Presentation Type: Panel Presentation
Medicine, Body and the Making of a Subject
How do medical rhetoric and discourses generate diasporic and citizen subjects in Asia? If medicine defines the biological body, how do subjects come to inhabit that body? How do individuals defy subject-making through subverting the totalizing gaze of medicine? This panel interrogates the ways medical rhetoric and discourse permeates the process of making the subject, …
Through Contact to Construct: Translation of Texts, Images, and, Objects in Pre-Modern Asia
Derived from the Latin word translatio meaning “to carry across,” “translation” evokes the act of people or things moving from one place or position to another, but this process of “moving” is never linear or teleological. Rather, as Homi K. Bhabha suggests, translation is a way of imitating but in a mischievous, displacing sense, opening …
Eco-Criticism from the Periphery: Japanese Fiction in Asian Landscapes
The four papers in this panel employ a trans-regional lens in attempting to address the experiences of humanity through the narratives of individuals who on the one hand, are situated locally, inhabiting different distinct geographical areas, but who on the other hand are global; connected by transregional phenomenon Thuc analyzes Furukawa Hideo’s work as a …
Objects, Images, and Court Culture in Qing China
The splendid material culture of the Manchu court during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) embodied diverse power relations in gender, ethnicity, and knowledge that were skillfully maneuvered by the ruling elites. By purposefully producing, using, and displaying discrete objects and images, the Manchu rulers not only engaged themselves in technical matters of production but also strategically …
Contemporary Interpretations of the Manchu Conquest: Writing about China in the Seventeenth Century
The fall of the Ming empire in 1644 and its replacement by a once small group of tribal peoples from what is now China’s northeast generated enormous discussions regarding the Ming-Qing transition’s world-historical significance. Focusing on the decades following the Qing takeover of the Chinese capital in 1644, this panel examines the different ways the …
Constructing Tradition Together: Identity and Agency of Women and Men in the Literary Culture of Late Imperial China
The literary women who flourished in late imperial China have been investigated for their crossing gender boundaries to write and to associate with male literati. However, their interventions in the literary and cultural traditions established and monopolized by men await further exploration. By creating a dialogue between the studies on both women’s writing and writing …
Cold War Asia: History, Knowledge, and Perception
To understand the Cold War in Asia is to interrogate the geopolitical divides that reduced Asia to a battleground for the proxy wars between the US and the USSR. This panel aims to explore the agency of East and Southeast Asian countries in shaping the global dynamics of the Cold War from the perspectives of …
Traversing Between Containment and Transboundariness: Cultural Strategies of Transnationalism in Cold War Asia
Although Cold War battle lines in Europe were basically fixed by the mid-1950s, Cold War Asia remained the site of a proliferation of bloc-building strategies that focused, not only on forging bipartite alliances with superpowers, but on imagining diverse transnational communities within each bloc. This panel explores selected interventions designed to foster such new collective …
Past Loves and Future Sex: Gender, Sexuality, and Romance in Japanese Reality Television
Many have written about the importance of television in Japan in the postwar period (see for example Shunsuke Tsurumi 1987; Jayson Makoto Chung 2007; Shunya Yoshimi 2014; Alisa Freedman 2017). What constitutes television today has shifted from decades past as multiple online platforms allow for increasingly diverse experiences to be represented on screen. Yet despite …
Academic Indigenization in Asia at Its Crossroads
This panel examines the outcome of academic indigenization in Asia since the early 20th Century and its pitfalls and promises. In so doing, the panel makes a critical assessment of Asian academia’s association with academic dependency through history, including its current status quo of knowledge production. To advance this agenda, we adopt a historical-comparative approach, …