Past Events at the Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies
November 2019
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Friday, November 15th Tagore in China: The Case for Pan-Asian Poetics in the 1920s
Date Time Location Friday, November 15, 2019 5:00PM - 8:00PM Second Floor Lounge, 1 Devonshire Place Friday, November 15, 2019 5:00PM - 8:00PM Seminar Room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place + Register for this Event Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Series
The Annual Bengal Studies Lecture
Description
Rabindranath Tagore’s 1924 tour in China has attracted numerous critical analyses throughout the years and continues to pique scholars’ curiosity. The literary luminary’s attempt to raise support for his vision of an Asia-wide investment in spirituality in a rapidly materializing world remains a particularly fraught topic. Scholarship on China’s response to the Eastern spirituality ideal has generally focused on Chinese Marxists’ scathing critiques of Tagore’s vision, epitomized in the cold reception his lectures received from their audience. Less attention has been paid to an array of enthusiastic responses that emerged from May 4th poets in the form of journal articles about Tagore and poetry which directly engaged with his ideas. This talk investigates the exchange with Tagore and his work as an event that deeply informed Chinese poetry. As such, I argue, Tagore’s visit enables a new understanding of the Eastern spirituality project not as a failure, but as a vehicle for the Chinese envisioning of Pan-Asian poetics.
Gal Gvili is an Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. She studies and teaches modern, and contemporary Chinese literature, literary and cultural theory. Her first book investigates how interactions between Chinese writers and Indian religions and philosophy fashioned a conviction that literature is the ultimate means for transforming the national fate.
The lecture will be followed by reception, 7-8 PM.
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.
December 2019
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Wednesday, December 4th On Native Testimony: Military Tribunals, War Crimes, and Imperial Judgment in Guam
Date Time Location Wednesday, December 4, 2019 2:00PM - 4:00PM Seminar Room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place + Register for this Event Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Description
In 1944, the U.S. Navy established the War Crimes Tribunals Program in Guam, one of several Japanese colonies located in the Pacific. For the next five years, the military commission reviewed war crimes cases about assault, murder, treason, and other acts against white civility. Throughout this period, the tribunal also featured more than 100 indigenous Chamorro and Chamorro-Japanese testimonies about Japanese militarism, policing, and torture in Guam. How did these testimonies support the U.S. effort to eradicate Japan’s sovereignty and remake the political bodies and territorial borders of Guam and the Pacific Islands more generally? By drawing on various philosophies and proverbs about life and death, this talk examines the legal and political impact of military courts, native testimonies, and white supremacist violence.
Keith L. Camacho is an associate professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the author of Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam, the co-editor of Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, and the former senior editor of Amerasia Journal.
* Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam by Keith L. Camacho will be available for purchase at the venue.
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.
January 2020
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Friday, January 17th A Transnational History of Victimhood Nationalisms: On the Global Memory Space of East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond
Date Time Location Friday, January 17, 2020 4:00PM - 7:00PM The Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7 + Register for this Event Print this Event Bookmark this Event
Description
The lecture will be followed by a reception, 6:00 – 7:00 PM.
Professor Jie-Hyun Lim’s book project of “victimhood nationalism” aims to illustrate competing memories of victimhood in the postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the global memory space across East and West. Throughout this book, he explores the dialectical interplay of global and national memory with a critical inquiry of the dichotomy of: perpetrators vs. victims, collective guilt vs. innocence, national vs. cosmopolitan memory, historical actors vs. passive objects, over-contextualization vs. de-contextualization, historical conformism vs. presentism, etc. With the emergence of global memory space, unconnected historical actors and memory activists are linked mnemonically a posteriori in the global mnemoscape and memories of victimhood have become more contested. With the histoire croisée as the methodological background, he will trace the global history of victimhood nationalism by drawing entangled memories between victimizers and victimized.
Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He is also a principal investigator of the research project on the “Mnemonic Solidarity: colonialism, war, and genocide in the global memory space” and the series editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave. His most recent book is Memory War: How Could Perpetrators Become Victims? (2019).
If you are attending a Munk School event and require accommodation(s), please email the event contact listed above to make appropriate arrangements.
Disclaimer: Please note that events posted on this website are considered to be public events – unless otherwise stated – and you are choosing to enter a space where your image and/or voice may be captured as part of event proceedings that may be made public as part of a broadcast, webcast, or publication (online and in print). We make every effort to ensure your personal information is kept and used in compliance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA). If you have any questions please get in touch with our office at munkschool@utoronto.ca or 416-946-8900.