Description

For the past several years, Myanmar has found itself in the international spotlight. The state once thought of a pariah in the international community made headlines in 2010 when its military rulers dissolved the junta that had ruled the country since 1962 in favour of a democratically elected civilian government. However, the path to democracy has not been without significant challenges. The Rohingya crisis has shed light on the continued control of military officials over the new government, and once revered leader Aung San Suu Kyi faces increased scrutiny for her defense of their practices at the International Court of Justice. By all accounts, the fight for democracy is ongoing in Myanmar. What are the obstacles to its achivement of a quality democracy? What is the role of international actors in advancing or suppressing this? How will the governing National League for Democracy handle the Rohingya Crisis with increasing nativist sentiments?

Join the Contemporary Asian Studies Students’ Union and the Synergy Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies on February 6th from 2-4PM as we dissect the democratic progress of Myanmar. Refreshments and snacks will be provided!

Jacques Bertrand is Professor and Associate Chair (Graduate) of Political Science, as well as Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies and Director of the Collaborative Master’s Program in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies (Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs) at the University of Toronto. He is the author/co- editor of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia (Cambridge, 2004); Multination States in Asia: Accommodation or Resistance (Cambridge, 2010); Political Change in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2013); and Democratization and Ethnic Minorities: Conflict or Compromise? (Routledge, 2014). He is finalizing a book manuscript on Democracy and Secessionist Conflict in Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP)and a book (w/ Ardeth Thawnghmung and Alexandre Pelletier) entitled Winning by Process: The State, Democratic Transition, and Ethnic Conflict in Myanmar.

Matthew Walton is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was the inaugural Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on religion and politics in Southeast Asia, with a special emphasis on Buddhism in Myanmar.

Joseph McQuade is the Richard Charles Lee Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies. He is also Editor-in-Chief at the NATO Association of Canada, where he runs the newly-created Centre for Disinformation Studies program stream. Dr. McQuade is affiliated with the Queen’s University Global History Initiative and with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, and is a Managing Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies.

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In 1940, at the height of her stardom, the star-actress Shanta Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the Bombay film industry. I interrogate this curious text – Should I Join the Movies? – by placing it at the intersection of female stardom, the corporeality of cinematic labor, and techno-scientific interest in industrial fatigue. The weariness of the actress, her capacity for “being spent,” is an experiential category that pushes us to think embodiment as production experience. This essay positions Apte’s text as theory from the South that helps us rethink the meanings of gender, embodiment, affective labor, inequality, and human-machine relations at a critical phase in the career of cinema in India. In dialogue with Apte, I think through the materiality of the off-screen world of film work and parse her insistence on embodiment as the grounds for refusal and resistance.

Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (forthcoming from Columbia University Press) brings together insights from film and media studies, feminist cultural studies, new materialisms, and technology studies to narrate the history of Bombay cinema as a history of material practice.

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This paper addresses the causes of non-execution deaths during the Cambodian Genocide. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979) had one of the highest mortality rates of any communist revolution, with the deaths of approximately one quarter of the population: half from direct violence and the other half from indirect means, in particular starvation. What explains the variation in indirect deaths, those that resulted from means other than execution, during this period of mass violence? I argue that it was not just control over agricultural production that led to high rates of starvation deaths, but the policies of social control associated with the collectivization process that exacerbated the problems of famine. The set of policies surrounding the family, including forced marriages and the separation of family units, which I call social collectivization, undermined traditional buffers against famine and decreased the likelihood of survival. The decision to include social components was an ideological one, but those it targeted reflect a strategic logic shaped by economic and security interests. I find that collectivization of economic activities also affected the likelihood of survival; but the social elements tipped the balance toward disaster. High levels of social control targeted preexisting social network and communal ties, fracturing those networks that would ordinarily have acted as a buffer against poor policy or economic downturns in a community. As a result, individuals were more vulnerable to the effects of overwork and over-requisitioned rice, making deaths from indirect means—starvation and exhaustion in particular—more likely. Through this study, I demonstrate the consequences of governing a revolutionary state for the indirect victims of mass violence.

Rachel Jacobs is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Dickinson College. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019. Her research centers on questions of survival during periods of mass violence. More broadly, she researches issues of political violence, gender and conflict, human rights, and the long-term consequences of conflict.

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The MeToo movement in Korea that happened for the past two years shows some fundamental differences from past political movements against sexual discrimination. First, the former takes on the form of a voluntary mass movement. The MeToo movement began due to the female audience’s active acceptance of the major head slogan of anti-sexual violence movements, “It was not my fault.” The growing feminist awareness of sexual violence and problems that surged after 2015 allowed the women to accept the slogan with all their hearts and launch the movement. Secondly, as testimonies appeared subsequently, the violence was seen as a communal affliction, different from the past feminist movements. In the past, sexual violence victims faced suspicion and criticism as soon as they open up about their experiences and to prove their experiences, they went through individual trials in court. However, the MeToo movement was different. As the name “MeToo” itself signifies, the sexual assault victims’ cases were not perceived as discrete or separate, or cause to socially ostracize the victim. Instead, the Me Too movement allowed more opportunities for solidarity and collaboration.
Lastly, the MeToo movement does not involve victim identity politics that responds to the demand to prove the assault and adheres to victim centricism that claims that women are disadvantaged. Rather, the movement demands change in socially mandated male-hegemonic, heterosexual normative, authoritative communal culture and behavior status quo. In this presentation, we will look at the hints of possibilities of change demonstrated by the MeToo movement and whether these possibilities will be held back by the process of court and bureaucratic procedures. Sharing these concerns about possible challenges to these new changes, I plan to discuss how sexual assault could be politicized as a social phenomenon.

Kwonkim Hyeonyoung is a Guest Professor in the Korea National University of Arts, South Korea. She sees herself as a research activist. She is a guest professor at Korean National University of Arts. She is the co-author of Analyzing the Korean man , Feminism of perpetration and victimhood and author of Will never turn back again. She also co-wrote twenty books, including The Politics of the MeToo Movement . Her primary interest as a researcher lies on exploring ways how gender politics of violence and power plays in today’s Korean society. As an activist, she reads written judgments in court, attends hearings at trials, protests in streets, and writes.

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Please join us as a group of interdisciplinary scholars shares their expertise on the political and economic implications of the novel Coronavirus outbreak.

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The Dr. David Chu Scholarships in Asia-Pacific Studies offer funding to undergraduate and graduate students in the University of Toronto who are pursuing study and research related to the Asia-Pacific region (East and Southeast Asia). These awards are administered by the Faculty of Arts and Science with an application deadline of March 9, 2020. Learn more about the awards and how to apply through the Faculty of Arts and Science Website.

The information session features Professor Takashi Fujitani, Director of the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, who will provide an overview of the award selection criteria and eligibility and how to build a strong proposal. Representatives from the Faculty of Arts and Science and Asian Institute will also be available to help students in filling out the Financial Need Assessment form and answer questions about the application process.

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This talk is based on a recently defended doctoral ethnography investigating end-of-life care issues in contemporary India from the perspectives of Indian and Tibetan religious adherents, through the lenses of religious studies, bioethics and the law. The need came in part from a paucity in bioethics studies related to the ancient Indic religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, from some studies ignoring the non-theistic Indic traditions altogether and legal challenges in India against Jain fasting at the end of life. Three core themes include attempts to block disclosure of bad news in sharing of sensitive medical information; ritual fasting and immobilization at the end of life; and exposure to and attitudes towards end-of-life care models including pain management, hospice palliative care and assistance in dying. This study is an advocacy anthropology project with hopes that it proves helpful in India and other jurisdictions where South Asian religious adherents receive end-of-life care so that culturally safe care can be better provided.

Dr. Sean Hillman is a clinical bioethicist with the Centre for Clinical Ethics (CCE), a consultant organization based at Unity Health Toronto and contracted to seven institutions in Ontario. Over the last several years Sean has been the ethics lead for the five-hospital Lakeridge Health system in Durham region. He also is a Buddhist Corrections Chaplain for two facilities in the Kingston region. Sean was a bedside caregiver in hospital for almost two decades and did a year-long fellowship in Clinical and Organizational Bioethics also at the CCE. A medical anthropologist and textualist, Sean recently completed his doctorate in religion and the collaborative programs of bioethics and south Asian studies at U of T.

A scholar of various Asian philosophies and languages for almost thirty years, with a major focus on the Indic religious traditions, Sean has spent five years living, studying and researching in India. Sean’s current research projects are on maximizing decisional participation by those who might have mental capacity interferences, and on how to better understand why families may request aggressive medical management for their loved-ones despite a poor prognosis (including religious logic such as vitalism, non-harm and filial piety). Sean is a member of Durham Family Resources community advisory committee for their “recognizing capacity” pilot project which advocates for increased inclusion of those with intellectual, cognitive or communication challenges and for including supported decision making in Ontario healthcare law.

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Opium was once integral to colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The drug was a major source of revenue for European colonizers, who also derived moral authority from imposing a tax on a peculiar vice of their non-European subjects. Yet between the 1890s and the 1940s, colonial states began to ban opium, upsetting the very foundations of overseas rule—how? Empires of Vice traces the history of this dramatic reversal, revealing the colonial legacies that set the stage for the region’s drug problems today. Diana Kim challenges the conventional wisdom about opium prohibition—that it came about because doctors awoke to the dangers of drug addiction, or that it was a response to moral crusaders—uncovering a more complex story deep within the colonial bureaucracy. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence across Southeast Asia and Europe, she shows how prohibition was made possible by the pivotal contributions of seemingly weak bureaucratic officials who delegitimized the taxing of opium, which in turn made major anti-opium reforms possible.

Diana Kim is Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a core faculty member of the Asian Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago (2013) and held a Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University.

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Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture-featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture. The local election system introduced in the mid 90s has stimulated strong desires among city mayors and county and district governors to develop and promote their areas. Riding on the Korean Wave—the overseas popularity of Korean entertainment, also called Hallyu—Korean cities have actively used K-dramas and K-pop idols in advertisements designed to attract foreign tourists to their regions. Hallyu, meanwhile, has turned the Korean entertainment industry into a speculative field into which numerous players venture by attracting cities as sponsors.
By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Popular culture-associated urban promotion also uses the emotional engagement of its users in advertising urban space, just as pop culture draws on fans’ and audiences’ affective commitments to sell its products. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture–mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.

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East Asian Seminar Series

The late 1970s and early ‘80s saw a Chinese craze for Indian films. Members of the generation that came of age in this time have such fond memories of the foreign and exotic Hindi films that many Indian visitors to China are still serenaded with songs from the handful of films that were screened in that period. This talk examines India’s symbolic role in China’s post Cultural Revolution healing, looking especially at the discourse around popular Hindi films such as Caravan, Noorie, and Awara. The contemporary rethinking of the 1980s in China serves as the larger framework of the talk, emphasizing how the India craze of the early 1980s challenges how 21st century scholars see 1985 as marking China’s entry to “world culture.” Looking at Hindi film in the 1980s interrogates the ways in which “the west” can come to symbolize “the world” in contemporary Chinese cultural studies.

Krista Van Fleit is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of Asian Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her first book, Literature the People Love, examines culture from the Early Maoist Period, providing a new interpretive framework with which to approach texts from this time. She is currently writing a book titled Bollywood to Beijing: Film Exchange and Cultural Production in China and India.

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Fatwas from Islamic organizations are prominent elements of public debates in democratic Indonesia, as well as the broader Muslim world. Yet scholars lack a clear theoretical explanation for the power of fatwas in politics. This paper draws on original archival material to explicate the legal authority of the fatwas from the Indonesian Council of Ulama (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI), which over the past twenty years has become one of the country’s most influential actors. The paper distinguishes three periods in the growth and transformation of MUI’s authority; starting with charismatic authority and state corporatism, MUI later gained formal regulatory authority, and now uses agenda setting, lobbying, mass mobilization, and the threat of violence. By examining how the power of MUI’s fatwas increased as the organization accrued more forms of authority, this periodization demonstrates that explaining the political power of the fatwa requires understanding the modern organizational authority of Islamic actors. In the modern age, Islamic legal authority reflects the dominant logic of political authority in society.

Jeremy Menchik is Assistant Professor in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and faculty affiliate in Political Science. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) was the co-winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations.

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Focusing on the geopolitical and economic circumstances that have prompted migration from Hong Kong and mainland China to Canada, The Transcultural Streams of Chinese Canadian Identities examines the Chinese Canadian community as a simultaneously transcultural, transnational, and domestic social and cultural formation. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the ways in which Chinese Canadian adapt to and co-construct the Canadian cultural mosaic, the book explores various patterns of Chinese cultural exchanges in Canada and how they intertwine with the community’s sense of belonging and disengagement.

Please RSVP by emailing events.rclchkl@utoronto.ca
or by calling 416-946-8978

Description

Kristin Bloomer’s Possessed by the Virgin: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, and Marian Possession in South India introduces readers to three women who become possessed by the Virgin Mary: Rosalind, Nancy, and Dhanam. In this rich ethnographic account of Marian possession, healing, and exorcism in Tamil Nadu, Bloomer pays particular attention to the experience of possession as articulated by these women and the various community members that surround them, from the skeptical Catholic priest to the devotees, and everyone in between. This beautifully written ethnography raises questions about possessed subjectivities and agencies, gender, Tamil language, Hinduism and Catholicism in South India, and, more generally, how to write about possession.

In this panel, a group of graduate students from the University of Toronto, with diverse research interests ranging from Tamil Studies to Possession Studies, will critically engage with the author and her book from various perspectives. The event aims to raise questions, deeply reflect, and start a critical conversation about the book and its contents.

PANELISTS:

Kainat Bashir, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Janani Mandayam Comar, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Stephanie Duclos-King, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Jesse Pruitt, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Kristina Rogahn, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT
Austin Simoes-Gomes, Department for the Study of Religion, UofT

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Kristin C. Bloomer is an Associate Professor of Religion at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. She is currently working on a book about Tamil family gods and lineage deities, with support from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Carleton College.