power in Africa, with a focus on Ethiopia. Dr. Repnikova holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In the past, she was a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2020-2021), a visiting fellow at the African Studies Center at Beijing University (2019), and a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication (2014-2016).

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

Join us for a workshop with Emiko Stock.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Emiko Stock is a multimodal anthropologist working on questions of historical and diasporic erasures, silence and absence, feminist praxis, and counter-archival orientations. Using writing, images, and soundscapes to resist medium specificity, her compositions dwell between pixels and emulsions, stillness and movement, facts and fabulation. Her short films The Wedding (2021) and Commute (2015) advocate for a sensory ethnography anchored in the experimental and have been screened in international film festivals and universities. She is the co-curator of The Virtual Otherwise Film Festival & Conference and co-founder of CoMMPCT (Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators and Teachers). She is based between Cambodia and Egypt, where she teaches at The American University in Cairo. She previously taught at Hamilton College and Cornell University where she received her PhD. She is currently working on her book project For This Cannot Be Told, Written Or Seen: Cham Resonances Countering Regimes of Hypervisibility. Some of her most recent publications include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Material Religions and a short piece in Otherwise Magazine.

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

There is always that one image that comes out of any archival digging only to resist everything: it comes with the excitement and promises of clarification, documentation, and explanation. And yet it gives nothing. It cares very little for tracks, footnotes, and answers. It resists the mission that, in all honesty and full passion, the historian, the ethnographer, the memory writer, and the all-things-pictures-nerd set out to do. It resists what we could call “regimes of hypervisibility”: the trials of facts, proofs, and truth that academic writing requires. The picture demands us to pause and ponder: could we, as researchers and writers of traces, find ways to work not against or around the blanks but through them? Is there a way for the historian to take in the emptiness of the archive in its entire fullness? Could the anthropologist account for ethnographic refusals beyond the anxious quest for observations?

In this talk, Emiko Stock starts with a single photograph, one taken among Chams—members of the Muslim minority—during the Cambodian 1960s pre-war era: an annihilation regime marked, notably, by a complete visual erasure, and the systematic destruction of archives, photographs, and family memorabilia. As Stock tries to work with the picture and its call to respect opacity, Stock discusses the potential for SF / Speculative Feminism / Speculative Fabulation to open alternative ways of thinking, analyzing, and writing with reparative generosity. For in the end, what those one-too-many pictures might be asking of us is to wonder: could there be other approaches to bring us into an actual resonance with humanity? A resonance which could have little to do with extensive documentation and studies of humans at large and more with a close attunement toward each other.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Emiko Stock is a multimodal anthropologist working on questions of historical and diasporic erasures, silence and absence, feminist praxis, and counter-archival orientations. Using writing, images, and soundscapes to resist medium specificity, her compositions dwell between pixels and emulsions, stillness and movement, facts and fabulation. Her short films The Wedding (2021) and Commute (2015) advocate for a sensory ethnography anchored in the experimental and have been screened in international film festivals and universities. She is the co-curator of The Virtual Otherwise Film Festival & Conference and co-founder of CoMMPCT (Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators and Teachers). She is based between Cambodia and Egypt, where she teaches at The American University in Cairo. She previously taught at Hamilton College and Cornell University where she received her PhD. She is currently working on her book project For This Cannot Be Told, Written Or Seen: Cham Resonances Countering Regimes of Hypervisibility. Some of her most recent publications include a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Material Religions and a short piece in Otherwise Magazine.

Description

This event is part of the B.N. Pandey Memorial Lecture Series

ABOUT THE EVENT

The interlocking technologies of caste, gender, sexuality, and humanity continue to shape identity, agency, and citizenship in South Asia and beyond. This talk focuses on the construction and consolidation of caste and examines its everdayness in both touchable and Dalit lives. It demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and the violence of caste. It centers new approaches to understand the transformative potential of the interlocking politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Shailaja Paik is Charles Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Associate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her first book Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit ("Untouchable") women in urban India. Her second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity (Stanford University Press, 2022) focuses on the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. Her book won the 2023 John F. Richards Prize for most distinguished work on South Asia.

Description

ABOUT THE EVENT

A variety of mutations of neoliberal, capitalist politics have been investigated across different parts of the globe, including many Asian countries. Particularly in South Korea, the market-state nexus has developed a distinctive form of legal violence for the past two decades to protect the capital, (re)establish sovereignty, and outlaw “the disobedient.” Marked by a punitive turn of neoliberal governance in 2007, the recent trend of lawsuits targeting labor unions and protestors reveals a new punitive technique of dispossession and death, which has been effectively enabled and deployed through the Korean juridical systems. Drawing on the analyses of 249 lawsuit cases and 3,138 pages of court judgments, this talk proposes a notion of punitive precarity to elucidate (a) exceptional legal mechanisms to punish the “social ills” employed by legal, government, and for-profit institutions; (b) a contemporary form of the subjugation of life to the power of death enforced by the imposition of liabilities and confiscation; and (c) legal violence as the performative and communicative technology that produces material and symbolic effects that spill over into the entire society. In doing so, this talk extends a poignant critique about the ways in which the state and state-sanctioned violence has proactively created a new underclass, legitimized by the law and legal systems.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Dr. Heewon Kim, a scholar-activist who works across borders, is an associate professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. She is a critical organizational scholar who focuses primarily on the areas of justice, participation and voice, power/knowledge, violence, as well as burnout and resilience.

(Chair) Michelle Cho is an Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies and Affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Korea, Asian Institute. Her research and teaching focus on questions of collectivity and popular aesthetics in Korean film, media, and popular culture. 

Description

ABOUT THE TALK

This talk will explore gender, transformation, and patriarchy in the 19th-century Urdu Qissah-i Agar o Gul (Tale of Agar and Gul), a story of the deeds of Prince Agar, who begins his life as the daughter of the vizier of Poppyseed City. Agar’s tale is queer in many senses, involving real or apparent same-sex desire, bursting with innuendoes and oddities, and driven by the question of Prince Agar’s gender. The talk will question the romantic strategy of celebrating Agar’s tale as an anti-patriarchal transgender narrative, and will begin an examination of the story’s instances of transformation more broadly, in relation to desire. Prince Agar’s maleness makes his tale revelatory of the oppressive force of norms of masculinity and the workings of homopatriarchy through representations of manly virtues, sexual pursuit, traffic in women, rape, and the possibility of a reproductive future.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Pasha M. Khan is the Chair in Urdu Language and Culture and an Associate Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University. He is interested in the narrative qissah genre and storytelling in languages such as Urdu-Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian, as well as South Asian literature more broadly. He is the author of The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu, among other writings.