Archives: Submissions
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 …
Armenians in Japan: Historical Perspectives
Given Armenia’s geographical location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, as well as historical circumstances, Armenian history has often been defined by migration, border crossing, transnational interaction and international trade. Japan, however distantly located, has also become a destination for Armenian travellers, traders, and even refugees, who arrived in Japan after the Meiji Restoration. …
Jesuit Cartography and the Translation of Knowledge in Early Modern Global Asia
The concept of translation has emerged recently as a way to understand the cross-cultural and trans-national movements of knowledge. The study of translation in this sense is the study of a practice that involves power struggles and different interests and is also social, collaborative, and multidirectional. Translation is moreover, not only the vehicle by which …
Making the Body Visible in Contemporary Japan: Femininity, Beauty, and the Female Form in Popular Culture
In contemporary Japanese cultural products, what does it mean to be embodied? Whose bodies are made visible, how and why? How does one represent the ‘womanly’ body in contemporary Japan? What kind of body is desired and permissible? To explore these questions this panel takes a transdisciplinary approach to the construction and performance of ‘female …
Trans-cultural Mobility and the Changing Notion of “Universality”: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Finding ‘Universality’
The concept of “universality” once played a critical role in our understanding of culture. However, over the years, the concept has been criticized, mainly for its western centric foundation and fantasizing an idealized modernity. It is argued that universality has different meanings at diverse situations, for instance at local and trans-cultural levels, making our understanding …
Threatening Discourses and State Anxieties in Southeast Asia, Past and Present
In the heyday of Marxist and nationalist scholarship on Southeast Asia, writers of the 1970s and 1980s revelled in recounting histories of overt resistance to colonial or state authority such as riots, rebellions, and revolutions (Kerkvliet 1977, Chatthip 1984, U Maung Maung 1990). However, since the publication of James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985), …
Alternative Ethics in the Politics of Knowledge and Authority: Focusing on Human-Environment Relations in China, Tibet and South Korea
We explore alternative ethics and their political work through ethnographic investigations in China, Tibet, and South Korea: contexts that have undergone drastic sociopolitical change accompanied by an increasingly complicated politics of ecological thinking. Recent scholarship has provided important insights into the emergence of alternative ethics in non-Western environmentalism (Cadena and Blaser 2018) – through interactions …