Description

This event was a book launch for Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar (Cornell University Press, 2022) co-authored by Jacques Bertrand, Alexandre Pelletier, and Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung.

Winning by Process asks why the peace process stalled in the decade from 2011 to 2021 despite a liberalizing regime, a national ceasefire agreement, and a multilateral peace dialogue between the state and ethnic minorities.

Winning by Process argues that stalled conflicts are more than pauses or stalemates. "Winning by process," as opposed to winning by war or agreement, represents the state’s ability to gain advantage by manipulating the rules of negotiation, bargaining process, and sites of power and resources. In Myanmar, five such strategies allowed the state to gain through process: locking in, sequencing, layering, outflanking, and outgunning. The Myanmar case shows how process can shift the balance of power in negotiations intended to bring an end to civil war. During the last decade, the Myanmar state and military controlled the process, neutralized ethnic minority groups, and continued to impose their vision of a centralized state even as they appeared to support federalism.

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BOOK TALK

Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Press, 2022)  

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government’s news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages.

In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position. From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.  

Order your copy of the book at: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674267978    

HAN SANG KIM is an associate professor and chair in the Department of Sociology at Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea. His teaching interests include visual sociology, qualitative methods, and sociology of film and media. He has conducted research and written on the themes of film archives, ethics of photographic representation, post/colonial visual culture, and mobilities. His most recent book is Cine-Mobility: Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation (Harvard University Asia Center, 2022) that traces the association between cinematic visuality and modern transportation mobility in forming a modern subjectivity in twentieth century Korea. He has been concurrently working on his second book project based on his doctoral dissertation on U.S. film propaganda activities towards South Korea from 1945 through 1972, putting on a self-reflexive critique of information-oriented archival approaches to film materials and expanding the project onto a methodological exploration. He has published essays in The Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, and several other journals in Korean. He was the inaugural programmer of the Cinematheque KOFA at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul and taught at UC San Diego, Boston University, and Rice University during his postdoctoral years.  

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Institute and the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto

Description

On September 22nd, 2022, Munk celebrated the book launch of Outsourcing Repression, authored by the Asian Institute’s faculty, Professor Lynette Ong!

About this event:  How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash?  In Outsourcing Repression (Oxford University Press, 2022), Lynette H. Ong examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors, from violent street gangsters to nonviolent grassroots brokers, to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research conducted annually from 2011 to 2019–the years from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Ong invites the reader to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies. Everyday state power is quotidian power acquired through society by penetrating nonstate territories and mobilizing the masses within. Ong uses China’s urbanization scheme as a window of observation to explain how the arguments can be generalized to other country contexts.  

Author: Lynette Ong (Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Asian Institute, Munk School, University of Toronto)  Discussants:  Andrew Mertha (Director of the SAIS China Global Research Center, and George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies)  Minxin Pei (Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow, Claremont McKenna College)  Dan Slater (Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies and Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Director; Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)  Sponsors: Asian Institute and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy Co-Sponsor: Department of Political Science, University of Toronto  

Author’s Bio:  Lynette H. Ong is Professor of political science at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the University of Toronto. She is the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her publications have also appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Foreign Affairs, among other outlets. Twitter: @onglynette.

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Speaker Bio:

Dr. R. Cheran is Tamil Canadian academic, poet, and playwright. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Windsor. An author of several books and poetry collections in Tamil, his work has been translated into many languages, including English. His best known work in English translation include The Second Sunrise (translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom, 2010), In a Time of Burning (translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom and Sascha Ebeling, 2013) and You Cannot Turn Away (translated by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2011) and in anthologies including Many Roads Through Paradise: Sri Lankan Literature (edited by Shyam Selvadurai, 2014), and In Our Translated World: Global Tamil Poetry (edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam, 2014).

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ABOUT THE BOOK:  Tastes Like War   

A Korean American daughter’s exploration of food and family history, in order to understand her mother’s schizophrenia. Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her mother’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive.   

Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in journals such as Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.   

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute, the Department of Sociology, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, the Department of English, and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School, University of Toronto

Description

In April 2021, Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and U.S. President Joe Biden made global headlines when they jointly “underscored the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”—the first such reference in a summit-level statement since both governments switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in the 1970s. Amidst a rapidly changing regional balance of power and with the Biden administration asserting that U.S. allies would “take action” if Beijing seeks “to use force to disrupt the status quo,” this talk examined the historical evolution of Japanese perspectives on the U.S.-Japan security alliance’s and the JSDF’s potential roles in a “Taiwan contingency.” Though Tokyo’s nuanced positions and policies are often neglected in the U.S.-centric academic literature and policy discourse, Japan is a critical front-line player. Its choices are today—and will inevitably remain—crucial variables affecting cross-strait deterrence, U.S. options, and how things may play out if deterrence fails.

  — Speaker Bio —

Adam P. LIFF is associate professor of East Asian international relations at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he also serves as founding director of its 21st Century Japan Politics & Society Initiative (21JPSI). His research focuses on international security affairs and the Asia-Pacific—especially Japanese security policy; U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy; the U.S.-Japan alliance; Taiwan; and the rise of China. Beyond IU, Dr. Liff is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Associate-in-Research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, and a B.A. from Stanford University.  More information: https://adampliff.com/

Description

Susan Shirk, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, discussed her new book, Overreach, and its implications for China’s 20th Party, cross-strait relations, and China’s relations with the West. Lynette Ong provided commentaries and moderated the discussion.  

ABOUT THE BOOK:  

For decades, China’s rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China today, something changed.  For three decades after Mao’s death in 1976, China’s leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. They determined that any threat to their power, and that of the Chinese Communist Party, came not from abroad but from within—a conclusion cemented by the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. To facilitate the country’s inexorable economic ascendence, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China’s peaceful intentions.  Then, as Susan Shirk shows in this illuminating, disturbing, and utterly persuasive new book, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight, threatening Taiwan as well as its neighbors in the South China Sea, tightening its grip on Hong Kong, and openly challenging the United States for preeminence not just economically and technologically but militarily. China began to overreach. Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, one of the world’s most respected experts on Chinese politics, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.  

BIOS:  

SUSAN SHIRK is Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. She is one of the most influential experts working on U.S.-China relations and Chinese politics. She is also director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and the author of Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford University Press, 2022).  Dr. Shirk first visited China in 1971 and has been teaching, researching and engaging China diplomatically ever since. From 1997-2000, Dr. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.    

LYNETTE H. ONG is Professor of Political Science at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the University of Toronto. She is the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her publications have also appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Foreign Affairs, among other outlets. Twitter: @onglynette.

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Abstract:

Cross-border marriages have grown across East Asia in the last few decades. Children from these transnational unions are reaching adulthood, but their identity formation is yet subject to academic scrutiny. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 50 young adult children of cross-border marriages in Taiwan, this talk examines how differences in ethnic backgrounds (Mainland Chinese or Southeast Asian immigrant mothers) shape their identity management strategies. I emphasize that the macro context of geopolitics enables and constrains their identity negotiation at the micro level. Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy, implemented in 2016, reframed the ethnic difference of Southeast Asian immigrants as a multicultural asset instead of a social liability, allowing “the new second generation” (a new official label) to enjoy some institutional opportunities and ethnic dividends. By contrast, as political confrontation has intensified across Taiwan’s Strait, Chinese spouses are easily suspected of lacking political loyalty; their language and cultural intimacy also make it difficult to claim a multicultural niche. Their children have developed different strategies, including replacement, rescaling, and differentiation, to manage the conflicting and ambiguous identities.  

Speaker Bio:  

Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University. She was a Yenching-Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University, a Fulbright scholar at New York University, a visiting professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University, and Tubingen University, and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, winner of Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).

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Race and Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific event series

Abstract:

What does life in the university cost, and what debts do our disciplines impose as we seek success? How have racism and colonialism shaped our analytical relation to East Asia and how might Black feminist methodologies help us diagnose and dismantle supremacist habits of thought?

Reginald Jackson considered the concepts of debt and reparation in relation to the university, with an historical awareness of postwar and post-civil rights developments between Asian Studies and Ethnic Studies. Reading texts by Moten and Harney, Wynter, Ahmed, against memoirs by Japanologists Keene and Seidensticker, he mapped critical limits and potentials for rethinking the historical stakes of academic expertise and survival. Specifically, by theorizing how whiteness is institutionalized within the university and inhabits disciplinary norms, he discussed methods of reparation through which to redress deadening legacies of racial and gender-based discrimination that continue to deplete our capacity to thrive as creative human beings.  

Speaker bio:

Reginald Jackson is Director of the Center for Japanese Studies and Associate Professor of premodern Japanese literature and performance at the University of Michigan. He founded the Japanese Antiracist Pedagogy Project and has published monographs and articles spanning medieval calligraphy to contemporary choreography. A devotion to illustration and guitar complement his scholarship.

Description

This was a community screening of Coming To You 너에게 가는 길  followed by post-screening conversations.

Synopsis:

We are ready to step into your world.  Nabi, a veteran firefighter, prided herself for living a successful life, until one day her child, Hankyeol, comes out to her by saying: “Mom, I want to get a mastectomy.” Meanwhile, Vivian, a flight attendant of 28 years, sheds tears after reading her son, Yejoon’s, letter: “I’m gay.” Nabi and Vivian’d never even heard of the term “LGBTQIA+” during their entire lives when Hankyeol and Yejoon started opening up their various problems. Facing the reality that their children are struggling, what would two mothers do?   

The post-screening conversations featured Sujin Choi (WIND), Minwoo Jung (Loyola), Hyun-Chul Kim & Samuel Yoon (U of Toronto).  

Hosted by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for the Sexual Diversity Studies, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, the Academy of Korean Studies, York University’s Korean Office for Research and Education, and WIND, Toronto Korean Feminist Collective.   

Information about the documentary: Coming To You 너에게 가는 길   

Director and Writer: BYUN Gyuri  Cast: Nabi, Vivian

Executive Producer: PINKS

Producers Sona JO, LEE Hyuk-sang

Production: South Korea 2021

Running time: 93 min (post-screening conversations will follow screening)

Audio: Korean (English subtitles)

Post-screening panelists:

Sujin Choi is a member of WIND (Toronto Korean Feminist Collective), and a founding member of Jogakbo (transgender rights organization) and Rainbow Foundation in South Korea. She also performed as a singer on the 2016 Seoul Pride stage.  

Minwoo Jung is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago. His research investigates the impacts of global and regional geopolitics on political, economic, and social life of marginalized groups and individuals. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork conducted across East and Southeast Asia, he is working on a book project that presents a comparative ethnography of the intimate entanglements of queer lives and geopolitics.   

Hyun-Chul Kim is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. She earned her MA degree in Geography from Seoul National University with the analysis of spatial occupation and contestation of the publicness between LGBTQI+ allies and anti-queer coalitions in the 2014 Seoul and Daegu Queer Parade in South Korea. Her doctoral project centers on rural villages as the intermediate locus of leprosy control in South Korea after the Korean War to engage in a deeper analysis of “the carceral” in the broader Asian context from the ruins of war, the discontinuity and continuity of the colonial past, as well as dreams of reconstructing nations via small community and rural reforms.   

Samuel Yoon (He/Him) is a PhD student in Women and Gender studies at the University of Toronto. His research is on queer performance, violence, and Asian racialization. In his spare time, he is an active participant and performer in queer of colour spaces in Toronto. Prior to his graduate studies he worked at an HIV/AIDS service organization as a project lead on LGBTQ+ inclusion.