Archives: Submissions
Decorative Arts, Architecture, and Manhua: Problematizing Exhibitions in Republican China (1912-49)
Scholars often grapple with how to study art exhibitions. Source materials are usually fragmentary, linkages between individuals are difficult to trace and verify, and the impact of the exhibitions are difficult to assess in isolated cases. In the case of modern China, exhibitions became a public space where different agents contested their visions of modernity …
Revisiting the Imagined Communities: Identities, Nationalism, and Social Activism
Academic works have long focused on how people formulated various types of “imagined community” in different geopolitical contexts. Benefiting from the blossoming scholarship on global history and inter-Asian connections, this panel enriches the discussion of “imagined community” by exploring the following questions: How did the power dynamics in the (post-)colonial contexts and respective government’s (in)action …
Bollywood’s Regional Turn: Investigating Hindi Cinema’s Shift to Non-urbanity
Since India’s economic liberalization in 1991, Bollywood films have predominantly been set in metropolitan centers around the country or in foreign locations in Europe or North America. However, a study of Hindi cinema in the last decade would reveal filmmakers have been looking to move away from these settings. Of particular interest in the current …
Tensions Embodied: Reading and Staging Sensation in Premodern East Asia
This panel focuses on sensation as a distinctive topos in pre-modern East Asian literature and theater. Expanding the scope beyond senses in different artistic forms, we observe the ways sensory experience is represented and constructed via various literary and theatrical devices. Drawing together the studies of literature, performance, gender, and disability, this panel sheds new …
Media, Communication Technologies, and the Promises of “Democratization” Across Asian Mediascapes
Shifting applications of media communication technologies have often put communities across Asia “at the crossroads” of evolving news cultures, social values systems, definitions of citizenship, and conceptions of “democracy.” But despite twentieth century theorizations which prophesized that communication technologies would open borders, improve educational opportunities, and serve as a democratizing force across the globe, local …
Framing Disaster Resilience: The Role of Women in Disaster Response
This panel examines women’s active participation in community-based post-disaster recovering efforts and activities. Drawing upon qualitative, quantitative and participatory research techniques, each panelist will present case studies to demonstrate how women’s situatedness within the community contributes to building resilience while promoting gender-sensitive responsive activities. With her research on women affiliates’ post-disaster response and recovery activities, …
Art and Diplomatic Gifts in Early Modern East Asia
This panel explores the practice of gift exchange in East Asia as a device of cross-cultural diplomacy as well as a mirror of aesthetic tastes, economic values, and ritual protocols. Focusing on the role of art, material goods, and images depicting foreign envoys in Sino-Korean and Korean-Japanese diplomatic encounters, as well as exchanges with Western …
Transgressing the Border between Academics and Politics: The CIA in the MIT Indonesia Project and Beyond
In the early 1950s, Boston briefly became an important center for the study of Indonesia. The CIA and affiliated foundation funded programs at MIT and the concentration of graduate students seeking topics, relevance, fame, and financial support at Harvard came together resulting in one of the most important starting points for Indonesian studies in the …
Visual Representations of the Persistent Cold War in the Korean Peninsula
The Korean Peninsula is a dormant volcanic locus where a hot war, the Korean War was not only waged, but its truce in 1953 also remained in a form of a cold war between the two divided Koreas in the twenty first century even after the perestroika in the 1980s.Our panel pays attention to the …
Japan and the Socialist Bloc During the Cold War: Translating Cultures
As a member of the capitalist sphere during the Cold War, Japan did not have many governmental exchanges with the socialist world. Nevertheless, leftist intellectuals visited various socialist regions, interacted with the local intellectuals and wrote about their experiences. As a result, literary works and other cultural products traveled between languages and cultures, giving birth …