Description

The Manipal Centre for Humanities meets the Centre for South Asian Studies

LECTURE #1

Ageing and Later Life Caregiving Arrangements in Urban India

By Jagriti Gangopadhyay

This lecture will be examining how ageing experiences, intergenerational relationships, and eldercare are shaped in a globalized India. Although, the law emphasizes on the role of the family to provide later life care, nonetheless, increasingly eldercare is becoming market (private companies providing a host of caregiving services to the older adults of urban India) oriented. Additionally, post the pandemic, virtual care has emerged as a strong option for later life care. Against this backdrop, this lecture will highlight how family care, virtual care and market-based care determines ageing experiences in urban India.

Jagriti Gangopadhyay is currently an Assistant Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities. She did her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Recently she was awarded the Shastri Publication Grant by the Shastri Indo Canadian Institute for her monograph titled Culture, Context and Aging of Older Indians: Narratives from India and Beyond, published by Springer. This year she co-edited a book titled Eldercare Issues in China and India, published by Routledge: UK. Her work analyzes the intersections between health, cultural practices, laws, and policies among older adults.

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.

Description

Event series: Race and Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

Overt and subtle misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny) pervade sport and sport media, as women in the Black diaspora are rarely in control of sporting regulations or their media representations. One recourse racialized athletes have at their disposal, however, is active resistance. This presentation provides a textual analysis of the intolerable misogynoir aimed at tennis professional Naomi Osaka, and key moments in her media (mis)representations. Results of a study co-authored with Dr. Sabrina Razack revealed three main themes: (1) ongoing misogynoir and colorism of sport media and athlete sponsors; (2) racial, national and diaspora media (mis)representations; and (3) resistance to gendered racism through self representation. After Osaka’s historic win at the 2018 US Open, narratives of her Japanese nationality and Asian identity became the story that rendered her Blackness invisible, and enabled her to be read against her opponent Serena Williams. Osaka’s use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), including social media, disrupted racist dominant narratives, and provided counternarratives that reveal her, and other mixed-race sportswomen to be more that the sum of our parts. Osaka’s identities align with Blackness as a political and racial category and position her Japaneseness part of the Haitian jaspora (diaspora).

BIO:

Janelle Joseph is an assistant professor of critical studies of race and indigeneity in the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education at the University of Toronto. Joseph’s research interests include anti-racism policy, physical activity access, decoloniality, and ethics.  

An elected member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists, & Scientists, Dr. Joseph’s book, Black Atlantic: Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean Diaspora, traces how sports create transnational social fields that connect migrants in North America, England and the Caribbean.

Dr. Joseph is the founder and director of Indigeneity, Diaspora, Equity and Anti-Racism in Sport (IDEAS) Research Lab, the first research lab in Canada dedicated to issues of race and movement cultures. IDEAS Research Lab promotes knowledge, leverages political work and develops community partnerships to create anti-racism programming in sports, dance and leadership. In 2021, IDEAS Research Lab partnered with Ontario University Athletics to conduct a study that traces experiences of racism among student athletes, coaches and administrators.

Description

The Manipal Centre for Humanities meets the Centre for South Asian Studies

LECTURE #2

The Secret Pleasures of a Migrant Dictionary

By Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil

This paper will look at a tiny portion of Benyamin’s Aadujeevitham (Goat Days, trans. Joseph Koyipally) commercially the most successful of Malayalam novels and a recipient of a number of literary awards. In the said portion, the migrant protagonist who finds himself faced with a foreign language compiles a dictionary of the words that he has learnt so far in his unforeseeably strange experience in the Arabian Gulf. The paper reads into the entries of this dictionary to speak about how migration produces a rent in the public sphere and invests it with zones of discrete communitarian pleasures.

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is interested in the cultural dimensions of the migration to the Arabian Gulf from the south Indian state of Kerala. His papers on various aspects of the cultures of Gulf migration have appeared on various platforms including academic journals. Shafeeq received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.

Description

The Manipal Centre for Humanities meets the Centre for South Asian Studies

LECTURE #3

The Waiting Dissolve: Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962)

By Gayathri Prabhu

Black and white Hindi cinema — from the time of independence (1947) to the emergence of colour (early 1960s) — can be studied for a distinct and fully realized aesthetic of shadows, stark contrasts, grey tonalities and spatializations of the frame. Indeed, the camera displays an autonomy from the expressed or stifled desires of characters or plot points. Such a camera has true freedom moving respectfully and attentively into secret spaces that can be playful, intimate, inviting, lingering, transgressive and melancholic by turns and often within the same movement. It innovates in the private, unhurried ardency of light and shade, as this talk demonstrates with reference to Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (Master, Mistress and Servant, 1962).

Gayathri Prabhu is Associate Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities and holds a doctoral degree in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of four novels, a memoir and a novella in prose poetry. She is also the co-author (with Nikhil Govind) of Shadow Craft: Visual Aesthetics of Black and White Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). She works with mental health advocacy and is the Coordinator of the Student Support Centre, a psychotherapy service for students in Manipal.

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The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre of Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges. A series of talks by colleagues from the Manipal Centre of Humanities will lead up to a panel discussion in which the MCH and the CSAS communities will be given the opportunity to begin an open-ended conversation.

Description

Join us for the panel discussion featuring Nikhil Govind, Jagriti Gangopadhyay, Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil, and Gayathri Prabhu from the Manipal Centre for Humanities.

The Manipal Centre for Humanities is one of two Centres of Excellence under the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE)–MAHE itself was one of the six original Institutes of Eminence recognized by the Government of India in 2018. Over the last decade, the Manipal Centre for Humanities has helped pioneer in India a strong multi-disciplinary, research-driven, and India-relevant approach to undergraduate and graduate education. Its faculty are internationally recognized in three key disciplines–literature, sociology and history–and many of its students and alumni are at the forefront of South Asia research in India, Europe and North America.

This is the first of a series of encounters, planned for the coming years, in which research and teaching institutions in South Asia represented by their faculty will be invited by the Centre for South Asian Studies to present their work, discuss shared interests, and meet and exchange as collectives dealing with the same global challenges.

Panelists’ Bios:

Jagriti Gangopadhyay is currently an Assistant Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities. She did her PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. Recently she was awarded the Shastri Publication Grant by the Shastri Indo Canadian Institute for her monograph titled Culture, Context and Aging of Older Indians: Narratives from India and Beyond, published by Springer. This year she co-edited a book titled Eldercare Issues in China and India, published by Routledge: UK. Her work analyzes the intersections between health, cultural practices, laws, and policies among older adults.

Nikhil Govind joined the Manipal Centre for Humanities after completing his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include modern Indian literature and film. He is the author of Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (Routledge, 2014), Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature (Oxford, 2019), (with Gayathri Prabhu), Shadow Craft: Visual Aesthetics of Black and White Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), and The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). He has been Head of the Manipal Centre of Humanities since 2015.

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is interested in the cultural dimensions of the migration to the Arabian Gulf from the south Indian state of Kerala. His papers on various aspects of the cultures of Gulf migration have appeared on various platforms including academic journals. Shafeeq received his PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.

Gayathri Prabhu is Associate Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities and holds a doctoral degree in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of four novels, a memoir and a novella in prose poetry. She is also the co-author (with Nikhil Govind) of Shadow Craft: Visual Aesthetics of Black and White Hindi Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). She works with mental health advocacy and is the Coordinator of the Student Support Centre, a psychotherapy service for students in Manipal.

Description

*no registration required*

Description:

Horror films often depict ghosts wreaking havoc on the living. Scholars of horror have understood the genre’s specters as returns of the repressed that can, like nightmares, be decoded from the fantastical façade of the films. Ghost stories are unscrambled in this analytic process, symbolic representations read back down to the unremembered traumas that they “came from”: the psychic, cultural, and national histories reflected in the broken mirror of horror. This has been a highly influential—and redemptive—-reading strategy by which the most disdained of popular film genres has become the most written about over the last few decades. Yet, after all that reading and writing, others have argued, something is still left on the table: the sensuousness of the horror film. The fullness of bodies, objects, and spaces, of shadows, sounds and colors, helps achieve the immediate visceral impact after which the genre is named. It gives presence to the phantom worlds of horror, and affective force to our viewing of them. But where does this presence come from? In this talk, I offer one answer. I propose that horror encrypts and unleashes the material history of filmmaking in spectral forms. This history is typically described as “behind the scenes,” but the materialities of celluloid editing, location filming, props, and makeup effects (in)form the genre’s representations, becoming perceptible in stylistic and affective “excess.” Focusing on a cycle of horror films made in India between the late 1970s and early 1990s, this talk will explore the spectral materialities of Bombay horror as clues to the forgotten conditions in which horror films were once made, and as traces that still shape sensory encounters with the films.

Kartik Nair is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is currently completing his first book, Seeing Things, which focuses on low-budget horror films made in 1980s Bombay. Examining the films for spectral traces of material histories of film production, regulation, and circulation, Seeing Things explores the aesthetic and historiographic implications of spectral materialities. Kartik’s writing has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), Film Quarterly, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The New Inquiry. He is a core editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and oversees the journal’s book reviews.

Description

Abstract:

There’s a little known story of nearly 3000 Chinese Indians who were incarcerated in a prison camp in Deoli, Rajasthan in 1962 following a border war between India and China. Families, parts of families and single men were taken across India to the west to be imprisoned for up to five years in some cases. What was their experience in the Camp like? And where are they now?

“The Deoliwallahs” explores the identity of incarcerated people. The stories of the survivors are beautiful and heart-breaking: a 13-year old girl who became the head of the family, three friends who forged their bonds amid despair and the vivid memories of the Camp that haunted a mother in her nightmares. Their story is more relevant now than ever as regional wars over territory rages on and injustice against civilians is a stark reality.

Speaker Bio:

Joy Ma grew up in India and has lived in Kolkata and New Delhi. She attended Lady Shri Ram College and graduate school at the New School. She recently published the book The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Incarceration. Joy was one of a handful of children born in the Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan. Her connection to the community in the US and Canada taps into the rich narratives of the group. She is co-producer of "Voices of Deoli", a film in post-production.

Description

Event series: Race & Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

In recent years, many commentators have bemoaned the dissolution of the liberal capitalist world order that has been called “Pax Americana.” In this logic, the occupations of Germany and Japan have been declared triumphs that inaugurated a rules-based global order that lasted for more than seventy years. The United States has been figured as the “global good cop” that insured peace, security, and prosperity throughout the planet, so that its recent decline on the world stage and a supposed isolationist mood is now being countered by new visions calling forth another world order dependent upon the massive militarization of minor and major powers throughout the world. This panel begins with the acknowledgement that the period of Pax Americana was far from peaceful and non-violent for most of the formerly colonized, indigenous, and racialized peoples of the world. Despite national and state/provincial celebrations of inclusion, multiculturalism, and reconciliation, our three panelists with expertise across the Asia-Pacific–including on Okinawa, Hawaiʻi, and postcolonial Koreans in Japan–reflect on the limits of this discourse on Pax Americana.

Description

Part of the Theory/Praxis/Politics series, the forum "Migratory Labors of Southeast Asian Cinema" invites filmmakers and academics from Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines to discuss their experience and thoughts on navigating labor and migration in the course of their work.

Panelists’ Bios:

Sompot Chidgasornpongse graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Chulalongkorn university in Thailand, and an MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His short films were shown at various international film festivals such as Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Viennale, Visions du Réel, IndieLisboa, etc. He’s also a Berlinale Talents, and Talents Tokyo alumnus. His first feature documentary, Railway Sleepers (2016) was in competition at Busan IFF, had European premiere at Berlinale, and later at Sheffield, True/False, TIDF, among others. Sompot has also been working closely with Apichatpong Weerasethakul as assistant director in many films, including Tropical Malady (2004), Syndromes and a Century (2006), Cemetery of Splendour (2015), and recently, Memoria (2021). Sompot is now based in Bangkok.

Kissada Kamyoung was born in the Thai province of Hat Yai. After graduating with a Bachelor of Political Science from Thammasat University and a Master of Comparative Literature from Chulalongkorn University, he began working as a lecturer in the Department of Western Languages, Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, where he teaches literature and film courses. He has written several academic articles, magazine columns, and reviews about how space, time, and modern life are presented in Southeast Asian literature and cinema through the lenses of postcolonialism, urban space, and culture. Kissada Kamyoung also attended Busan Asian Film School. His 2009 short film BANGKOK DWELLER screened at the 13th Thai Short Film and Video Festival. He was the line producer for Jacob Von Heland’s BELOVED FLOOD (2014, TV) and line producer for Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s RAILWAYS SLEEPERS (2016, Busan and Berlinale Forum). He previously attended La Fabrique Cinema 2020, HAF Forum 2020, Nantes Produire au Sud 2020, SEAFIC 2020, and Locarno Open Doors 2021.

Carlo Francisco Manatad is a Filipino film director and editor based in Manila. He is a graduate of the University of the Philippines Film Institute. His short films have screened at numerous local and international film festivals. Junilyn Has, his first short film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival under the Pardi di Domani Section in 2015. Jodilerks Dela Cruz, Employee of the Month, his 4th short film was selected in competition at the 56th Semaine de la Critique of the Cannes International Film Festival. Baga’t Diri Tuhay Tat Pamahungpahung (The Imminent Immanent) premiered in competition at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. As one of the most prolific editors in the Philippines today, he has collaborated with numerous filmmakers on independent and studio films. Carlo is an alumnus of the Asian Film Academy, Berlinale Talents, Tokyo Talents and the Locarno Filmmakers Academy. Whether the Weather is Fine (Kun Maupay Man It Panahon) is his first feature film.

Wikanda Promkhuntong is a lecturer in Film and Cultural Studies at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University. Her research engages with East Asian cinema and different forms of border-crossing. Her works explore the discourses around and practices of screen industry agents from auteur/stars, cinephiles/fans, above/below-the-line workers, and the changing conditions that shaped their lives and works over time. Since being based in Thailand, her research also covers the areas of film cultures in relation to cinema spaces and film locations, different forms of cinematic mobilities, and historical film receptions. She completed her PhD in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, Wales.

Maung Sun is a filmmaker born in Myanmar in 1983 and is currently based in Paris. His first feature film MONEY HAS FOUR LEGS world-premiered at Busan International Film Festival 2020 in competition for the New Currents Award. It traveled to Locarno, BFI London, New York Asian, and more festivals in 2021. In the same year, he was the first filmmaker from Myanmar to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation Residence. He participated in Talents Tokyo 2022 and Berlinale Talents 2023.

Live captioning will be available during the webinar session. To request disability accommodations, please contact palitac@umn.edu The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.

This activity is supported by an Imagine Fund Special Events Grant, an initiative of the University of Minnesota Executive Vice President and Provost, established through a generous gift from the McKnight Foundation, and facilitated by the Institute for Advanced Study.

The event is co-presented by the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota and the Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto.

Description

Pathbreakers: New Postdoctoral Research on South Asia at U of T

This talk will discuss Dr. Rachelle Saruya’s research on Myanmar Buddhist nuns’ formal and informal education. Dr. Saruya focuses on fourteen Buddhist nuns at one nunnery in Sagaing, Myanmar, their experiences with education and monastic training, and their spaces of choice or convenience that help mediate these practices. By allowing the spatial aspects of one nunnery to organize her investigation, Dr. Saruya is able to move through each building, encountering nuns at different life stages and with various aspirations, creating a much more complex picture than if she had used what might be called an “ideal” renunciant with a linear and straightforward educational path. More specifically, this approach enables her to touch on themes of secular vs. monastic education, child nuns vs. older ones, disability and minority status, reformed nunneries vs. old institutions, and lineages, among other matters. While examining this nunnery, Dr. Saruya also explores the connections this nunnery has to two seminary type nunneries and monasteries in the area that help in the nun-making process.

Rachelle Saruya is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Historical Studies at UTM where she is teaching two courses and embarking on a new research project centered on child-wishing rituals in contemporary Myanmar. She is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Description

BOOK TALK

Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions (Standford University Press)

There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account for three spaces: Korean American literature has to grapple with the legacy of Japanese imperialism in the United States, and Zainichi literature must account for American interventions in Japan. Comparing Korean American authors such as Younghill Kang, Chang-rae Lee, Ronyoung Kim, and Min Jin Lee with Zainichi authors such as Kaneshiro Kazuki, Yi Yang-ji, and Kim Masumi, Minor Transpacific uncovers their hidden dialogue and imperial concordances, revealing the trajectory and impact of both bodies of work. Minor Transpacific bridges the fields of Asian studies and Asian American studies to unveil new connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures. Working in Japanese and English, David S. Roh builds a theoretical framework for articulating those moments of contact between minority literatures in a third national space and proposes a new way of conceptualizing Asian American literature.

David S. Roh is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he specializes in Asian American literature and Digital Humanities.  He is the author of Minor Transpacific (Stanford University Press, 2021), Illegal Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers University Press, 2015). His work has appeared in Law & Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, MELUS, Verge, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.  He is currently at work on Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of English, Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto.

Description

NOTE: The event will now be conducted virtually on Zoom due to weather conditions. Please register to receive the Zoom link.

Pathbreakers: New Postdoctoral Research on South Asia at U of T

The saint, prophet, liberated guru, or enlightened being occupies a powerful place not only in their respective religious spheres, but in the social lives of the cultures that create and maintain them. Yet how are these social categories “created” and through what means are their parameters delimited over the last century and a half as technologies of mass comminication have transformed the epistemology of discourse?

To approach these questions, this paper focuses on the “living arahants” of early twentieth-century Burma, examining how the narratives surrounding this supposedly enlightened class are negotiated and contested in the public sphere through the mediums of photography and print. By exploring the figure of the Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw (1868-1955), a Burmese scholar-monk and pioneer of insight, or vipassanā meditation, it is argued that the application of these categories is not just a religious act, but profoundly political—determining who wields the power of definition itself.   

BIO:

Tony Scott is a PhD Candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, working under Professor Christoph Emmrich. His research focuses on the relationship between Pali commentary, insight (vipassanā) meditation, and Buddhist statecraft in twentieth-century Burma/Myanmar. Tony’s dissertation centres on the Milindapañha-aṭṭhakathā (Commentary on the Questions of King Milinda) of the Mingun Jetavan Sayadaw (1868-1954), a rare example of a modern Buddhist commentary (aṭṭhakathā) that caused controversy amongst the highest levels of the Burmese monastic community (saṅgha) and first independence government.

As a 2018-2019 Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellow in Buddhist Studies, Tony spent the year working in Myanmar, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and as a 2019-2020 Bukkyō Dendō Kyokai Foreign Scholar Fellow, he will finish his dissertation at the University of Tokyo under Professors Norihisa Baba and Ryosuke Kuramoto.

Description

BOOK TALK

This talk is based on the book, Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State (University of Michigan Press, 2022), edited by David Oh.

Abstract: The book talk addresses the ways in which alterity is mediated in South Korean popular culture. With Korea’s complicated postcolonial legacy with Japan and its neocolonial relationship with the United States, the Korean ethnoscape is produced through a negotiation between various ways of understanding difference: its own indigenous notions of difference, its incorporation and resistance to Japanese notions of difference, and its interpretations of U.S. and Western racial hierarchy. Although racial frames have been applied to the study of Korea and its sensemaking around difference, this book talk argues that doing so is reductive and problematically asserts Western-centrism by applying a Western framework to understand non-Western spaces. Thus, drawing on a postcolonial ethos, Dr. Oh argues that to understand alterity and its mediation in South Korea, it is important to take seriously indigenous epistemologies. To do so, Dr. Oh translates the local word for discrimination, injongchabyeol, to English as “anthrocategorism" in order to recognize that Korea’s construction of alterity is locally specific. It incorporates race and ethnocentrism but, anthrocategorism is not reducible to either. Instead, the representations of anthrocategorism in Korean mediated spaces reflects ambivalent, complex negotiations of multiple types of cultural capital in formulations of who is represented and understood as more valued and normal and who is not. The talk draws upon the various contributions to the edited book to demonstrate the complexities of anthrocategorism in Korean ethno- and mediascapes.

David Oh is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is the author of Second-Generation Korean American Adolescent Identity and Media: Diasporic Identifications and Whitewashing the Movies: White Subjectivity and Asian Erasure in U.S. Film Culture. He has also co-written Navigating White News: Asian American Journalists at Work (forthcoming) and edited Mediating the Korean Other: Representations and Discourses of Difference in the Post/Neocolonial Nation-State. Dr. Oh writes about Asian/American representation in U.S. media culture, representations of alterity in Korean media culture, and transnational audience reception of Korean media. He serves on eight Editorial Boards in communication, cultural studies, and media studies, and he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to South Korea in 2018-19 at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

Description

China’s surveillance reach is global.  With police stations being set up abroad, election interference in Canada, and spy balloons, how are we to make sense of China as a surveillance state?  Join journalists and researchers for a dynamic discussion of China as a surveillance state: the benign, the malign, and the ugly implications for Canada and the democratic world.  

SPEAKERS’ BIOS:

Josh Chin is deputy bureau chief responsible for politics and general news in The Wall Street Journal’s China bureau. Prior to his current role, Josh spent six years as a politics reporter in China covering law, civil society, and government use of technology. He is a recipient of the Dan Bolles Medal and led an investigative team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting in 2018. He is the co-author, with Journal reporter Liza Lin, of "Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (2022, St. Martin’s Press).

Josh started reporting for the Journal in 2008 as a freelance video journalist in Beijing and also spent several years editing the newspaper’s China blog. He began his career an editorial assistant at the Park Record, in Park City, Utah.

Emile Dirks is a Research Associate at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. His research on police-led mass biometric surveillance in China has been covered by The New York Times, The Economist, and The Intercept, among other publications. He completed his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2022.

Dahlia Peterson is a Research Analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). Her research work focuses on how China harnesses predictive policing algorithms and facial, voice, and gait recognition technologies for AI-powered surveillance programs within its own borders and abroad. At CSET, she also studies how China is developing its artificial intelligence education and workforce pipelines. Her work has been published by the Brookings Institution, The Diplomat, The Hill, The National Interest, and Routledge. She has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and WIRED, among others. Prior to joining CSET she worked for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the U.S. State Department’s Virtual Student Federal Service, and the Foreign Commercial Service at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Chinese Language with a minor in China Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University.

Description

Building on fieldwork from 2015 to the present, this talk by Jeffery Hou of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington addresses how Taipei’s “Open Green” Program, the latest iteration of community planning initiatives in the Taiwanese capital, transcends the established boundaries of urban communities and community design practices to turn placemaking into a vehicle for collaboration and social learning. In Hou’s view, the outcomes and processes of the program suggest directions for the ongoing evolution of civic urbanism(s) in Asia.

Jeffrey Hou, Ph.D., is Professor of Landscape Architecture and director of the Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on the agency of marginalized social groups in transforming the built environments. In a career that spans the Pacific, Hou has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, fishers, and villagers in Asia and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, on projects ranging from the conservation of wildlife habitats to bottom-up placemaking.

Organized by the Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in collaboration with the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.

Description

Abstract:

The emergence of the digital financial services ecosystem in India has widened the digital divide leading to the financial exclusion of marginalized populations and negatively impacting economic development. This research addresses the United Nation’s sustainable development goal of poverty reduction with the advances in information technology. Illiteracy, lack of digital literacy, and distrust of digital payment systems are widely prevalent among the marginalized in the Global South. This research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of the financial exclusion of impoverished users and find solutions to foster financial inclusion from community organizations, fintech and political institutions. The research aims to comprehend the power dynamics determined by political institutions and conglomerates for private gain vs. the public interest for digital financial platforms in India. It illuminates the gaps that lead to information asymmetries arising from economic and information policies. This research tracks digital policies to facilitate the adoption of mobile applications for monetary transactions and the experience of marginalized micro-entrepreneurs with digital financial services. Research questions include: How has the emergence of the digital financial service ecosystem in India impacted social practices around money and economic development for the marginalized? What is the role of political institutions in arranging the public and private power dynamics for digital financial platforms?

Aditi Bhatia-Kalluri is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on how digital policies shape the information practices of marginalized users in the Global South. The research tracks adaptation to mobile phones by auditing everyday user challenges and finding gaps that lead to information asymmetry. Aditi earned a Master of Digital Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and B.A. Hons in New Media Studies from the University of Toronto.

Description

Program

2:30 pm. Opening remarks and introduction

2:45 pm. Presentation by Jungmin Seo (20-25 minutes)

               "Agents and Victims of Korean Nationalism: From History to Politics"

3:10 pm. Presentation by Young Chul Cho (20-25 minutes)

               “Decolonizing International Relations Studies through Korean Literature”

3:35 pm. Presentation by Hye Min Ryu (20-25 minutes)

                "Korean Feminism and Backlash politics in South Korea"

4:00 pm. Discussion by Jesook Song

4:10 pm. Discussion by Yoonkyung Lee

4:20 pm. Authors’ response

4: 40 pm. General Q&A

Presenters’ Abstracts & Bios:

Agents and Victims of Korean Nationalism: From History to Politics

By Jungmin Seo

Abstract: The existing literature on Korean nationalism predominantly on the birth and history of nationalism, not on the politics of nationalism. The lack of political analysis of Korean nationalism stems from a rather simple reality: Korean nationalism has been studied by historians as well as anthologists and sociologists but not political scientists who have neglected the dynamic nature of nationalistic discourses in the Korean society. The political studies on Korea have been indifferent to this issue based on a vague assumption that Korean nationalism is an unchanging and fixed element of Korean culture and history while unconsciously accepting the primordialist theories of nationalism. By analyzing the development of Korean nationalism as a discursive field of political struggle, I suggest that modern nationalism, with its requisite reification of the nation as the ultimate object of political loyalty, should be understood as a process of hegemonizing and de-hegemonizing through competition among various political and social agents. It should not be understood as a uni-linear project toward an independent nation state. In other words, even a successful nation state is always subject to re-interpretation of nation-ness through which challenging social forces can de-legitimize the state’s claim as a guardian of the nation. With this theoretical framework, I briefly discuss various social forces such as the Korean state, Korean women, student dissidents, oversea Koreans and migrant workers as agents and victims of Korean nationalism who shaped the forms of political struggles in modern Korean history, and at the same time, whose identities were formed by the discursive struggles of Korean nationalism. In sum, this research is a tentative attempt to construct a theoretical framework to understand the life of nationalism in a well-constructed nationhood.

Jungmin Seo (PhD)is Professor of political science and international studies at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. He taught at the University of Oregon and University of Hawaii before joining Yonsei University in 2010. His teaching and research areas are nationalism, Korean politics, Chinese politics, critical approaches to political science and International Relation theories. He recently published “Nationalism” in Oxford Handbook of Korean Politics (2023), “Koera-Japan relations through thick description: revisiting the national identity formation processes,” Third World Quarterly (forthcoming), “The Emergence and Evolution of Internatioanl Relations Studies in South Korea,” Review of International Studies (2021), and “Introduction: Political Dynamics of Korean Femiism-From #MeToo to Womad,” Journal of Asian Sociology (2020).

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Decolonizing International Relations Studies through Korean Literature

By Young Chul Cho

Abstract: This paper aims to un-suture Westphalian IR common sense from a non-essentialist and situated perspective in South Korea, in the context of decolonising IR. Toward this end, the paper methodologically looks at a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963, the time when it was the early postcolonial period of South Korea and at the height of the Cold War. In doing a contrapuntal reading of Westphalian IR via the non-Western novel, the paper also attempts to do a different worlding and conceptualising of the international from the below. This paper mainly addresses the following set of questions. How do yellow negroes (subject race) make sense of themselves, their roles and life-modes in the world defined for them by the white West (master race)? How do yellow negroes understand and reply to the white West who has been hegemonic in world politics and history? What are A Grey Man’s ways of resisting, engaging with, or relating to the hegemonic West who is already internal to himself?

Young Chul Cho (Ph.D. in International Relations) is Professor in the School of International Studies at Jeonbuk National University in Jeonju, South Korea. Before taking up the current position, he taught at O.P. Jindal Global University (India), Leiden University (the Netherlands). He was a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University in Taiwan (ROC). His teaching and research interests include International Relations theory, critical geopolitics, non-traditional security studies, East Asian studies, knowledge production and travel, and philosophy. His articles can be found in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Review of International Studies, International Journal, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Asian Perspective, Korean Observer, and so on.

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Korean Feminism and Backlash politics in South Korea

By Hye Min Ryu

Abstract: This paper aims to provide a new perspective on the current backlash against feminism in South Korea. The Korean society is currently experiencing a strong backlash against feminism. As this anti-feminist tendency has been widely shared by the young Korean men, the tendency became ‘the twenties men phenomenon’ in Korean society. Nevertheless, Korean feminism, which had been understood as an integral part of Korean democracy, looks withering amid the backlash associated with ideologies of ‘fair’ and ‘meritocracy’. Renowned feminist scholars even admitted that Korean feminists have lost the effective feminist language to combat it. In this paper, I argue that the current backlash in South Korea is not regressive to what Korean feminism seemed to achieve since the democratization in 1987 but rather presents new politics in South Korea. This paper concludes that the meaning of ‘progressiveness’ and ‘conservativeness’ in South Korean society could be discussed in the context of the backlash politics.

Hye Min Ryu is a doctoral student in political science at Yonsei University. Her research interests are in critical theory, feminism, and postcolonialism. Hye Min completed her undergraduate degree in East Asian Studies at University of Toronto and master’s degree in Political Science at Yonsei University.

Description

The event will feature the following two presentations:

Transpacific Subjectivities: Okinawan Nisei in Hawaii and Militarization of the Pacific

By Asako Masubuchi

Abstract:

This paper examines the transpacific life course of Thomas Taro Higa to explore the shifting identities of Okinawan nisei in Hawaii during and after World War II. By doing so, this paper reveals how the indeterminate status of Okinawa under the U.S. military occupation shaped the distinctive consciousness and identities of the Okinawan diaspora in Hawaii.

Higa was a so-called “kibei nisei,” born in Hawaii to Okinawan parents and returned to Hawaii after receiving his education in Okinawa and working briefly in Osaka and Tokyo. During World War II, Higa served with the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion. Immediately after the war, Higa organized the Okinawa Relief Movement to send relief goods to war-devastated Okinawa. In many ways, Higa was at the nexus of Japanese Americans who were trying to restore their status as American citizens and Okinawan immigrants who were building up their ethnic identity through the act of saving their homeland Okinawa. Through examining Higa’s life experiences within the context of the Cold War, occupation of Okinawa, and postwar Japanese Americans’ efforts for citizenship, this paper aims to rethink postwar Okinawa from a transpacific perspective.

Dr. Asako Masubuchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Policy Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto. She holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the questions of militarism, racism, and biopolitics in U.S.-occupied Okinawa. Her works include “Stamping Out the ‘Nation-Ruining Disease’: Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign in US-Occupied Okinawa” (Social History of Medicine, Vol. 34, Issue 4, November 2021).   

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Nation and Nationality as a White "Possessions" in Japan and the United States

By Michael Roellinghoff

Abstract:

In this paper, I discuss early 20th century Japanese critiques of Asian exclusion laws in Anglophone settler colonies. Intellectuals such as Mori Ōgai, Nagai Ryūtarō, and Ōkuma Shigenobu understood Asian exclusionism and European imperialism in Asia as constituting a single "white peril” which threatened all of Asia. At a time when Japan’s “Great Power” status seemed to signify Euro-American recognition of the Japanese Empire as an equal partner, Asian exclusionism marked the tangible limits of Japan’s acceptance into the international community. Arguing that this reflected a larger dynamic — well understood by Westernizing Meiji reformers — according to which Euro-Americans claimed sovereignty, civilization, and the nation-state formation itself as exclusively white "possessions," I analyze “white peril” critiques together with attempts by Japanese immigrants in the United States to "pass" as (the supposedly "Caucasian") Ainu in order to bypass exclusion laws and naturalize as US citizens.

Dr. Michael Roellinghoff (he/him) is a historian specializing in Indigeneity, colonialism, and race in modern Japan. He is currently an Associate at the University of Toronto Asian Institute and a Research Fellow at the University of Alberta.

Description

The film screening is free and open to the public. The filmmaker, Pimpaka Towira, will be present for an introduction and Q&A.

Sponsored by the Department of Visual Studies, Southeast Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, and Cinema Studies Institute and supported by Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.

THE ISLAND FUNERAL (2015)

Directed by Pimpaka Towira

Duration: 105 min | Format: DCP, color | Language: Thai with English Subtitles |

Production: Extra Virgin Co, Ltd

Won the Best Asian Future Film Award, 28th Tokyo International Film Festival
Won FIPRESCI Prize, the 40th Hong Kong International Film Festival
Won Best Cinematographer, Asian New Talent Awards, 19th Shanghai International Film Festival
Won Silver Hanoman Award, Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival 2016

Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQQXuDzYJkM

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

On 19 May 2010, I was driving back from Pattani to Bangkok. Upon reaching the city, it was getting dark. A curfew was announced, with military tanks running everywhere. The situation did not seem to be very different from Pattani where I just left. But I saw the image I never thought before that I would get to see in this lifetime: that of black thick clouds of smoke rising up to cover the entire city. Even though I may have already experienced the anxious situation, of the nation being torn apart, that had been happening in the capital for several months, but this time the image of what happened that day will become forever entrenched in me and my generations’ memories for a long time.

I feel that human memory is a special thing, as each person may remember what they see in different ways or choose to remember it the way they want to. Importantly, memory can last forever or turn into a story being told from one to another. And a powerful story may also become planted in the minds and goes on to be a part of the history of a person, or a group of people, before anyone realizes it. At the same time, memory can also turn out to be a powerful weapon that makes people who strongly believe in it gets extremely violent in defending what they believe.

Over the past few years, I traveled to many places – the North, Northeast and South. I got to talk with the local people and caught a glimpse into their lives while listening to the stories told from their memories. I absorbed the power of those tales from each region, from each individual. At the same time, I also feel that all these conflicts that are occurring right now in my own country may not just be about what is happening right here at this moment, but they are tied to the memories from the past, from the old stories that may either be true or with some added elements.

I take a look at my memory and see a connection between mine and others’. These memories are also connected with those of many other people’s. The confrontation of these mental images makes me feel that I want to create a memory of the idealized world. But whether that really exists or not may not be the point. It may just be the world of hope that only cinema can create.

The Island Funeral is not a film about the conflict and violent situation of the southern Thai border, and not a story of any group of persons in particular. It is film about everybody who is looking for their ideal world amidst the conflicts of the internal clash in their past and memories.

Director’s Bio:

Pimpaka Towira is a film director, producer and programmer who is a pioneer among female film directors in the Thai independent film scene since the early 1990s. She received international acclaim for her first feature One Night Husband which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. Her second feature, The Island Funeral, won Best Asian Future Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. She has also directed award-winning winning fiction, experimental and documentary short films. She has been a professional film programmer for more than 15 years. Since 2015, she has been the Programme Director for the Bangkok ASEAN Film Festival. From 2017-2018, she was the Program Director for Singapore International Film Festival. She was honoured with the national Silpathorn Award in 2009 by the Ministry of Culture of Thailand. Pimpaka has led the Deep South Young Filmmaker Project I and II with young people from the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat that are considered conflict zones.   

Description

Bai Chongxi’s life spanned the Late Qing, the founding of the Chinese Republic and its fracturing into the so-called “Warlord Era,” the Nanjing Decade, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. His displacement from the mainland to Taiwan in the late 1940s was jarring. Beyond being very far and very different from Guangxi, the move required a quick realignment of ethnopolitics and outreach to anticolonial Muslims around the world. Suddenly, the goals of retaking the mainland from the Communists subsumed the long efforts of Chinese Muslims to be included into visions for the emerging Chinese nation-state. This talk will examine some of the tensions between the ways that Bai tried to ensure that Muslim voices were heard in postwar politics and the ways that he navigated the new geopolitical realities in the Global South. By doing this, we see that Bai attempted to foreground Muslim concerns as a pressing geopolitical issue for the Nationalists.  

Speaker:

Kelly Hammond is an Associate Professor of East Asian History in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas. She is also the Associate Director of International and Global Studies. Hammond specializes in modern Chinese and Japanese history, and her work focuses on Islam and politics in 20th-century East Asia. She serves on the editorial board of Twentieth-Century China and is the Associate Editor for Modern China at the Journal of Asian Studies.  

Description

Joshua Pilzer’s book launch, Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of "Korea’s Hiroshima" (Oxford University Press, 2022).

*The presentation of the book will be followed by a reception*

 Book

About the book:

Based on nine years of intermittent fieldwork, Quietude recounts the stories, songs and other arts of survival of Korean atomic bomb survivors and their children in Hapcheon, Korea, offering a corrective to the enduring, multifaceted neglect and marginalization they have faced. Struck by the quiet of many atom bomb victims and their children, many of whom suffer from radiation-related illness and disability, I discuss its many sources: notions of Japanese soft-spokenness, vocal disability, the quiet contemplation of texts, the changes to the human heart as one grows older, the experience of war, social marginalization, traumatic experience, and various social movement discourses. I consider victims’ uses of voice, speech, song, and movement in the struggle for national and global recognition, in the ongoing work of negotiating the traumatic past, and in the effort to consolidate and maintain selves and relationships in the present.

About the author:

Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, and the relationships between music, everyday life, survival, memory, traumatic experience, marginalization, socialization, gendered violence, public culture, mass media, social practice and identity. He is particularly interested in the ethnography of the “everyday,” in the thresholds which link music to other forms of social expression, and in the vistas of ethnomusicology beyond music. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012 by Oxford University Press. He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety, authority and legitimate violence.

Description

Policy reports on the “status of women” constitute one of the most abundant archives on the world’s women in the second half of the twentieth century. This talk offers an account of and a reckoning with the promises and limits of the social scientific report through an analysis of archives of early “status of women” reports, focusing on reports produced in South Asia from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Speaker:

Durba Mitra is the Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Acting Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University. She is the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Description

BOOK TALK

Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature (Columbia University Press, 2022).

Abstract:

No scholar of modern Chinese literary studies in its globalizing mode will miss the recent spotlight on Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature. Previously untapped, works from or about the Southeast Asian country are now read for bracing ideas on language, ethnicity, and diaspora. In Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature, Chan shows how the minor literary formation’s grasp of its own marginality in the world-Chinese literary space constitutes the threshold—instead of a hurdle—to creating signature aesthetic imprints that foster global outlooks.

In the book, Chan describes the strategic “worlding” of modern Chinese literature that involves authorial navigation of inter-connected literary spaces. Foregrounding the inter-Asian linkages between Malaysia and other Sinitic-speaking locales (such as China, Taiwan and Singapore) in the writing practices of Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, Chan analyzes narrative representations of multilingual social realities, and authorial reflections about colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Both sets of creative discourse underlie the literary worlds built out of the physical journeys, the interactions among social groups, and the mindset shifts entailed in creating distinctive literary languages for the place. Historicizing such “crossings” from the 1930s to the 2000s, Chan contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.

Author’s Bio:

CHAN CHEOW THIA is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include modern Chinese-Sinophone literature, Southeast Asian studies, and diaspora studies. His book, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature, is published by Columbia University Press as part of the “Global Chinese Culture” series. His articles have appeared in disciplinary and regionally focused venues such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, as well as PRISM: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature. He co-edited the special issue of PRISM on “The Worlds of Southeast Asian Chinese Literature” (September 2022). As a literary translator and editor, he has worked with Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine.

Description

Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University College and the University of Toronto Libraries Proudly Co-Present:

A panel discussion about teaching through film in the context of #stopthehate and transnational anti-racist activism. Speakers will reflect on the distinct pedagogical possibilities of film for the future of teaching against racism in all its forms with specific attention to Asian Canadian Studies. Drawing on examples from their own work, panelists will discuss the politics of race and the potential of emerging visions of anti-racist solidarity enabled through visual studies.

Followed by reception

Description

Abstract:

Many have referred to an unfolding "Asian Century." Yet, the place of historical difference, sometimes the problem of “race,” in the making of Asia, with Japan as a key example, has not acquired consideration commensurate with its implication. Matters African American as in the historical vision of W. E. B. Du Bois, namely his sense of a modern global “problem of the color line” may be of assistance. Asia, to take Japan as a complex example, was for Du Bois an utterly persuasive historical example; yet, two continuing twin privileges—the idea of the utterly singular exemplar of the human, or natality, and the persistent retention of the idea of sovereignty as also rooted in a singular exemplar (e.g. the monarch, the ethnic group, the party)—together articulate the fundamental contemporary conundrum of modern collective inhabitation. A strong sense of the African American example and the conception that lead to Du Bois’s acute recognition of this problematic before its cataclysmic eruption during the Second World War and ongoing aftermath may be useful for a world-wide community of and thinkers and practitioners within the present recrudescence that has reimagined Asia, including Japan, on a global scale.

Speaker Bio:

Nahum Dimitri Chandler serves as a professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His teaching and research are in the fields of African American studies, literature, philosophy, and modern intellectual history. He is the author of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (2014), as well as the editor of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays (2015), both from Fordham University Press. An enlarged edition of his 2013 book Toward an African Future – Of the Limit of World was issued in July 2021 by SUNY Press. His study “Beyond This Narrow Now:” Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois was released in February 2022 by Duke University Press. Also, forthcoming in the May of 2023 from Duke Press is Annotations: On the Early Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is Associate Editor of the journal CR: The New Centennial Review; as well, he has served since its founding on the editorial team of The A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought.

Description

This talk presents the doctrine of the seven levels or places along the path to liberation that is outlined by the sage Vasiṣṭha in the Mokṣopāya (c. 950 CE), a philosophical literary text from Kashmir that is better known in its later Advaita Vedānta affiliated recension as the Yogaavāsiṣṭha. The Yogavāsiṣṭha is an important text of nondual Vedānta that has been transmitted, translated, and commented upon over the centuries. However, when compared with the Mokṣopāya, it is clear that the Yogavāsiṣṭha contains significant corruptions that alter the doctrine of the text. With the near completion of the critical edition of the Mokṣopāya by scholars in Halle, Marburg and Mainz, passages that have never been printed before are available to be studied by scholars. In this talk, I present the rich material from the sixteen sarga-long yogabhūmi passage from the Nirvāṇaprakaraṇa—the sixth book of the Mokṣopāya—that has not been studied before. The Path of Yoga is an everyday path in the human developmental cycle that will ultimately be embarked upon by any inconspicuous person when they become dissasfied with worldly life and devoted to going beyond saṃsāra. At some point in a human life—which extends across lifetimes—a person will inevitably enter the Path of Yoga as the natural culmination of the average life, and the seven bhūmikās are stages of growth, markers of progress or levels of attainment along the way.

Description

China’s economy is rebounding. Beijing let Alibaba’s Jack Ma out in public again, sending good vibes to private businesses.  Meanwhile, the United States is leading the charge on banning Chinese products like TikTok.  What does this all mean for the world’s second largest economy and for consumers at home?  How are we to assess political risk in Chinese markets given the state of current affairs?  Join us for a panel with leading figures in business and academia for a timely analysis.

Panelists’ Bios:

Craig Allen is the president of the US-China Business Council (USCBC), a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization representing over 260 American companies doing business with China. Prior to joining USCBC, Craig had a long, distinguished career in US public service.

Craig began his government career in 1985 at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA). He entered government as a Presidential Management Intern, rotating through the four branches of ITA. From 1986 to 1988, he was an international economist in ITA’s China Office. In 1988, Craig transferred to the American Institute in Taiwan, where he served as Director of the American Trade Center in Taipei. He held this position until 1992, when he returned to the Department of Commerce for a three-year posting at the US Embassy in Beijing as Commercial Attaché. In 1995, Craig was assigned to the US Embassy in Tokyo, where he served as a Commercial Attaché. In 1998, he was promoted to Deputy Senior Commercial Officer. In 1999, Craig became a member of the Senior Foreign Service.

After a four-year tour in South Africa, Craig became Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia at the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. He later became Deputy Assistant Secretary for China. Craig was sworn in as the United States ambassador to Brunei Darussalam on December 19, 2014. He served there until July 2018, when he transitioned to President of the US-China Business Council.

Kristen Hopewell is Canada Research Chair in Global Policy in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, Director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues, and Co-Director of the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia. Her research specializes in international trade, global governance, industrial policy and development, with a focus on emerging powers. She is a Wilson China Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Dr. Hopewell is the author of Clash of Powers: US-China Rivalry in Global Trade Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Breaking the WTO: How Emerging Powers Disrupted the Neoliberal Project (Stanford University Press, 2016).

Kyle Jaros is Associate Professor of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. He is also a faculty fellow of the Keough School’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Jaros’s research explores the politics of regional development, central-local relations, and metropolitan governance with a focus on China. His first book, China’s Urban Champions: The Politics of Spatial Development (Princeton University Press, 2019) examines the policy logics and political factors driving uneven development in China’s provinces.

He is currently at work on a second book project that examines changes in the structure and workings of China’s big-city governments to understand the evolution of the party-state system under Xi Jinping.

Description

The India-Canada Association Lecture

Abstract:

This talk presents ongoing research on the Tantric traditions of Kashmir in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is based on a newly prepared critical edition and translation (with Prof. Ben Williams, Naropa University) of Sanskrit hymns composed by the followers of the prolific and influential Kashmirian author, Sābib Kaula. Many of the hymns are about their guru and their lineage, but others reframe earlier Śaiva and Śākta traditions popular in Kashmir. This talk focuses on three hymns: the Bhairavīśaktistotra (modelled on Abhinavagupta’s Bhairavastotra) and Tripurasundarīstotra of Gaṇeśa Bhaṭṭāraka and the Svacchandamaheśvarāṣṭaka of Govinda Kaula. Based on this analysis, it argues for new perspectives on the history and evolution of religious and literary traditions in Kashmir.

Speaker Bio:

Hamsa Stainton is an Associate Professor in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. His recent research focuses on a popular genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry in north India, the hymn of praise (stotra). Recent publications include Tantrapuṣpāñjali: Tantric Traditions and Philosophy of Kashmir; Studies in Memory of Pandit H.N. Chakravarty (co-edited with Bettina Bäumer) and Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Description

A conversation with Jack Austin and Bernie Frolic on the foundation and evolution of Canada’s complex relationship with China, moderated by Dr. Emile Dirks.

PARTICIPANTS’ BIOS:

Jack Austin is the co-author of Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa. He was a member of the Senate of Canada for 32 years, representing British Columbia and has championed stronger relations between Canada and Asia. In 1971, as the Serving Deputy Minister of Energy, Mines and Resources, he was part of the first Canadian trade mission to China. He later served as President of the Canada China Business Council and Co-Chair of the Canada China Legislative Association. Senator Austin was awarded the Order of Canada for his contribution in Canada-China relations, and was also instrumental in establishing the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. Austin has been involved in politics and public policy at the highest levels for more than fifty years. He lives in Vancouver.

B. Michael Frolic is the Executive Director of the Asian Business and Management Program and Professor Emeritus of Politics at York University. He first visited China in 1965 and was First Secretary in the Canadian Embassy Beijing in the 1970s. Later he taught at Peking University and Beijing Foreign Studies University and was a visiting professor at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous chapters, monographs and books, including Mao’s People: Sixteen Portraits of Life in Revolutionary China (Harvard University, 1981); Civil Society in China (w/ Timothy Brook, Routledge, 1997), and his latest Canada and China: A Fifty-Year Journey (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

Emile Dirks is a Research Associate at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. His research on police-led mass biometric surveillance in China has been covered by The New York Times, The Economist, and The Intercept, among other publications. He completed his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2022.

Description

This event is a keynote presentation as part of the Centre for South Asian Studies Graduate Symposium 2023 and is open to public.

Keynote speaker:

Professor Nayanika Mathur (Professor of Anthropology and South Asian Studies, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford)

Abstract:

This talk weaves together beastly tales of big cats that make prey of humans in India to ask what they may be telling us about a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists. This talk explores the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. It deploys ethnographic storytelling to explain the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement with the climate crisis.  

Image credit: Nayan Khanolkar

Description

Abstract:

How did statistics become a public good in modern India? In this presentation, I trace the institutional history of statistics in 20th century India. Nationalist statisticians, on the one hand, advocated using disciplinary statistics to constitute a scientifically conscious, statistical-minded public. On the other, their work demonstrated how only a certain pedagogical training could result in using and understanding statistical reasoning and data. How did this dilemma between statistics as public knowledge and as a domain of expertise shape the kind of postcolonial public that nationalist statisticians envisioned? What notions of community and nationalism came to be envisioned following the dissemination of statistical thinking as a public form of reasoning? Historicizing the rise of statistical reasoning in colonial modernity will enable us to reflect on how statistical data came to be seen as objective and at the same time can be mobilized to exclude and discriminate against communities.

Bio:

Sayori Ghoshal completed her PhD at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS), Columbia University, New York. At present, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science & Technology (IHPST), University of Toronto. She is working on her first monograph, “Calculated Identities: How Difference became Minority in Modern India”. Her work on contemporary politics of Hindu nationalism, and the intersection of religious, caste and racial differences have been published as journal articles in the ‘Economic and Political Weekly’ and ‘History Compass’ as well as an essay in an edited volume, ‘Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere’. Her current research is funded by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science & Technology (IHPST) and by the International Network for Research in Science and Belief in Society (INSBS), University of Birmingham.