Presentation Type: Panel Presentation
East Asia at Crossroads – China and Japan as Historical Mirrors, and Contemporary Images in International Relations
The relationship between China and Japan remains a pivotal aspect of Asia in the 21st century. As Japan adjusts to China’s growing power so does China try to determine what it means for itself to be a big power. The sentiment that today’s China is mirroring early 20th century Japan, as well as the emulation …
Mediating New Versions of Womanhood in Asia, 1880s–1950s
This panel explores the allure and consumption of new versions of womanhood that developed under the official and unofficial empires of Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, foreign women traveled to Asia as missionaries, diplomatic wives, and vocational instructors, and presented new ideas of womanhood through the promulgation …
Rethinking Collective: Mapping on the Development of Woodblock Printing Collectives in Inter-Asian Context
The development of contemporary woodblock printing collectives in Asia is different from artworks that serve the institutions, market or personal collections, to a certain extent it can be regarded as the “alternative narrative” of our time. As the Inter-Asia affiliations have taken place across East Asia and Southeast Asia, they formed a self-organized network among …
Narratives of Belonging in Borderlands Through Perspectives of Indigeneity and Visual Representations
The advancement in visual technologies and its subsequent use in anthropology has been able to construct an ethnographic observation with modalities that have denied the ethnographic present and ignored the historical context of its own processes of production. Consequently, series of representation(s) were generated which contradicted the historical reality under which those representations were produced. …
The Politics of The Everyday: Discursive and Communicative Negotiation between Control, Violence, and Resistance in Modern Chinese Literature and Media
The past few decades have witnessed China undergoing waves of social and cultural restructuring against shifting dynamics of political and economic systems, which consequently results in drastic reshaping of everyday life experienced by every social stratum. To navigate the shifting scenes of the everyday, modern Chinese literature and media prioritize the task of negotiating individual …
Re-thinking Creative Economy Through Fashion in Asia
The rise of Asia in recent years not only as economic powerhouse but as global cultural soft power has shifted geopolitical trajectories for the region and its ‘imagined’ threat to the West. Despite the fact that Asia’s growing interest in creative industries such as fashion consumption is seen to hold out opportunities for countries like …
Aspects of the Female Intellectuals: Fictional Characters, Writers, Activists and Archivists
This panel examines the four aspects of female intellectuals in twentieth-century China, which lay beyond the current definitions of the mere ‘talented women’ or the Bluestocking circle, and the legacy of these aspects for succeeding women intellectuals. It looks at how female writers Chi Li 池莉 and Tie Ning 鐵凝 subject their heroines to moral …
At the Crossroads: Challenges and Solutions in Cross Cultural East Asia
Every person plays a role in a string of cultural and social encounters. From the grassroot to national leaders, in modern and contemporary East Asian history, such role is all about facing challenges and finding solutions. In this respect, families, medical practitioners, politicians, are all the same – every individual is a problem-solver. This panel …
The Fate of Locality in Modern China: Changes and Continuity
Unlike the conventional picture in studies of nationalism in which the dawn of nation-states ushered in the dusk of things local, the emergence of the nation-state in China was not accompanied by a decline of the local. This local-national symbiosis is understandable if we view locality in the Chinese republic as inheritance from the late …
Dissent, Public Space and Politics of Citizenship in Pakistan
The costs for dissent in Pakistan are high. The active, and increasingly anticipatory, suppression of opposition in Pakistan has momentous consequences for the freedoms of citizens in times of rising socio-economic disparities and human right violations. The space for free speech is diminishing evident from increasing penalization of journalists, student activists and minorities for state …