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Abstract:

The history of German Indology during NS times has been part of many historical narratives, mostly because it seemed obvious to trace the Nazi idea of an Aryan race back to German Indologists. But the approach had its drawbacks: the focus was on two German Indologists with NS leanings, while the history of others and especially Jewish Indologists in Germany was never studied. It has also proved quite detrimental that the discussion of these topics has often been caught in the political crossfire. All this seemed to leave not enough space for carving out a way in which German Indologists might live with their past. In this talk Jürgen Hanneder shall try to formulate such a perspective and demonstrate that if we look more closely and use more of the rich archival sources, a differentiated picture emerges.

Biography:

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hanneder has studied Indology, Tibetology and Comparative Religion in various German Universities, then continued in Oxford and Marburg with his PhD, and worked as an assistant professor and in academic projects in Bonn, Halle, and Freiburg. In 2007, he succeeded to the chair of Indology in Marburg in 2007. His main fields of research lie within the Sanskrit literature of Kashmir, which is also a focus of many Indological projects in Marburg, but he is also interested in the history of Indology.

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Abstract:

Bringing knowledge about China to the disciplines has reduced the outsized role that research on Europe and America has on many topics. But mainstreaming China studies also gives rise to certain tradeoffs. How should we manage these tradeoffs and produce research that is both true to China and contributes to the social sciences? In the last 30 years, China scholars have developed many strategies to navigate the territory between area studies and the social sciences. I myself have vacillated about how area studies and political science should interact and inform each other. How are China scholars addressing this issue now, in the era of mixed methods, experiments, “big data,” and causal inference?

Biography:

Kevin O’Brien is the Bedford Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC-Berkeley. A student of contemporary Chinese politics, he has written on legislative politics, local elections, fieldwork strategies, popular protest, policy implementation, protest policing, and political reform. His most recent work centers on the Chinese state and theories of popular contention, particularly as concerns protest control and types of repression that are neither “soft” nor “hard.”

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ABSTRACT:

This lecture is drawn from the introduction to my forthcoming study, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism and British Dissent. Against the grain of influential histories of empire as much postcolonial studies, I will make the case, ‘in a spirit of dialectics’, for lines of influence which run from periphery to metropole (as much as in the other direction). One axis, though not the only one, along which this question can be explored is that of dissent around the question of empire in Britain, with dissidents variously referred to as ‘critics of empire’, ‘imperial sceptics’ or British ‘anti-colonialists’. Without pretending that the field could ever have been level or lines of influence simply reciprocal given the constitutive power differential, I suggest that there was also an anticolonial impact from outside Europe on metropolitan thought, specifically, though not only, on British dissent around and criticism of the colonial project. Resistance to the colonial project in several parts of the British Empire in the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries helped shape criticism of and opposition to the imperial project within Britain itself. That influence was not necessarily always ideational or to be solely assessed using the tools of intellectual history; it was often exercised by the practice of struggle and by crises occasioned by insurgency.

BIOGRAPHY:

Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures at the University of Cambridge. A professor in the School of English and Fellow of Churchill College, she is the author of Literary Radicalism in India (2005) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (2009). Her most recent study, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism and British Dissent, is forthcoming from Verso.

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Abstract:

Where is the USA in Asia? Washington CSIS Senior Asia VP Mike Green talks about
BY MORE THAN PROVIDENCE
Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783

From a New York Times book review by Gordon G. Chang on April 7, 2017: “It was “by more than Providence” that the United States, over the course of more than two centuries, became the pre-eminent power in Asia and the Pacific. Commerce, faith and notions of self-defense drove Americans westward, not only across a continent but also a wide expanse of ocean, says Michael J. Green, who served as special assistant to President George W. Bush and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council staff.”

Green argues that, going back to 1783, the American strategy in Asia has been to prevent any one country from dominating the Pacific. But with the rise of China, can this strategy hold? And are Americans willing to pay the price?

Bio:

Michael Jonathan Green is senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of Asian Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He served on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) from 2001 through 2005, first as director for Asian affairs with responsibility for Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, and then as special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asia, with responsibility for East Asia and South Asia. Before joining the NSC staff, he was a senior fellow for East Asian security at the Council on Foreign Relations, director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center and the Foreign Policy Institute and assistant professor at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses, and senior adviser on Asia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He also worked in Japan on the staff of a member of the National Diet.

Dr. Green is also a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, a distinguished scholar at the Asia Pacific Institute in Tokyo, and professor by special appointment at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Strategy Group, the America Australia Leadership Dialogue, the advisory boards of Radio Free Asia and the Center for a New American Security, and the editorial boards of the Washington Quarterly and the Journal of Unification Studies in Korea. He also serves as a trustee at the Asia Foundation, senior adviser at the Asia Group, and associate of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Dr. Green has authored numerous books and articles on East Asian security, including most recently, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (Columbia University Press, 2017). He received his master’s and doctoral degrees from SAIS and did additional graduate and postgraduate research at Tokyo University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Kenyon College with highest honors. He holds a black belt in Iaido (sword) and has won international prizes on the great highland bagpipe.

“By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783” will be available for sale and the author will be available for signing.

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Abstract:

Recent years have witnessed an increased attention to specifying the characteristics of the colonial state, largely focused on outlining its distinctiveness. Two epistemological frames subtend most inquiries: first, replicating the Weberian view that the state is a territorially circumscribed entity, analyses of the state are also similarly circumscribed. Second, if implicitly, the normative horizon of the inquiries is the European modern state. While recognizing the value and, oftentimes, the necessity, of studies conceived in territorially delimited terms, this paper suggests we need to develop pathways to address the coproduction of the coeval formations of colonial state and the modern state. Through an assessment of state control of colonial Indian migration, it argues that important features of historical state formation are obscured when analyses assume a presentist territorial closure, that modern elements are embedded in the colonial state form, and that a colonial dimension is an integral aspect of the modern state form, globally.

Biography:

Radhika Mongia is Associate Professor of Sociology and faculty with the graduate programs in Sociology, Political Science, Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, and Social and Political Thought at York University. She is the author of Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Duke University Press, 2018).

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Abstract:

The firebombing of Japan has been eclipsed in postwar writing by both the atomic bombings of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the conventional bombing of Japanese cities. This is curious given (a) that the death toll – over 300,000 by conservative estimates – exceeded that of the atomic bombs and (b) the strategy relied on the same bombing techniques that caused so much controversy over Germany. The paper reviews the reasons behind the US switch from precision bombing (designed to minimize civilian casualties) to area bombing (designed to maximize them) and evaluates the effect of them on the outcome of the war. Simply put: did the killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians through conventional bombing help win the war?

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Abstract:

What kinds of representations of place and landscape did the colonial mapmaking project encounter when its great trigonometrical survey unfolded in early nineteenth century India? Exploring the sensory, affective, and epistemological aspects of place-making images, art historian Dipti Khera and historian of medieval and early modern India Samira Sheikh examine the interfaces between colonial cartography, eighteenth century courtly art, and precolonial revenue systems. The formal innovations generated at these interfaces both informed and exceeded colonial cartography, offering an intriguing historical key to understanding perceptions of landscape in India.

Description

Abstract:

In this presentation, I inquire into one of the earliest responses to the recent Philippine war on drugs: the courageous work of photojournalists. In the context of the drug war, how does photojournalism become a kind of advocacy by becoming a mode of mourning? How is trauma and witnessing braided together in the experience of photographers covering war? What is the role of the camera and what are the ambivalent effects of the technical and aesthetic imaging of the dead and their survivors? What is the fate of photographic images once they travel beyond the control of the photographers? For example, converted into commodities, what happens to them when they circulate in the global mediascape and rendered into items for the daily consumption of anonymous viewers? And among families of the victims, how are the dead remembered in ways that elude photographic capture?

Biography:

Vicente L. Rafael is the Giovani and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of several works on the cultural politics of the Philippines including Contracting Colonialism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, The Promise of the Foreign, and Motherless Tongues: the Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation (all from Duke Univ. Press). He also wrote the Introduction to a recent edition of Nick Joaquin’s stories, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropic Gothic (Penguin Classics).

Reception to follow.

Description

ABSTRACT:

Before the 2018 Platform Coop Consortium (PCC platform.ccoop/2018, Sept. 28, 29) formal conference began, Huang SunQuan organized a two-day co-ops+hackathon (coopathon 2). Preceded by a series of panel discussions held in Taipei, Kaohsiung, Hangzhou, and Hong Kong, over forty interested programmers, artists, social innovators, and international tech organizations from greater China and other countries participated. The previous coopathon 1 was held in Shanghai in 2016. The aim of these coopathons is to figure out the collaborative possibilities of coders and cooperatives, addressing fundamental issues before more deeply thinking about the platform of cooperativerism, particularly in the Chinese context.

A difference exists between coops and hacker geeks, which extends beyond the pursuit of economic equality to differences in cultural and political values. Cooperativism asks for the participation of all or nothing at all, while the hacker geek model mostly pursues individual, ‘genius’ achievement. Coops are threatened by privatization, while the latter is an updated neoliberal version of the Californian ideology of accelerationism and solutionism (1995, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron). The former pursues economic justice—that is, better relations of production; the latter pursues efficiently productive forces. Hackers don’t like doors that can’t be opened, but cooperatives hope the door will always open.

These two groups are more or less unaware of the commonalities they share. They both need a sustainable model, and they both rely on the results of sharing and mutual benefit. In this talk, Huang SunQuan will share some of his experiences of coopathons and some Chinese cooperatives which he deeply engaged in, discussing strategies for introducing a social aspect into coding and the design of platform coops.

BIOGRAPHY:

Huang SunQuan (PhD, Building and Planning from National Taiwan University) is Professor at the China Academy of Art and Director of the Institute of Network Society, School of Inter-Media Art, CAA. He is an artivist engaging in architecture, media, social movements, and art, known for his long-term research and intervention in media, internet culture, and social activism.

Huang SunQuan was the editor-in-chief of POTS Weekly (established in 1994) and the director of Cultural Express from 2007 to 2009. He organized the first anti-gentrification movement in Taiwan under the slogan “Against City Government’s Bulldozers” (1997) and made the documentary film Green Bulldozer: the Rise of Your New Homeland. In 2004, he created one of the most influential blogs in Taiwan (twblog.net) and the Taiwan Independent Media Center (tw.indymedia.org) as part of the network of Global Independent Media Center (indymedia.org).

In recent years, he has undertaken a curatorial and artistic practice, running Monkey-Wrenching Art Center in the southern Taiwan. He has participated in the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (2007, 2013), “Memoscape” at Cube Project Space, “Juke Box of Kaohsiung” at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, and mounted a solo show, “U-topophilia”, at the Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, among other projects. Curatorial projects include “Treasure Hill GAPP (Global Artivist Participation Plan)” (2003, 2004), “Lulu Shur-tzy Hou Solo Exhibition—Look toward the other side-Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan” at the Kaohsiung Museum of Arts (2010), and a migrant workers exhibition at Kaohsiung Labor Museum (2011-2012), etc.

Description

ABSTRACT:

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has the largest collection of Indian artefacts outside India, which was mostly acquired during colonial times. The V&A’s Indian collections can be used to track a history of the impulses and opportunities underlying colonial collecting: artefacts entered the collection as loot, as gifts, and as documentation of resources available in the colony.

Alongside a history of collecting, however, there is a history of uncollecting, where collections are trimmed and refined through the removal of artefacts that are considered unimportant or irrelevant to the museum’s changing aims. The process of “de-accessioning” is one that museums seldom discuss in public, but the museum’s records keep traces of this less visible process.

This talk will track the fate of four grand, architectural-scale Indian artefacts that were collected by the V&A in the 19th century but are no longer available to view. Each of these four artefacts was collected in response to different impulses; each was hailed in its time as an important acquisition and was prominently displayed; each fell out of favour and was removed from the galleries for a different reason and in a different way. By tracking the histories of these objects the talk will open the door to a hidden history of the museum.

BIOGRAPHY:

Kavita Singh is Professor of Art History and is currently serving as the Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she teaches courses on the history of Indian painting and the history and politics of museums. She has published essays on issues of colonial history, repatriation, secularism and religiosity, fraught national identities, and the memorialisation of difficult histories as they relate to museums in India and beyond. She has also published essays on aspects of Mughal painting.

Description

ABSTRACT:

In the modern historiography of Dalit learning in Southern India certain names stand out: Ayothee Thass Pandithar (1845-1914) and Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956) being the most prominent. Much of the historiographical narrative of their scholarly achievements tends to be placed against the backdrop of colonial modernity and particularly tied to the emergence of “Buddhism” as the religion favoured by modernists in the colonial period. Though much recent work has been done on Ambedkarite Buddhism there is still much more that remains to be done on its local and vernacular iterations within specific Dalit regional locations and communities and how it has specifically comes to be used as a vehicle for new religious imaginaries and for an ethical and humanist approach to living. This one-day workshop plans to focus on the resonances of Ambedkarite Buddhism in its South Indian (Tamil and Maharashtrian) context to address some of these issues. It is the intention of this workshop to bring into conversation these two seemingly divergent strands of Dalit learning in showing how in their convergence on the issue of religious authority and “caste” and in their complex negotiation of these we might be able to not just perceive certain common genealogies but that these, in turn, might also to enable us to gain new perspectives on the nature of Ambedkarite Buddhism in its specifically South Indian iterations.

Program:

10am-11am: Lecture by Professor Rajangam
11am-11:15am: Coffee Break
11:15am-12:15pm: Discussion of Lecture

2pm-3pm: Lecture by Professor Keune
3pm-4pm: Discussion of Lecture

Description

ABSTRACT:  What does the future of Asian-Canadian relations hold?  Ever-deepening connections with Asia are reshaping the ways that Canadians participate in global media, transnational business, international education, and cultural and historical production. This panel reflected on the influences of Asian-Canadian dynamics in transforming the speakers’ fields of expertise, including business and media, immigration politics, historical memory, curatorial and archival work, and university education.