Description

Abstract:

In the 1990s and 2000s, contemporary art in India changed radically in form, as an art world once dominated by painting began to support installation, new media, and performance. In response to the liberalization of India’s economy, art was cultivated by a booming market as well as by new nonprofit institutions that combined strong local roots and transnational connections. The result was an unprecedented efflorescence of contemporary art and growth of a network of institutions radiating out from India. Speaking from her new book, Infrastructure and Form, Karin Zitzewitz articulated the connections among formal trajectories of medium and material, curatorial frames and networks of circulation, and the changing conditions of everyday life after economic liberalization. By untangling the complex interactions of infrastructure and form, Zitzewitz offered a discussion of the barriers and conduits that continue to shape global contemporary art and its relationship to capital more broadly.   

Speaker Bio:

Karin Zitzewitz is a specialist in the modern and contemporary art of India and Pakistan. An art historian, anthropologist, and curator, her latest research is collected in Infrastructure and Form: Globalization, Contemporary Art, India (University of California Press, 2022). Her earlier books are The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (Hurst/Oxford, 2014) and The Perfect Frame: Presenting Indian Art: Stories and Photographs from the Kekoo Gandhy Collection (Chemould, 2003). Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Fulbright program.  At Michigan State, Zitzewitz is core faculty in the Global Studies in Arts and Humanities Program and Muslim Studies Program, and is affiliated faculty with the Asian Studies Center and the Center for Interdisciplinarity (c4i).

Image caption: Vivan Sundaram, Barricade (with two drains), 2008, digital print.

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ABSTRACT:  

When the Imperial Japanese Army swept across Southeast Asia in 1942, the region’s large and diverse South Asian diaspora was incorporated into Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In recent years, the story of the Indian National Army (INA) and its leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, have received much popular and scholarly attention. However, Bose’s relationship with his Japanese supporters is often framed around the issue over whether Bose was an Axis collaborator or a patriot who was willing to go to any length to achieve India’s independence. Yet this opportunist/collaborationist binary ignores a fundamental fact about the wartime Japanese empire. Japan’s purpose in articulating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was precisely to create an empire of client-states that could mount a serious challenge to the liberal internationalism of the League of Nations and the socialist internationalism of the Communist International. It was in the interest of both Bose and Japanese military administrations to present Indian nation-building exercises in the diaspora as “authentic” expressions of Indian nationalism. This talk explores the complicities between empire, nationalism, and internationalism through the language of authenticity as Japanese and Indian leaders in wartime Southeast Asia attempted to mobilize the South Asian diaspora behind a vision of a resurgent India that would play an active role in Japan’s community of nation-states to overthrow Euro-American colonialism in Asia. It highlights both the possibilities and limitations of a Pan-Asianist universalism that privileged the nation-state as the building block of transnational solidarity, as well as the violence and exploitation that Tamils and Muslims in particular experienced at the hands of both the Japanese military and Bose’s Provisional Government of Free India.    

BIO:

Aaron Peters recently completed his PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto, Department of History on Japan-South Asia relations titled, “A Complicated Alliance: Indo-Japanese Relations, 1915-1952.” He is currently a lecturer at Ambrose University in Calgary.

Description

OCAD University’s Faculty of Art in Partnership with Reel Asian Film Festival presented:

The Kym Pruesse Speakers Series:

ART CREATES CHANGE

Featuring: Deann Borshay Liem

The screening was a Canadian premiere of Liem’s film CROSSINGS, a documentary that follows a group of international women peacemakers who set out on a risky journey across the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, calling for an end to a 70-year war that has divided the Korean peninsula and its people.

Deann Borshay Liem, a Sundance Institute fellow, has worked in independent documentaries for over twenty years. Her films include the Emmy Award-nominated documentary, First Person Plural (Sundance, 2000) and the award-winning films, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (PBS, 2010) and Memory of Forgotten War (with Ramsay Liem; PBS, 2015). As former director of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) she activated the work of racialized artists in public media.

The screening was followed by a conversation featuring Deann Borshay Liem and Christine Ahn of Women Cross DMZ.

Event co-sponsors:

Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies

Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University

Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto

Asian Canadian Women’s Alliance

Korean Professional Womens’ Association

Description

Canada, Sri Lanka, UK | 2021 | 67 minutes | Tamil, Urdu, English with English subtitles | Documentary, Experimental, LGBTQ+ Filmmakers

*FREE SCREENING*

If From Every Tongue It Drips is a documentary constructed between three locations that follows Ponni, who writes a form of 19th-century queer Urdu poetry called Rekhti, and her lover Sarala, a camera operator. As their personal lives unfold on camera, the lines between rehearsal and reality, location and distance, and self and other seem to dissipate. The couple’s conversations are interwoven with the director’s own reflections, connecting dots from each of their specific experiences and reference points.

By choosing to look at the personal and political through the framework of quantum physics, director Sharlene Bamboat draws connections between British colonialism and Indian nationalism, tracing the impact these distinct histories and realities have on queer art, politics, poetry, dance, and music. From landmark pieces of music and poetry composed by revolutionary figures to more contemporary works, the film shows us the politicization of South Asian pop culture and the possibilities of its reclamation. – Mariam Zaidi

Description

Synopsis:

In this oddly sweet and gentle story, Hong, a shy young man, opens his eyes to love when he coincidentally meets Lele, the mistress of a sex worker business. After a disastrous blind date set up by his mother, Hong is dragged to Lele’s hotel by his cousin. Not yet ready to lose his virginity to one of Lele’s girls, Hong finds himself strangely attracted to the older woman instead. This comes as a revelation for Hong, who has been under the thumb of his mother Meiling all of his life, and has never acted out of his own will. Little does Meiling know that the spark in Hong’s heart for this older, experienced, and unapproved woman will truly mark the beginning of Hong’s growth into adulthood.

Two multi-talented singer-actor heartthrobs from different generations, Kai Ko and Vivian Hsu, play the awkward yet warm couple who find comfort in each other. After a break of almost 10 years since Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, Mama Boy is a welcomed return for Arvin Chen that will bewilder you with its magical colour palettes and characters that grow in you as well as on the screen. -June Kim

Director’s Bio:

Arvin Chen is a Taiwanese American director and a familiar name to Reel Asian. He attended the festival with his debut feature, Au Revoir Taipei, which was invited as the closing film for the 14th festival in 2010. Chen has been recognized and awarded by many festivals, including the Berlinale, where he won the NETPAC Award for Au Revoir Taipei.

Description

Book launch of the Colonial Institutions and Civil War: Indirect Rule and Maoist Insurgency in India (Cambridge University Press), authored by Shivaji Mukherjee (University of Toronto).

ABOUT THE BOOK:  

What explains the peculiar spatial variation of Maoist insurgency in India? Mukherjee develops a novel typology of colonial indirect rule and land tenure in India, showing how they can lead to land inequality, weak state and Maoist insurgency. Using a multi-method research design that combines qualitative analysis of archival data on Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh states, Mukherjee demonstrates path dependence of land/ethnic inequality leading to Maoist insurgency. This is nested within a quantitative analysis of a district level dataset which uses an instrumental variable analysis to address potential selection bias in colonial choice of princely states. The author also analyses various Maoist documents, and interviews with key human rights activists, police officers, and bureaucrats, providing rich contextual understanding of the motivations of agents. Furthermore, he demonstrates the generalizability of his theory to cases of colonial frontier indirect rule causing ​ethnic secessionist insurgency in Burma, and the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan.  

AUTHOR BIO:  

Shivaji Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor in Political Science, at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and also part of the Graduate Faculty at the University of Toronto, St. George. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Center for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He works on political violence and conflict in India, and does research on insurgencies in South Asia, particularly focusing on colonial legacies of indirect rule and Maoist insurgency in India. He also has an interest in state formation, legacies of colonial institutions, and other types of political violence in South Asia like the Kashmir insurgency and Hindu-Muslim violence and vigilantism.

Description

China’s 20th Party Congress has just sealed a third term for Xi Jinping.  What will the next five years hold for Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy?  How should Canada and the United States be dealing with a China that is economically weaker but continuing its wolf warrior diplomacy abroad? Three experts of Chinese elite politics convened to discuss these pressing issues.  

Dr. Alfred L Chan is Professor Emeritus at Huron University College, Western University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Toronto, and is a long-term research affiliate with the Asian Institute at the Munk School. A political scientist and China expert, he has taught and researched about China for more than four decades. He is also the author of Xi Jinping: Political Career, Governance, and Leadership, 1953-2018 (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Diana Fu is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, and Director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School. She is a non-resident fellow at Brookings and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. She is also a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Her research examines popular contention, state control, civil society, and authoritarian citizenship, with a focus on contemporary China. She is author of the award-winning book Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (2018, Cambridge University Press and Columbia Weatherhead Series).

Cheng Li is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. He is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. Li focuses on the transformation of political leaders, generational change, the Chinese middle class, and technological development in China. He is also the author or the editor of numerous books, including The Power of Ideas: The Rising Influence of Thinkers and Think Tanks in China (2017), and Middle Class Shanghai: Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement (2021). He is currently completing a book manuscript with the working title Xi Jinping’s Protégés: Rising Elite Groups in the Chinese Leadership.

Victor Shih is an Associate Professor of Political Economy and the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the School of Global Policy & Strategy, UC San Diego. Professor Shih is an expert on the politics of Chinese banking policies, fiscal policies, and exchange rate, as well as the elite politics of China. He is the author of Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation and Coalitions of the Weak: Elite Politics in China from Mao’s Stratagem to the Rise of Xi, published by the Cambridge University Press. He is also editor of Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Stability: Duration, Institutions and Financial Conditions, published by the University of Michigan Press.

Description

CASSU Academic Seminar

This talk will invite us to historicize and contextualize the evolution of patriarchal violence in contemporary East Asia against Orientalist imaginations and official reinventions and appropriations of Confucianism, to better explain gender violence following the global #MeToo movement without regarding “Confucianism” as the ahistorical source of East Asia’s patriarchal violence.

Dr. Ting Guo is Assistant Professor of Language Studies, University of Toronto (Scarborough), focusing on religion, politics, and gender in transnational Asia. Her first book monograph, Politics of Love: Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Critical Research on Religion, Anthropology Today, and Journal of Religion and Film. She co-hosts a Mandarin podcast called "in-betweenness" (@shichapodcast).

Description

Using mostly unexplored archives from Albania, China, Italy, France, and Germany, as well as conducting interviews, the research explores the educational networks of Albania during the Cold War. This project proposal contends that studying these educational and academic exchanges would provide a more complete understanding of the communist regime of Albania during the 1960s and most of the 1970s when hundreds of economic and industrial projects were under construction with Chinese assistance. To compensate for the lack of an adequate specialized workforce, hundreds of Albanians were sent to Eastern and Western Europe, and China to pursue university studies. By tracing Albania’s educational networks during its communist period, this study aims to inscribe part of the history of Albania’s communist past into the broader context of the exchanges that took place between East European countries, as well as between them and the rest of the world in the field of education and expertise circulation during the central decades of the Cold War. The study is also aimed, among others, at revealing the limits of ideology driven economic models, its legacy in the country’s model that followed the fall of the communist system in Albania (path dependency), and the shortcomings of the centralized planning of human resources at national level under the communist regime. Furthermore, the research will also focus on the personal experiences of the students, which were strictly intertwined with the dynamics of the Cold War divisions, and were continuously conflicted between political loyalties and spaces of personal affirmation. In this way, this investigation poses issues of, among others, agency, political control and oppression, self-development, and creativity under the last Stalinist regime of Europe. Ultimately, the research contributes to the emerging scholarship focused on the agency of smaller countries of Eastern Europe and the transnational networks they create at the margin of the competition between major powers. Considering the recent events in Eastern Europe, historical studies have the potential of providing a better understanding of the area and provide the European Union with better tools to adopt adequate policies towards Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Ylber Marku is Lecturer in History at Zhejiang University, China. He is a Cold War historian with research interests in Albania’s communist past, Tirana’s transnational networks during the communist period, the Global Cold War, Sino-Albanian Relations, East European History, and the Global South in the Sixties. Dr. Marku obtained his Ph.D. in History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, in November 2017. Before his doctoral studies, he studied Political Science and Politics of the European Union at the University of Padua, Italy, and has lived in different European countries such as Spain, the Netherlands, and Greece. Dr. Marku has published research articles in leading journals in his field such as, among others, Cold War History, Journal of Cold War Studies, and The International History Review. He is currently working on several research articles and the completion of his first monograph.

Description

Abstract:

This presentation explored how a distinctive temporal consciousness – mainly a sense of belatedness, but of non-synchronousness or non-identity with the present regardless – characterizes Korean modernist poetry of the 1920s and ‘30s in such a way as to substantiate on the literary-cultural plane its latecomer advantage, what Leon Trotsky had called “the privilege of historical backwardness,” through the non-linear, non-sequential appearance of the various European avant-gardes “all at once, en masse,” as art historian Youngna Kim puts it. Dr. Smith suggested that the amalgamation of various forerunner movements constitutes the formal imprint of Korean modernist poetry’s belatedness, registered not merely as subjective feeling of falling behind by Korean poets themselves but as the literal coming after, in the wake of the European avant-garde’s heyday such that it became retroactively possible for the poem to magnetically attract and synthesize these cumulative exploits into a formal singularity otherwise unthinkable in Eurocentric literary-historical time. He, therefore, located in select works by poets such as O Chang-hwan, Kim Ki-rim, Yi Sang, and Im Hwa a multifaceted temporal metabolism distinguished by an oscillation between belatedness and a highly technical quality outpacing the present, too advanced for the mainstream reading public and, given the forward directionality and innovative ethos of modernist practice broadly, rendering the social acceleration of modernity’s “shuddering” 20th century in new poetic forms.

Dr. Kevin Michael Smith is Assistant Professor of Korean in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis in 2019. His research and teaching focuses on modern Korean literature and culture with emphasis on poetry and poetics, concerned broadly with aesthetics and politics in colonial Korea and its aftermath, pursuing questions of uneven development, literary form, and periodization comparatively across East Asia and Euro-America. His articles and translations have appeared in positions: east asia cultures critique; Modernism/modernity; Trans-Asia Photography Review; Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review; and Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, Shuddering Century: Modernist Poetry in Colonial Korea and the Poetics of Belatedness which examines the uneven and accelerated reception of the European and Japanese avant-gardes by Korean poets in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Description

Abstract:

Hedging is widely misunderstood as sitting-on-the-fence behavior. This talk corrected this misunderstanding by focusing on the Southeast Asian states’ policy responses to the U.S.-China rivalry. Far from being opportunistic, speculative behavior, hedging, in fact, seeks survival and avoids speculation. Professor Kuik defined hedging as instinctive, insurance-maximizing behavior under high-uncertainty and high-stakes conditions, where a rational actor seeks to mitigate and offset risks by pursuing active neutrality, inclusive diversification, and prudent contradictions, with the ultimate goal of cultivating a fall-back position. Each of these elements is evidenced in the Southeast Asian states’ responses to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the U.S. Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy. Based on the Southeast Asian states’ alignment patterns over the past decades, Professor Kuik argued that weaker states opt to hedge under two structural conditions: when patron support is uncertain and when threat perception is diffuse and unpredictable. The greater the structural uncertainty, the greater the weaker states’ tendency to hedge, even and especially as space for maneuvering shrinks. Structural conditions, however, only explain when states hedge; it is domestic factors that explain how and why states hedge the ways they do.      

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

Description

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

Abstract:

In the Philippines, the United States’ first overseas colony, direct occupation had supposedly come to an end with Filipinization: the appropriation of native leadership into colonial governance. But Filipinization also informed the everyday conduct and political imaginations of those outside of structures of power, namely, migrant workers across the Pacific. In this talk, I suggest that American counterinsurgency informed how people across the Pacific imagined how the future citizens of an independent Philippines might behave. This provisional subject—the Filipino subjunctive—emerges from these transnational imaginaries, and the creative labors of everyday life. Together, this fledgling community asked: What would it look like to become Filipino, and who would pay the price to make this nation yet-to-come?

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Along with Prof. De Leon’s talk, there will be a graduate student luncheon held at 12:00-1:45pm; location: TBD. For this graduate luncheon, students will have the opportunity to engage in informal conversation with Professor De Leon to discuss all things graduate school-related including writing, fellowship applications, publishing in journals, selecting post-docs, hitting the job market as a graduate of a Canadian institution, opportunities for PhDs beyond traditional academic presses, and other general advice. Those interested in registering for this lunch should email Melanie Ng at melanie.ng@mail.utoronto.ca. Attendance will be restricted to U of T graduate students.  

Adrian De Leon is an award-winning writer and public historian at the University of Southern California, where he is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity. A graduate of the History Department at U of T, his dissertation was recognized with the Governor’s Gold Medal in 2020. He is also a host for PBS Digital Studios and the Center for Asian American Media. His first academic book, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America, is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press.

Description

BOOK TALK

Imperial Gateway explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan’s empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. It uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan’s imperial interests. Drawing on multilingual archives in six countries, Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order.

Author Bio:

Seiji Shirane is an Assistant Professor of Japanese History at The City College of New York (CUNY). He received degrees in history from Yale University (BA) and Princeton University (PhD), and his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Description

*This event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances*

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 communication 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.

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The idea that China’s system of governance, which has achieved rapid economic growth through a one-party system, has an impact on other countries is gaining popularity. In this talk we call this hypothetical mechanism the China Effect. We examine whether the China Effect can be observed in the context of the global progress of digitalisation in the 2010s. To empirically tackle this issue, we focus on the policy transfer of digital protectionism via China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A possible pathway for China’s protectionist practices to spread to relevant countries is through the various channels of the initiative as well as bilateral agreements including memorandums of understanding. After briefly reviewing domestic digital protectionism in China, we conduct an event studies estimation. Results suggest that the countries involved in the initiative have strengthened their regulation of digital services, however, the effect of treatment is largely heterogeneous. To further examine underlying mechanisms, we also conduct case studies. Our findings suggest that discussion around the China Effect needs to focus more on the heterogeneous impacts and two-way influences of the countries involved. As the results suggest some emerging countries have stronger incentives to absorb the Chinese model, the findings have important implications for the foreign policymaking of countries like Canada, Japan, and the United States.

Asei ITO is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo. He obtained PhD in Economics from Graduate school of Economics, University of Keio, Japan. His research covers Chinese industrial development, outward FDI activities, and innovation. He is one of editors of China’s Outward Investment Data (Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo, 2014) and The Asian Economy: Contemporary Issues and Challenges (Routledge, 2020). Also, he is a recipient of academic prizes including Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo Prize and Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. Currently he stays at Harvard Yenching-Institute as visiting scholar (2022-2023).