Description

Beijing and Taipei have long disputed ideas of “one China.” The nature of their contentions has also varied across time. What is certain now is that a majority of Taiwanese disagree with any “one China” concept that implies Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China. Most people in Taiwan want to remain a self-governing liberal democracy and reject Beijing’s “one country, two systems” policy. Our speaker, Yu-Jie Chen, an assistant research professor at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica and an affiliated scholar of U.S.-Asia Law Institute of NYU School of Law, talked about the diversified political positions on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese attitudes towards their own identity, and whether a peaceful solution can be found to this increasingly volatile and high-stakes dispute.  

Speaker’s Bio:  Yu-Jie Chen is an assistant research professor at the Law Institute of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. Her research focuses on human rights and international law and relations, particularly in the context of China, Taiwan, and China-Taiwan relations. Professor Chen received her J.S.D. and LL.M. degrees from New York University School of Law. She also holds an LL.M. and LL.B. from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She was an inaugural Global Academic Fellow at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law (2019-2020). She has been a research scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute, a researcher and advocate for the non-governmental organization Human Rights in China, and an attorney at the Taipei-based international law firm Lee and Li.

Description

With their shared and yet diverged colonial and postcolonial experiences, both China and India have embarked on their own modernizing and state-building projects after World War II. From a brief hope of solidarity in the 1955 Bandung Conference to repeated border conflicts, and from postwar developmentalism to neoliberal market reforms, the two self-assured Asian giants have entangled with one another in numerous ways. Today, as China and India seem to drift further apart from each other under the rhetoric of the “New Cold War,” what does it mean to talk about South-South relations in research, activism, and policy-making in the context of China and India? How do scholars and intellectuals from or working on India view China and the changing Asia-Pacific order? This panel brings together scholars and intellectuals from a variety of backgrounds to engage these urgent questions.

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

USA | 2021 | 84 min | English | Canadian Premiere | Documentary, Women Filmmakers

FREE Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

About four hours from Los Angeles, on the dusty valley floor beneath the snow-capped Sierra mountains, lies a single white obelisk gravestone, one of the iconic remains of the notorious Manzanar camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. But the valley wasn’t always so. Payahuunadü, or “the land of flowing water,” Owens Valley is the home of the Nüümü (Paiute) and Newe (Shoshone) people who, years earlier, were forced from their land after ranchers and farmers claimed it, while the Los Angeles water department later drained the valley dry, diverting its water to the thirsty city.

Ann Kaneko’s Manzanar, Diverted invokes this history to tell the story of generations of women: Native American, Japanese American WWII incarcerees, and environmentalists, fighting for the future of the valley. Through a mix of testimonials, archival, and aerial photography, Kaneko weaves intersectional histories with the urgency of the present. – Aram Siu Wai Collier

Recognitions:
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, 2021
DOXA Documentary Film Festival, 2021
CAAMFest, 2021

Director Bio:

Ann Kaneko is known for her personal films that weave her intimate aesthetic with the complex intricacies of political reality. Her work has screened internationally and been broadcast on PBS Independent Lens and NewsHour. Her wig-shop musical 100% Human Hair played Reel Asian in 2002.

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

FREE Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

Myanmar | 66 min | Burmese with English subtitles | Drama, Experimental, Women Filmmakers

Guest-programmed by Thaiddhi in partnership with the Minikino S-Express Short Film Program Exchange, this collection of short films showcases young and new voices of independent filmmakers from Myanmar amid the sociopolitical changes of the country.

This collection includes ‘Late Summer Day’ by Nay Wunn Ni, ‘Burn Boys’ by Kaung Myat Thu Kyaw, ‘The Cockroach Thu’ by Sxar Kiss, and ‘Age of Youth’ by Myo Thar Khin.

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

‘The Blind Rabbit’ by Pallavi Paul
FREE Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

India | 2020 | 43 min | Hindi, English with English subtitles | North American Premiere | Documentary, Experimental, Women Filmmakers

A mysterious tiger walks through the forest, barely revealing itself, save for a few rare and magical glimpses. This allegorical fiction begins Pallavi Paul’s description of systemic police violence in Delhi, India, based on events suppressed from official history. Using scattered but historically significant fragments of documentation, including video and audio eyewitness accounts, Paul explores the intersections of power, gender, and the narrativization of memory. The film moves across moments like the national emergency of 1975–77, and the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, all while remaining contemporary by alluding to recent police brutality across university campuses.

Creating a narrative from the memories and stories of collective power, resistance, and violence, Paul arrives at a coherent study of an abuse of power that is situated in Delhi, but that is easily recognizable almost anywhere in the world. – Mariam Zaidi

Recognitions:
OFFICIAL SELECTION
2021 International Film Festival Rotterdam
2021 Sheffield DocFest

Director Bio:

Video artist and film researcher Pallavi Paul works with video, installations, and performance. She started her scientific career with a study of literary science, and has now completed her PhD in film studies in New Delhi. Paul’s work has been shown at, among others, the Tate Modern in London, Contour Biennale in Mechelen, Belgium, and the Mumbai Film Festival.

Description

Asian Institute x Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival

Screening Dates: November 10-19, 2021

USA | 2020 | 77 min | English, Hawaiian with English Subtitles | International Premiere | Drama

PART OF THE CENTREPIECE SPOTLIGHT ON HAWAI’I

Kea can’t make ends meet, even while working as a luau dancer, karaoke-bar hostess, and elementary school Hawaiian-language teacher. After a violent altercation with her boyfriend, Kea accidentally hits a homeless man with her car. Not wanting to involve the authorities, she decides to take care of the mysterious man herself. But while she continues to struggle with her own financial hardship and difficulty finding housing, Kea’s downward spiral begins to reveal a deeply rooted trauma from her past. As her life careens out of control, so too does her grasp on the world around her.

Christopher Kahunahana’s captivating storytelling ventures beyond the world-famous titular tourist destination and strikes an aesthetic that is perhaps unfamiliar to those with cursory knowledge of idyllic Hawaii. Kahunahana’s juxtaposition of the latter against the cold concrete of looming and perpetual urban development casts a critical look at the gentrified waste of ecological decay, systemic poverty, and the enduring legacy of U.S. colonization, which haunts the faces and spaces of Kahunahana’s film. Waikiki is a critical contribution to the growing body of Native Hawaiian cinema. – Kevin Lim

Director Bio:
Christopher Kahunahana is a Sundance Institute Native Lab and Feature Film Program Alumni. As the founder of 4th World Film, he’s written and directed LĀHAINĀ NOON and directed a short documentary for the Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American “A Day in the Life” project.

Recognitions
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Hawai’I International Film Festival, 2020
Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2020
Seattle International Film Festival, 2021

AWARDS
Best Hawai’I Feature Film, Hawai’I International Film Festival, 2020
Best Feature and Best Cinematography, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, 2020

Description

* Tea Circle is a Burma/Myanmar blog founded in 2015 and housed at the Asian Institute since 2018.

The military coup in Myanmar prompted a quick shift by major ethnic Burman political actors—including the National Unity Government (NUG)—to adopt language of a “federal democracy” and commit to meaningful federal reform. While political uncertainty and repressive military rule persist, conversations continue about what political changes are necessary to enact meaningful decentralization, but also what complementary processes are needed within Myanmar society to counteract decades of entrenched discrimination and inequality.  

Panelists:

David Thang Moe (Asbury Theological Seminary)

Naw May Oo Mutraw (Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, University of San Diego)

Dr Sai Thet Naing Oo (Pyidaungsu Institute)  

Moderator: Htet Min Lwin (York University)   

This event is supported by a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada

Description

Since the advent of cinema and the forced colonization of the islands, Hawai’i stories on film have too often been told by outsiders. Reel Asian is bringing a spotlight onto two acclaimed Hawai’i-made dramatic feature films. Christopher Kahunahana’s award winning WAIKIKI is the first dramatic feature film written and directed by a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). Christopher Makoto Yogi’s I WAS A SIMPLE MAN had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. Unique films and filmmakers, both Kahunahana and Yogi share a genuine reverence for their home and seek to provide images and sounds of the Hawaii they know.

In this moderated filmmaker to filmmaker conversation Kahunahana and Yogi will discuss each others films and the groundbreaking context that surrounds them.

Description

Abstract:
In this talk, I present the core findings and arguments of my upcoming book, Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press 2022). This research traces how Korean citizens have become “participatory democrats” who experience greater political efficacy when they engage in direct action than in institutional politics. In comparing the coordinating capacity of three groups of democracy activists between 1987-2017 – i.e., activists in social movement organizations (SMOs), activists turned politicians in centrist parties, and activists-cum-politicians in progressive parties – I center my explanation on the concept of national solidarity infrastructure. I maintain that activists in Korean SMOs, compared to their counterparts in formal party politics, have developed a remarkable infrastructure to address a broad spectrum of national public policy areas, to organize nationwide popular demonstrations, and thus to nurture the political dynamics of participatory democrats. These findings not only suggest a rethinking of the interconnection between and mutual constitution of social movements and political parties, but further revise the definitional characteristics of social movement actors when the scholarship has conventionally approached SMOs as focused on a narrow scope of social issues or as provisional organizations compared to political parties and institutional politics.

Speaker’s Bio:
Yoonkyung Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the director of the Center for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto. She is a political sociologist specializing in labor politics, social movements, political representation, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011), Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press 2022), and numerous journal articles that appeared in Politics and Society, Globalizations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Asian Survey, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Critical Asian Studies. She regularly teaches courses on Theories of Social Movements (graduate), Research Practicum (graduate), Comparative Political Sociology (undergraduate), Social Movements (undergraduate), and Transnational Asia (undergraduate).

Discussant’s Bio:
Joan Cho is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Government at Wesleyan University. Authoritarianism, democratization, social movements, and authoritarian legacies in Korea and East Asia are her primary research and teaching focus. She is also a non-resident adjunct fellow at CSIS Korea Chair and an associate-in-research of the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.

Description

Beginning in July 2020, youth-led protests filled the streets of Bangkok and other cities in Thailand. Fed up with the remnants of dictatorship that lingered despite the elections in March 2019, the protestors made three demands: 1) The current prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, who first came to power in the May 2014 coup, must resign and a new election held; 2) The 2017 Constitution, drafted by a junta-appointed body, must be revised; and 3) The institution of the monarchy must be reformed. The third demand is both what has made the protests potentially socially and politically transformative – and has caused the state to respond with repression. Since November 2020, at least 155 people, including many secondary school and university students, have been accused of lèse majesté, or insulting, defaming or threating the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent, a crime that carries a sentence of up to 15 years imprisonment per count. This talk examines the courageous dissent of activists and the repression they now face.

Bio:
Tyrell Haberkorn is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin. Tyrell researches and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand from the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 until the present. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence (2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (2018). She is currently writing a first draft of an indictment of the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), the military junta that took power in the 22 May 2014 coup, and translating Prontip Mankhong’s prison memoir, All They Could Do To Us [มันทำร้ายเราได้แค่นี้แหละ]. Tyrell also writes and translates frequently about Southeast Asia for a public audience, including Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Mekong Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, openDemocracy, and Prachatai.

Description

“Smile Broadly!” is the title of a dynamic performance by children in the Arirang Festival. The scene symbolically shows the culture that can command a smile to breathless children, and actually train them to do so. It is this cultural background that makes it possible to advance the slogan “March with a smile though the roads are rough!” to the people suffering from severe famine. To comprehend the present changes and anticipate future developments in North Korea, we should understand their past experiences and socialization processes of their values, norms, and lifestyles. During the period of famine, I visited North Korea, met North Korean refugees in China near the border, and taught refugee youths in the South. As an anthropologist, famine relief activist and educator, I would like to share my experience with North Koreans and their culture.

Bio:
Dr. Byung-ho Chung received his Ph.D. from Illinois in 1992 in Anthropology. He is professor emeritus at Hanyang University, South Korea, and special advisor to the president of Korean Red Cross. He was professor of the department of cultural anthropology and founded the Institute for Globalization and Multicultural Studies at Hanyang University ERICA Campus. He has been a teacher, scholar, social activist, and social reformer. While keeping one foot in the university and sustaining a career as a researcher and writer, he has extended his reach to social activism and reform. As a public intellectual and action anthropologist, he is the founder or co-founder of seven social justice organizations for equality and multiculturalism in Korea and East Asia, including Cooperative Childcare and Communitarian Education, Okedongmu Children (NGO for relief of North Korean famine), Hanadul School for North Korean Refugee Children, Rainbow Center for Migrant Youths, and Steppingstone for Peace (NGO for the Peace and Reconciliation in East Asia). He is the author or co-author of a number of works on inter-Korean affairs and multicultural issues including North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics, Welcome to Korea: North Koreans in South Korea, Multicultural Spaces in South Korea, and Suffering and Smile (published in Korean in 2020, translated in Japanese in 2021, and English translation in progress).

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This event is organized by Jesook Song (Anthropology, University of Toronto), Yoonkyung Lee (Sociology, University of Toronto) and Laam Hae (Politics, York University).

This virtual event is co-organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea (CSK) at University of Toronto and the Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies.

Description

Abstract:

Taking up treatments in social thought on work as an insult to status and an assertion of dignity, the recuperation of collective standing in the recognition of individualised death, and the imagination of sovereignty derived from common culpabilities, this presentation explores how caste as a particular contextualisation of questions of equality is framed through mediation of the body as an analytical instrument. How might we understand the polemical force of B.R Ambedkar’s formulation of a “division of labourers” as description of inequality? How does the category of atrocity anchor untouchability as the reconciliation between multitudes of the dead and death as individual event? How might a poetic figuration of force frame sovereignty as collective culpability for every body harmed? Through thumbnail sketches of polemical, conceptual, and aesthetic strategies through which Dalit and other thinkers frame and engage these questions, I hope to share the sense in which these particular operationalisations of caste may be inhabited as lessons in thinking with equality as an axiom and aspiration.

Speaker’s Bio:

William F. Stafford, Jr. is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. He completed his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation on the autorickshaw meter in Delhi as an exemplary format of “public” transactions and anchor of a variable ethos of commercial sociality. His current project takes up the autorickshaw meter-mounted panic button to explore architectures of “sequester” as a spatialising genre of governance and sociality in India. Taking the Lakshman Rekha as a technological artefact and visual rhetoric of security, his project works through political theologies and aesthetics of the individuation, identification, and fungibility of city residents in the “democratisation” of a gendered moral economy of location through the platformisation of bodily security. He has co-edited a collection of essays on topology and method in anthropology, authored essays and book reviews on political theologies of demonitisation in India and imaginaries of belonging through and beyond labour in Sri Lanka, and undertaken academic, policy, and legal research on bonded labour, forced labour, and the minimum wage in South Asia.

Description

The Inter-Asian Forum on Film Censorship was the first webinar roundtable discussion for the series, Theory/Praxis/Politics. This forum highlighted film practitioners and programmers’ thoughts and reflections on the practices of censorship across Asia. Our panelists, Zhu Rikun, Kek Huat Lau, and Park Sungho, articulated their first-hand experiences in the field and unfurl the complexities of censorship both in the production and circulation of cinema.  Theory/Praxis/Politics was a webinar series working to advocate for and bring together perspectives of academics, filmmakers, programmers, civil servants, and other stakeholders with an interest in the question of censorship across Asia and its diasporas. We considered Asia as a productive site in which theory, practice, and politics overlap. The intersection allows us to question not only our understanding of censorship and the ways in which we engage with cinema in the region but also to reconsider the relationship between theory, aesthetics, and politics.

PARK Sungho is a programmer for Cambodia International Film Festival and Busan International Film Festival, and is working to promote Southeast Asian cinema globally. Park was born in Seoul, Korea in 1977. He majored in Film Editing at the Cinematography Department at Chung-Ang University. In 2007, he joined the Busan International Film Festival and served as a program coordinator for Asian cinema and manager for the Asian Film Academy. In 2013, he moved his base to Phnom Penh. Since 2016, he has joined Cambodia-based film production company Anti-Archive as a producer.  

ZHU Rikun is an independent film director and producer, as well as a curator from China. He is the founder of Fanhall Films and chief editor of cinema website fanhall.com. Zhu founded Documentary Film Festival China in 2003, which is one of the earliest independent film festivals in China. As a director, Zhu’s has made the following film: The Questioning, The Dossier, Welcome, Dust, Anni, and No Desire to Hide(also named Siren in original title).  

LAU Kek-Huat is a Malaysia-born filmmaker based in Taiwan. His debut film Boluomi was in competition Busan International Film Festival, New Currents section, and Golden horse nominated for a Best new director. The project won him the Tokyo Talent Award 2015,  Best Script Award in 2013 Taiwan, and was selected for La Fabrique. Cinema du monde. His short film Nia door won Best Short Film Award, Sonje Award at the Busan International film festival, selected for the 38th Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. Both his documentary Absent without leave and The Tree Remembers still face censorship challenges today in Malaysia. He is an alumnus of Golden Horse Academy and Berlinale & Tokyo Talents. Lau had also a jury and mentor for regional filmmaking events such as Doc Doc, Asiadoc, FFD, New Asian Scenery.  

Palita Chunsaengchan is an assistant professor of Southeast Asian cinema in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is working on her book manuscript entitled, Sovereign Screen: Early Thai Cinema and Politics of Media Modernity. This project focuses on early Thai cinema — particularly on its intermedial relationships to prose, poetry, and traditional theatre — from the period of the absolute monarchy to the Siamese Revolution. She also published in Asian Cinema (2021) and Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2018).   

Elizabeth Wijaya is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema in the Department of Visual Studies and Cinema Studies Institute of the University of Toronto. She is Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies and an Associate Producer of Taste (Dir. Le Bao, Special Jury Award, Berlin Film Festival).

Description

Taiwan is among the top 20 largest economies in the world and plays a key role in global supply chain. Yet, the industrial activities also come with a heavy environmental cost. Taiwan is the fifth largest coal importer in the world; at the per capita level, Taiwan’s carbon emission is higher than most developed countries. This talk will review the politics of climate change in Taiwan at different levels. At the global level, the talk will discuss how being a non-member to UNFCCC constrains Taiwan’s internal discussions on climate change; at the national level, the talk will focus on how Taiwan’s legacy of developmentalism shapes the policy trajectories on energy sources; at the local level, the talk will showcase how the potentials and challenges for Taiwan’s vibrant civil society to contribute to climate actions.
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John Chung-En Liu is an associate professor of sociology at National Taiwan University, and a faculty affiliate in the International Program on Climate Change and Sustainable Development. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and previously was an assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.

Description

Please join us for a panel discussion of Kajri Jain’s new book, Gods in the Time of Democracy (Duke University Press, 2021)

In 2018 India’s prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the world’s tallest statue: a 597-foot figure of nationalist leader Sardar Patel. Twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, it is but one of many massive statues built following India’s economic reforms of the 1990s. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork at giant statue sites in India and its diaspora, Gods in the Time of Democracy examines how monumental icons emerged as a religious and political form in contemporary India. Centering the ex-colony in rethinking key concepts of the image, it mobilizes the concept of emergence towards a radical treatment of art historical objects as dynamic assemblages. Its richly layered narrative describes how these public icons have proliferated at the intersections between new image technologies, neo-spiritual religious movements, Hindu nationalist politics, globalization, and Dalit-Bahujan verifications of equality and presence.

Learn more about the book at: https://www.dukeupress.edu/gods-in-the-time-of-democracy

Description

BOOK TALK

What can China’s railway initiative teach us about global dominance? Join us for a panel discussion with the authors of the book ‘Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power In Southeast Asia’ (University of California Press, October 2020).

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled what would come to be known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a global development strategy involving infrastructure projects and associated financing throughout the world, including Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. While the Chinese government has framed the plan as one promoting transnational connectivity, critics and security experts see it as part of a larger strategy to achieve global dominance. Rivers of Iron examines one aspect of President Xi Jinping’s “New Era”: China’s effort to create an intercountry railway system connecting China and its seven Southeast Asian neighbors (Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). This book illuminates the political strengths and weaknesses of the plan, as well as the capacity of the impacted countries to resist, shape, and even take advantage of China’s wide-reaching actions. Using frameworks from the fields of international relations and comparative politics, the authors of Rivers of Iron seek to explain how domestic politics in these eight Asian nations shaped their varying external responses and behaviors. How does China wield power using infrastructure? Do smaller states have agency? How should we understand the role of infrastructure in broader development? Does industrial policy work? And crucially, how should competing global powers respond?

The book is available for purchase at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520372993/rivers-of-iron

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Selina Ho is Assistant Professor and Chair (Master in International Affairs Program) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. She is also nonresident Senior Fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. She is the author of Thirsty Cities: Social Contracts and Public Goods Provision in China and India.

David M. Lampton is Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Research Scholar and Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia-Pacific Research Center. He has served as president of the National Committee on United States–China Relations and was the inaugural winner of the Scalapino Prize in 2010. He is the author of Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping.

Cheng-Chwee Kuik is Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Asian Studies, the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies at the National University of Malaysia, and a nonresident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, SAIS Johns Hopkins. He received the 2009 Michael Leifer Memorial Prize, presented by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, for his essay “The Essence of Hedging.”