Archives: Submissions
Mediating Society: Activism and Journalism in Myanmar, Indonesia, Taiwan and China
Rapid innovation of information technology has changed the ways by which people obtain information and make sense of their society. In the era of digital media, citizens increasingly gain broader access to information whether they live in a democratic or authoritarian regime. The proliferation of access and information however appears to have come at the …
Religion in Translation and the Acculturation Patterns in South and Central Asia
South Asia has been the site of a wide-ranging exchange of religious, linguistic and cultural knowledge systems for over a millennium. Recent scholarship compares the magnitude of the translation movement of Indian knowledge from Sanskrit into Persian in the pre-modern and modern periods, to grand cross-cultural interactions in history such as the ones from Greek …
Mapping a Local/Global Socialist Lifestyle: Practice and Perception of Life in Maoist China
This panel examines the diversity and complexity of China’s Maoism as both a practice and perception, especially in its role of shaping a socialist life in both local and global contexts. The individual papers demonstrate that the nature and characteristics of a socialist life in practice and in perception are multiple. Shi examines how urban …
Shifting Technologies, Mines, & Rituals of Relatedness: A Multimedia Montage of Post-war Cambodia and Laos
In the post-conflict nations of Cambodia and Laos, globalizing forces of economic development and efforts at recovery often occur simultaneously. This session on these two nations in the contemporary moment blends film, photograph, and narrative in a multimedia montage of the varied physical, ecological and social forces at play in these rapidly changing Southeast Asian …
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 …