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Where does the call for new, “planetary” humanities leave area studies? What does “South Asia” mean, in the Anthropocene? A partial answer to that question lies in the South Asian Monsoon. Crucial to food and human security, changes in the monsoon are an uncertain outcome of planetary warming. But does South Asia shape the monsoon as much as it is shaped by the monsoon? Long before global recognition of anthropogenic climate change, the uncertainties of the monsoon stimulated thinking about poverty and inequality in South Asia. The paper examines how monsoon-related dreams and fears shaped Indian meteorology. The quest to “liberate” South Asia from the monsoon inspired repeated attempts to conquer nature and harness water, with unintended consequences—consequences that suggest the need for a more flexible definition of the region: one that overlays ecological and cultural maps to incorporate spaces like the Bay of Bengal or the terrain of the Himalayan rivers, which transcend political borders.

Sunil Amrith is Reader in Modern Asian History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His work focuses on the circulation of people, ideas, and institutions between South and Southeast Asia. His most recent book is Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Harvard, 2013). He is currently working on the environmental history of India’s eastern seaboard, supported by the European Research Council

Description

Haejoang Cho will be speaking as a ‘native anthropologist’ about her whirlwind journey experiencing South Korea’s compressed modernity since the 1980’s. The discussion begins with the recent 4/16 Sewol Ferry Disaster in Jindo, that has resonated with 9/11 and the 3/11 Disaster in Fukushima. Professor Cho will focus on the split of South Korean public responses into disparate antagonistic groups; those who say to “never forget”, and those who urge to “forget and go back to normal life”, The discussion will elaborate on concepts of ‘risk society’ and ‘reflexivity’ and ‘mourning’ and ‘violence’ in its analysis of compressed modernity and global capitalism as the lived experiences of people in South Korea.

Haejoang Cho is cultural anthropologist in training and feminist in faith. She is a professor Emeritus of Yonsei University, Seoul. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of youth culture and modernity in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern day Korea. Cho is the founding director of Haja center (The Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) which is an alternative educational and cultural studio for the teenagers since 1999. The Haja project has been launched as a part of ‘action research’ of solving the problems of youth from the perspectives of feminism, cultural studies and ecological studies in the rapidly globalizing East Asian context.

Description

China released its first national urbanization plan in March 2014. The plan outlines a bold move to grant urban hukou (household registration) to 100 million people in the next six years. If successfully implemented, the plan will help China to achieve genuine urbanization and alleviate some major social and economic problems. The plan has also brought forth a new vision of urbanization with an emphasis on the human aspect. This presentation examines the relationship between urbanization and hukou reform, the feasibility of the plan and the problems.

Kam Wing Chan is Professor of Geography at the University of Washington. His main research focuses on China’s cities, migration, employment, and the household registration system. He is the author of Cities with Invisible Walls: Reinterpreting Urbanization in Post-1949 China, and some 60 articles and book chapters. He has served as a Consultant for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, United Nations, and McKinsey & Co. and worked with the Chinese Government on a number of policy projects. His recent commentaries and interviews have appeared in the public media such as Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, South China Morning Post, BBC, CBC, Caixin, and China Daily. He is a graduate of the University of Hong Kong and the University of Toronto.

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This lecture will focus on the precarious youth at the Haja Center (the Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) and their survival politics based on Professor Haejoang Cho’s pedagogical and socio-political experiments. In the rapidly globalizing East Asian context, the project has evolved responding proactively to national and global crises; the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2008-2009 global financial crises, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Interested in a pedagogy that connects life and learning, Cho has endeavored to create platforms that enable new types of learning in various forms including a youth center, an alternative school, an after-school community, and a transition town. This discussion will explain the launching of these platforms and the discussion of anticipated new projects. As Ulrich Beck termed as “emancipatory catastrophism”, the power of transformation is coming from a keen awareness of recent economic, social, and natural crises. It is unprecedented, fundamental, and globally shared, rather than as isolated and unique. Hence, the youths would be able to bring their experiences and observation of crises into an “epochal transformation” of learning through actively connecting platforms of various kinds, creatively turning their connections into a new one.

Haejoang Cho is cultural anthropologist in training and feminist in faith. She is a professor Emeritus of Yonsei University, Seoul. Her early research focused on gender studies in Korean modern history; her current interests and research are in the area of youth culture and modernity in the global/local and post-colonial context of modern day Korea. Cho is the founding director of Haja center (The Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture) which is an alternative educational and cultural studio for the teenagers since 1999. The Haja project has been launched as a part of ‘action research’ of solving the problems of youth from the perspectives of feminism, cultural studies and ecological studies in the rapidly globalizing East Asian context.

3PM – 5PM – Lecutre
5PM – 6PM – Informal Reception

Description

Born in Hwanghae Province, North Korea, Kim Keum-hwa is one of Korea’s greatest shamans. She has been honoured as a national treasure of Korea for her outstanding talent in singing and dancing. However, her impressive career is accompanied by the history of oppression of shamanism throughout the 20th century, from the Japanese colonial period to the Korean War, to the New Community Movement in the 70s.

A thought-provoking, sensational documentary from Park Chan-kyong (Day Trip 2013, Night Fishing 2011), Manshin provides an in-depth look at the indigenous religious belief of shamanism told through the famed shaman Kim Keum-hwa’s life story. The film depicts Korea’s modern history on a micro-level through the eyes of Shaman Kim, who is destined to respond up-close to the sufferings of others. It also reveals the power of forgiveness and reconciliation of Korean shamanism, which has survived oppression while performing different kinds of “Gut” rituals in relation to certain periods of modern Korea. Kim appears in new as well as rare archival footage, and is portrayed in animation and fantasy sequences. Viewers are transported through past and present, with notable reenactments by actors Moon So-ri, Kim Sae-ron, and Ryoo Hun-kyung.

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Since the end of the Cold War, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal?

In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, tracing back to the first Sino–U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China., creating a kind of legal imperialism causing enduring damage to legal Orientlalism to this day.

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law at Emory University. His scholarship addresses questions of legal history and theory from multiple perspectives, comparative as well as international, frequently with China as a vantage point. Most recently, he is the author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard, 2013).

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Information is not yet available.

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The focus of this talk is a rather strange relationship between rice, water management infrastructure and farmers in the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand. Floating rice is a type of rice that has the ability to grow its stem rapidly, keeping pace with the rise of the floodwater. Since the 1970s, the role of floating rice in water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya Delta has increasingly attracted attention from government officials, area studies scholars and hydrologists. Morita will argue that this particular interspecies relation facilitates a reconsideration of the notion of infrastructure and its relationship with nature. Operating in the background of everyday activities, infrastructures often remain largely invisible to the actors that rely on them. However, unusual events such as breakdowns and accidents bring about what STS scholars have denoted “infrastructural inversion”, in which the workings of infrastructure become highly visible to people. In moments of infrastructural inversion, it has often become apparent that the water management infrastructure of the Chao Phraya Delta is entangled with floating rice cultivation. By following the travels of people, ideas and technologies, this talk traces how the concerned parties have delineated this multispecies infrastructure in moments of infrastructural inversion in partly overlapping and partly divergent ways. At the core of this multispecies infrastructure is an involutionary relation between farmers and rice species. In this relationship the care of farmers and the unpredictable variation of rice create a condition for the development and constant variation of divergent but mutually dependent ways of life in the watery environment of the delta.

Atsuro Morita teaches anthropology at Osaka University. He has done ethnographic research on technology development in Thailand focusing on how ideas, artifacts and people travel in and out Thailand. In his recent research on Environmental Infrastructures (funded by Japan Society for Promotion of Science), he studies the co-existence of heterogeneous components–including cosmological, scientific and multispecies ones–of water management infrastructures in the Chao Phraya Delta. The Environmental Infrastructures project (http://eiam.hus.osaka-u.ac.jp) is an international project based on collaboration between Japanese and Danish scholars, among others. The project is focusing on the intersections of a variety of practices in the making of infrastructures for knowing and managing environmental change.

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Scholars often confuse the Non-Aligned Movement with the Afro-Asianism Movement. Although both were rooted in Nehruvian thinking, they had different, though overlapping, sets of members and goals. In three parts, the current article explores how the movement emerged. From 1946-56, Jawaharlal Nehru conceived the Non-Alignment motion and eventually convinced Iosip Broz Tito and Gamal Abdel Nasser of his ideas. In the five subsequent years, the Yugoslav and Egyptian leaders promoted the ideas of establishing a formal movement. Finally, from 1961 to 1965, during its first four years as a movement,the Non-Alignment struggled and eventually emancipated itself from Afro-Asianism. The article uses archival documents from India, former Yugoslavia, former East Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Australia.

Lorenz Lüthi is an Associate Professor for the History of International Relations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His first book, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. The book has been released in a Polish translation by Dialog in Warsaw in 2011; a Chinese translation is in preparation. Lüthi has widely published on the Cold War in East Asia, Sino-Soviet relations, and the Vietnam War. He is currently working a second book project on the regional Cold Wars in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. Lüthi’s research has led him to work in archives in China, Australia, Russia, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.

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Water security in metropolitan cities is increasingly important in the developing world. In Mumbai, for example, rapid urban growth has dramatically increased the demand for water, which has resulted in serious consequences for the water entitlements of rural communities located near the sources of water. This presentation focuses on the regional dimensions of water delivery and looks at the role of institutions and the impact of local laws, agencies, and governance on how water is shared between rural and urban areas.

Bharat Punjabi is the IMFG Post-Doctoral Fellow for 2014-15 and is completing his Ph.D. in Geography from Western University in London. His dissertation is on “Canal Bureaucracy: Institutions and the Politics of Inter-Sectoral Water Competition in the Mumbai Region.” His research interests include urban governance and water management in large city-regions in India and Canada.

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Information is not yet available.

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The event was held at the embassy on 16. December 2014, and entitled 中国当代艺术与社会批评座谈会 (Art and Social Critique in Contemporary China). It was held entirely in Chinese and endeavoured to provide a platform for the discussion of politically sensitive topics for the local art community, which would not be monitored by the state (though they were taking photographs of all who entered). Speakers included Ai Weiwei 艾未未, Mo Yi 莫毅, the critic and curator Zhu Qi 朱其, and artist Du Xia 杜峡, with the event moderated by artist Luo Jie 罗杰. (the latter three of whom represent the Chinese Independent Artists Alliance 中国独立艺术家联盟). Zhu Qi wrote the attached response to the event, which was published and circulated online via we chat before it was removed by the authorities. I was admittedly rather upset that the CIAA effectively claimed that this was their first group exhibition, as that was not the case, and they effectively railroaded my event and claimed that their coordinator 何锐 (Corey Willis), who is now a friend and fellow Canadian, was its curator – he’s an MA student at 北京师范大学 and also works for the group. In any case, it went well, and we had quite a large turnout.

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The Centre for the Study of Korea is pleased to present the launch of Professor Janet Poole’s When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University). Prof. Poole’s new book takes a panoramic view of Korea’s dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, locating the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in this global fascist moment produced some of the most sophisticated writings of twentieth-century modernism.

Professor Poole teaches Korean literature and cultural history at the University of Toronto and is a a faculty affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Korea at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs. She has translated the works of many writers from colonial Korea, including Yi T’aejun’s Eastern Sentiments.

For more information on the book and to purchase the book, please click on the link below.

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The Chinese have lived in single-extended-family courtyard houses in many parts of China for thousands of years. The earliest courtyard house found in China was during the Middle Neolithic period (5,000-3,000 BCE). However, the 20th century was a significant turning point in the evolution of Chinese courtyard houses. This presentation provides an overview of this transition and evaluates some of its causes. Based on Dr. Zhang’s empirical research and analysis of six multi-household renewed and new courtyard housing experimental projects built in Beijing and Suzhou since the 1990s, she observes that, although the new communal courtyards can facilitate some social interactions, neighborly relations are only partially influenced by the form and space of the courtyard housing, and are perhaps influenced even more so by China’s changing and polarizing society as manifested in these specific residents’ socio-economic levels, housing tenure, modern lifestyles, community involvement, common language, cultural awareness, and demographic backgrounds.

Dr. Donia Zhang is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University (Barch, MA, PhD) in the UK and Brock University (Med) in Canada. Her area of expertise is in courtyard housing development in China and North America, China’s heritage preservation policies and practices, cultural sustainability, and architectural multiculturalism.

Donia’s email is doniazhang@gmail.com

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This inaugural event, the first of its kind in North America, brings together academics, artists, activists, and frontline community members as they examine and discuss the experiences of queer Filipinos/as in Canada. Through a series of connected and provocative events, this gathering aims to initiate rich dialogue between multiple stakeholders around the contributions and needs of queer Filipinos/as as a diasporic community with links within and beyond Canada.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
This conference places emerging and established scholars in Filipino, Asian North American and Queer Studies in conversation with artists, front-line community workers, and community members. Participants will address specific concerns and topics that are relevant to LGBTQ Filipinos/as in Canada, and will attempt to intervene in dialogues around policy, integration, and settlement.

CONFERENCE
JANUARY 23, 2105. 9 am – 7 pm
100 McCaul St., Room 190

OPENING RECEPTION
JANUARY 23, 2015. 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Open Gallery, 49 McCaul St.

ART EXHIBIT: VISUALIZING THE INTIMATE
JANUARY 23 –FEBRUARY 15, 2015.
M-F, 9am-5pm
Open Gallery, 49 McCaul St.

Click the link below for more information about the event.

Description

The challenge for understanding modern Chinese intellectual history is to get beyond our assumptions and the big stories. For many, Chinese intellectuals are dissidents and democrats, people trying to be like us. The big stories are tied to what China is today. Recasting modern Chinese intellectual history requires us to find ways to break out of these set story lines. Looking at China’s thinkers and writers in terms of ideological moments and intellectual worlds can help us understand what intellectuals in different decades thought they were doing, what the problems were that they were addressing, and thus how to assess their contributions to enduring ideas in Chinese thought from the nature of “the people” to “Chinese” to “democracy.”

His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. His books include Critical Introduction to Mao (2010) Living with Reform: China Since 1989 (2006), Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions (2002) and Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China (1997), as well as New Perspectives on State Socialism in China (1997), with Tony Saich, and The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao (1989) with Roderick MacFarquhar and Eugene Wu, and China’s Establishment Intellectuals (1986), with Carol Lee Hamrin. His new book, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History will be available on Cambridge University Press in 2015.

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The distinct personal laws that govern the major religious groups are a major aspect of Indian multiculturalism and secularism. States that inherited personal laws reflecting specific cultural norms adopted different approaches to recognition and family regulation. India changed its personal laws less than Turkey and Tunisia, but far more than Algeria, Syria, and Lebanon, and increased women’s rights and individual liberties in certain ways, contrary to the trend in Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, and Nigeria since the 1970s. Moreover, Hindu law was changed earlier and more extensively than the minority laws.

Ruling elites’ discourses about the nation, its cultural groups, and its traditions interact with the state-society relations that regimes inherit and the projects of regimes to change society. These interactions influence the pattern of multiculturalism, the place of religion in public policy and public life, and forms of family regulation. They led India to introduce moderate yet sustained personal law reforms. Further, the greater engagement of political elites with Hindu initiatives and the predominant place of Hindu motifs in nationalist discourses shaped Indian multiculturalism. They were crucial reasons why policy-makers changed Hindu law far more although support for personal law reform was not clearly higher among Hindus.

Narendra Subramanian is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University. He studies the politics of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, gender, and race in a comparative perspective, focusing primarily on India. Subramanian’s first book (Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India, Oxford University Press, 1999) examined why the mobilization of intermediate and lower status groups through discourses of language and caste reinforced democracy and tolerance in Tamil Nadu, southern India. His second book (Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India, Stanford University Press, 2014) traced the course of the personal laws that govern family life among India’s major religious groups. He is currently engaged in a project comparing the effects of political rights on the socio-economic status of two historically bonded groups, titled From Bondage to Citizenship: The Enfranchisement and Advancement of Dalits and African-Americans.

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This presentation investigates The Arrival of Yoshitsune/Camp at Kisegawa (1940-41) produced by the Japanese-style painter Yasuda Yukihiko. It demonstrates that the painting, which emulates Kamakura-period paintings, depicts medieval warriors, and was displayed at an exhibition that celebrated Japan’s imperial family, significantly contributed to the politicized cultural discourse that espoused the theme of “return to Japan” (Nihon kaiki), which was central to Japan’s wartime ideology. The painting, Asato Ikeda will reveal, clearly drew on pre-modern Japanese pictorial art but it was simultaneously inspired by the modern aesthetics of post-expressionist machine paintings, and thus mirrors the fundamental contradiction of the wartime Japanese state that repudiated some aspects of modernity upon which it was nevertheless predicated. Following recent fascism studies that understand fascism in relation to a paradoxical attitude toward modernity, Asato Ikeda will suggest that Yasuda’s work not only exemplified the Japanese state’s appropriation of modernism, but can also be considered as a Japanese example of fascist modernism.

Asato Ikeda is Assistant Professor of Art History and Music at Fordham University, New York and an Asia-Pacific Journal contributing editor. Between 2014 and 2016, she is the Bishop White Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where she plans to organize an exhibition about wakashu (male youth). Co-editor, with Ming Tiampo and Aya Louisa McDonald, of Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), she is currently working on a monograph that will explore the relationship between Japanese art and war in the 1930s and early 1940s.