Conference: AAS-in-Asia2020
Managing the Frontiers: Knowledge Production of Law and Ethnicity on China’s Coastal and Internal Frontiers
Frontier and borderland are arenas where imperial powers were projected, overlapped, contested. Across China’s frontiers from the southeast coast to Northeast Asia, new knowledge about law, ethnicity, and sovereignty were being produced and contested among a variety of powers. This panel integrates two types of different yet closely related frontier contact zones: the coastal frontier …
Theorizing the Cold War in Southeast Asia: Approaches and Concerns
Southeast Asia is becoming featured more prominently in studies of the Cold War, however, existing works tend to reinforce traditional approaches to its study. Theorizing the conflict in the region overturns established understandings, and reconceptualize the Southeast Asian Cold War, as a major and not peripheral part of the global conflict. This panel brings together …
The Body and Modes of Embodiment in Japanese Literature of the Modern and Contemporary Era
In the past few decades, modern Japanese literary specialists, in their scholarships on the body and modes of embodiment, have significantly broadened our knowledge and understanding of Japanese literature. How does Japanese literature reflect, construct, reevaluate and question the phenomenon of Japanese modernity, which is manifested in various forms of the body and bodily experiences? …
Elite and Non-Elite Urban Cosmopolitanism in the Early Twentieth-Century China: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue
Cities in the early twentieth-century China took shape in a cauldron of vibrant transnational and transcultural encounters. This panel analyzes a wide range of individual participation in these encounters with a particular interest in how urban cosmopolitanism was generated, experienced, and responded to across socioeconomic spectra. Through both historical and literary lenses, we investigate how …
Demons and Gods on Display: The Pageantry of Popular Religion as Crossroads Encounters
Display is a recurrent and immanently diverse theme in Asian studies and classic anthropological analyses of ritual, performance, theatre, and even museology. Yet an ‘anthropology of display’ has yet to emerge as a field of study in its own right that would show how persons, things, gods, spirits, beings, qualities, and emotions are not only …
Representing History through the Personal and the Familial: Cinema and TV Production in Postsocialist China
Since the beginning of China’s economic reform, the representation of the nation’s postsocialist transformation in film and TV production has been a field of discursive complicity and negotiation. In such a cultural practice, historical experiences are often framed in private memories, personal journeys, or familial relationships. This panel explores film and TV productions that articulate …
Reclusion as Socio-cultural Engagement in Pre-modern China and Japan
There is a common perception that reclusion indicates withdrawal from the world into a life of seclusion. This, however, does not necessarily imply a complete renunciation of public affairs. Operating within the substantial discourse constructed by previous reclusive prototype, those who withdrew play active roles within the world. Some even participate in the most engaging …
Exploring the Intersections of Gender and Food in East Asia: From Material Culture to Symbolic Practices
Even when it does not demand urgent attention, food is everyone’s issue – no one can live without a regular intake of nutrients. At the same time, food can be a very personal thing – it constitutes the distinctive habits, interests, and memories of each individual. When food is so much embedded in our daily …
A Journey of Life Towards the Dream Land: Space and Identity for Women on Cheju Island
This panel investigates the complex relationship between space and identity for women on Cheju Island, Korea as it manifests itself in their real and imaginary lives. Women in Cheju have been far more restricted in their geographical movement compared with those on the peninsula. The Chosŏn government even banned Cheju women from leaving the island …
German-speaking Jews and the Chinese in Wartime Shanghai: Transnational Encounters through Comics, Memoirs, Films
This panel is closely related to the conference theme (“Asia at the Crossroads”), since it showcases three important crossroads moments in German-Jewish and Chinese relations from 1938 until just after the Second World War. Each presentation highlights the global transfer of people via a focus on the approximately 17,000 German Jewish refugees who fled to …