The Ohio State University

Lecture Series

“Cultures in Contact” Lecture Series 2011-2012

Spring Quarter 2012
Friday, March 30, 1:30 pm 2012
Matthew Wells, Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Kentucky
“Conforming to the Cosmos: Esoteric Daoist Lifewriting and Official Biography in Early China”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Co-sponsor: Center for the Study of Religion
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road
[flier]

Matthew Wells is Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture and Director of Chinese Studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of To Die and Not Decay: Autobiography and the Pursuit of Immortality in Early China as well as several critical biographies of key figures in early medieval literature and several articles on the field of lifewriting in early China. This talk is part of a study that examines diverse genres of lifewriting in early China such as biography, hagiography, poetry, and epistolary literature.

Lecture Abstract:
This presentation will examine several genres of lifewriting in pre-modern China through. First, it will discuss the esoteric hagiography of the Daoist “perfected,” Lord Pei (Peijun zhuan) from the Seven Tallies of the Cloudy Satchel, a Song Daoist collection, and will address both the esoteric instructions for transcendence found in the text and the way in which the biographical narrative reflects this transcendence. It will then address the official biography of Wang Dao (276-339) from the History of the Jin, an early Tang dynasty historical work, and examine the narrative of state sanctioned historiography as a form of hagiography.

Friday, April 6, 1:30 pm 2012
Karen Mancl, Professor of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering, The Ohio State University
“The Culture of Water Pollution Control in Rural China”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road
[flier]

Lecture Abstract:
For centuries in China human and animal manure were recycled to support agricultural production. As a result, China did not develop wastewater treatment infrastructure.  The modern shift of viewing manure as a waste rather than a resource has resulted in extensive water pollution throughout the county. 

A model for environmental technology transfer was developed to extend technology on rural wastewater treatment.  The model considers the role of appropriate technology, legal and policy issues and the appreciation of culture. Working relationships were established at an Agricultural University and an Academy of Agricultural Sciences to compare the capabilities to extend environmental technology to the countryside.  Oral histories of life in a rural village were also obtained from waste management professionals.  This project found that the goals of the 5-year plan and campaigns to develop environmental and water resources infrastructure are key to success in developing water pollution control system is rural China.  The agricultural academy presented the most direct access for rural villages to new environmental technology.

Friday, April 20, 1:30 pm 2012
Zong-Qi Cai, Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese, Comparative Literature, and Medieval Studies, University of Illinois
“Toward a Grammar of Classical Chinese Poetry: Probing the Secret of Poetic Vision”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road
[flier]

Zong-qi Cai is the author of The Matrix of Lyric Transformation: Poetic Modes and Self-Presentation in Early Chinese Pentasyllabic Poetry (Michigan, 1996) and Configurations of Comparative Poetics: Three Perspectives on Western and Chinese Literary Criticism (Hawaii, 2002), and the editor of A Chinese Literary Mind: Culture, Creativity, and Rhetoric in Wenxin dialong (Stanford, 2001) and Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties (Hawaii, 2004). He has also published numerous articles on classical Chinese poetry, literary criticism, comparative literature and philosophy.

Lecture Abstract:
This lecture introduces the macro study part of my book project Chinese Poetry As Art.  If traditional Chinese impressionistic criticism reveals an intuitive grasp of the ineffable aesthetic qualities of a given work, the oeuvre of a poet, or even a given genre or subgenre, Chinese Poetry as Artaims to go one step further: to provide an analytical explanation for these aesthetic qualities.  It consistently applies modern linguistics to analyze both the synchronic and diachronic interconnectedness of four essential aspects of Chinese poetic art—rhythm, syntax, structure, and vision—in an effort to illuminate the inner dynamics of Chinese poetic evolution.

Friday, April 27, 1:30 pm 2012
Weijing Lu, Professor of History, University of California at San Diego
“Memorializing Marital Intimacy: Writings of Sun Xingyan孫星衍(1753-1818)”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road
[flier]

Weijing Lu is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press. Winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians 2008 First Book Prize). Her current research focuses on family and marital practices of the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries.

Lecture Abstract:
Having tied our boat, we walk into the night’s mist,
The human world appears remote and separated.
The moon rises slowly;
And stars have changed their color.
My young wife, in the boat, is sick and sleepless,
Holding hands, we rise to tread on the fog of the creek ahead.
…
                                               
In a moonlight night of the early 1770s, Sun Xingyan took a stroll with his wife Wang Caiwei (1753-1776) near the Yangzi River. The intimate event is memorialized in a beautiful poem by Sun that begins with the lines cited above. Such writings provide us with some of the most revealing sources for exploring marital love in arranged marriage in premodern China.   

The talk will present some of this material, along with the records produced by Sun Xingyan’s friends and relatives, to consider questions about courtship and marital intimacy at a time when the modern notion of “love” was absent: how did the newly-wed interact, feel, and speak about their relationships? How were the modes of their expression of affection shaped by cultural, gender, and esthetic norms? What could the couple’s marriage-- and the presentations of it -- suggest about the thinking and practice in marital relations at the time?

Friday, May 4
Wei SHANG, Du Famiy Professor of Chinese Culture, Columbia University
“The Grand Prospect Garden and Its Visual Representations, 1791-1919”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road
[flier]

Wei Shang received his B.A. (1982) and M.A. (1984) from Peking University, and his Ph.D. (1995) from Harvard. Professor Shang specializes in pre-modern Chinese literature and culture, especially fiction and drama of the Ming and Qing dynasties. His research interests also include print culture, book history and intellectual history of the same era. His book "Rulin Waishi" and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China addresses the role of Confucian ritualism and fiction in shaping the intellectual and cultural changes of the eighteenth-century. His other publications are concerned with Jin Ping Mei Cihua (The Plum in the Golden Vase), late Ming culture, fiction commentary, and medieval poetry. He is the coeditor of several volumes and a contributor to The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature.

Lecture Abstract:
Like many dramas and novels of the early modern era (1550-1919), The Story of the Stone was accompanied by wood-block illustrations when it first appeared in print in 1791. Almost immediately, though, Stone proved to be much more than an illustrated novel: during the centuries that followed, paintings, murals, peep shows, and decorative artifacts that feature the characters and scenes from Stone became part of the lived environment of Chinese men and women. Instead of being a mere textual phenomenon, Stone took on a new life through visual renditions at different levels of remove from the text. This paper explores the visual dimension of what might be called the “Stone phenomenon,” with special attention to the pictorial representations of the Grand Prospect Garden, the main setting of Stone, in a variety of visual genres and forms facilitated by the social, cultural, and technological changes in the nineteenth-century. More specifically, it highlights the irrepressible fascination with the art of illusion-making best captured in a series of murals inside the Forbidden City. The visual renditions of the Garden that proliferated during this period provide a prism for examining the trends in visual culture as well as the evolving roles they themselves have played in shaping them.

Saturday, May 5, 2012
ICS Graduate Forum: “The Fashioning of New Cultural Spaces: Between Performance, Print, and Visuality in Late Imperial and Republican China”
Sponsors ICS
Hagerty Hall, Room 180
1775 College Road

Tuesday, May 8, 4:30 pm 2012
Huang Yu, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington
"Entangled Guanxi: Tracing State-Society Relations through Food Safety Control in China"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0045
1775 College Road
[flier]

Huang Yu received her Ph.D. in anthropology in 2012 from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her dissertation, entitled “Vibrant Risks: Scientific Aquaculture and Political Ecologies in China,” a work of both Science and Technology Studies (STS) and environmental anthropology, examining how scientific aquaculture shifted from a discourse of “high-yields” to one on food safety so as to meet the changing demand of global consumption. By interrogating on shrimp farmers and aquaculture scientists’ drive to overproduction, she speculated on the positions of Chinese labor in the global food regime.

Lecture Abstract:
Conventional scholarship in the environmental politics of China adopts a binary framework that equates politics with the state and assumes the state as a top-down, coherent entity.  This presentation draws from Foucault’s concept of governmentality to view power not as an oppressive totality, but a force that “structure(s) the possible field of action of others.” This theorization echoes the Chinese social connection of guanxi by dislodging power from an ontological mooring into a relational force. Locating the site of power in the science dissemination process, I examine the role of state development agents, such as shrimp aquaculture extension officials, in promoting and negotiating the state agenda with grassroots levels in Guangdong, China.

This presentation analyzes two cases studies in state’s food safety regulation: a fish veterinary training program and a drug residue detection trip. I explore how food safety works both as a discourse and practice that grants the Chinese state a new mission of governance but the ambivalence of the issue at the same time delegitimizes the state’s power to rule. The fish veterinary program reflects a neoliberal process of creating a lean state, when the state will employ only official veterinaries to control epidemic diseases and leave the certified veterinaries to learn self-help and make their living from the market. The drug residue detection campaign, on the other hand, indicates the complex but fragile guanxi between the marketizing state and citizens. This helps understand rural development of China as a project of both empowerment and risk.

Friday, May 11, 1:30 pm 2012
Parks M. Coble, Professor of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
“Trauma and Displacement in Wartime China, 1937-1945: The Experiences of Wartime Mobility”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road
[flier]

Parks Coble's research field is 20th century China with special emphasis on the political history of Republican China (1911-1949), the history of Chinese business in the 20th century, and Sino-Japanese interactions. Recent publications have included a study of Chinese businessmen living in occupied China during World War II, and of the anti-Japanese movement in China in the 1930s. His current project is a study of the legacy of World War II in East Asia, a conflict which led to at least twenty million Chinese casualties. Over six decades after the end of this conflict, disagreements over its meaning are not simply academic, but often a source of conflict among the people and governments of East Asia. The rise of nationalism in post-Mao China has led to the rediscovery of this conflict as "the great patriotic war." Public focus on Japanese atrocities committed during the conflict, such as the rape of Nanjing, has even resulted in anti-Japanese outbursts in Chinese cities. This new study seeks to understand why the historical legacy of this conflict has been so problematic.

Lecture Abstract:
Even in a century filled with violence and destruction, the eight years of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945, was a brutal era. The war brought not only death and suffering, but also led to massive movements of populations. Japan’s invasion of China in the summer of 1937 led millions of Chinese, from wealthy merchants to the poorest peasants, to flee from the fighting. Perhaps as many as 95 million became short-term refugees, with perhaps 50 million becoming long-term refugees. Yet the standard story of flight to Sichuan and the interior is only part of the picture of wartime mobility. Particularly after the fall of Wuhan and Guangzhou in October 1938, movement of peoples in wartime became more complex with some people leaving “Free China” for the occupied areas, and others moving between different war zones for business or personal reasons. This paper is an attempt to give a more nuanced understanding of the experience of wartime mobility and its significance.

Friday, May 18, 1:30 pm 2012
YAO Chen, Visiting Composer, University of Chicago
“Of Confrontation and Confluence”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road
[flier]

Cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary concepts permeate the creative inspiration and compositional output of YAO Chen.  His music has been widely performed by leading orchestras, ensembles and soloists at various music festivals and concert halls.  He has also received commissions and awards from prestigious organizations such as Radio France, the Leonard Bernstein Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago & Silk Road Project, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Beijing Modern Music Festival, and the Chinese Fine Arts Society.  He holds a BA in composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and a Ph.D in composition from the University of Chicago.  He has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois School of Music, and will join the Illinois State University School of Music as an assistant professor later in 2012.

Lecture Abstract:
Composer YAO Chen grew up in China, surrounded by a culture that is often interpreted as either a clash between, or a fusion of, the traditional and the modern, the old and the new, and the Oriental and the Occidental.  Having lived in many different places in China from the northwest to the far south, and then up north in Beijing, he was exposed to a wide variety of genres and styles within Chinese music.  After arriving in the US in 2001, he immersed himself in the rich, multicultural environment around him, studying not only Western music and its languages within their original contexts, but also engaging with musics and people from unforeseen cultures.  This transcultural experience of life continues to leave a profound impact on his compositional thinking, techniques, sounds, and style, leading many to view his work as a synthesis of Eastern and Western traditions.  His perceptions on time, timbre, intonation, pulsation, and expressivity exist always at frontiers – between the old and the new; between the static and the rhythmic; between the descriptive and the dramatic; and between irrational mysticism and rational logic.

In this presentation, he will discuss, and play excerpts from, some of his representative pieces, in which Eastern and Western notions of time, nature and spirituality have significantly influenced his aesthetic pursuits and compositional strategies.

Friday, May 25, 1:30 pm 2012
Peggy Wang, Assistant Professor of Art History, Denison University
“Art of Artifice: Advertisements in Contemporary Chinese Art”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0050
1775 College Road

Friday, May 31, 1:30 pm 2012
Howard Choy, Associate Professor, Chinese Literature, Wittenberg University
"Narrative as Therapy:Stories of Breast Cancer by Xi Xi and Bi Shumin"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0056
1775 College Road

Howard Y. F. Choy, Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Cultural Studies, received his Ph.D. in comparative literature and humanities from the University of Colorado. A journalist and theater critic from Hong Kong, he joined the Wittenberg faculty in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures and East Asian Studies in 2007. His research interests focus on Chinese culture and literature, with the most recent project being a comparative study of political jokes across mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. Currently editing a book of Liu Zaifu's selected essays, he is the author of Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng's China, 1979-1997 (2008) and the assistant author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Confucianism (2005). He has also published a number of articles and translations in major scholarly journals, including positions, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and Asian Theatre Journal. Dr. Choy has also taught at Stanford University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His teaching includes all levels of Chinese, business Chinese, and courses in Chinese cinema, culture and literature. He serves as the faculty advisor of The Wittenberg University East Asian Studies Journal.

Lecture Abstract:
With Lu Xun’s celebrated story “A Madman’s Diary” (“Kuangren riji,” 1918), modern Chinese literature started off in a medical approach often interpreted by critics as national allegory. The therapeutic function of storytelling on the personal level, however, has largely been ignored until recently. This paper focuses on the fictional writings about breast cancer by two contemporary Chinese women writers, namely, Xi Xi’s Elegy for a Breast (Aidao rufang, 1992) and Bi Shumin’s Save the Breast (Zhengjiu rufang, 2003). In light of Susan Sontag’s cultural critique of medical metaphor and post-Freudian, Foucauldian deconstruction practices of narrative therapy, these masto-texts have emerged as investigative reports to re-author or re-story fe/male fears of the malignant tumor that is not only incurable but also unspeakable because of its perceived relation to sexual characteristics.

Buttressed by postmodern literary and poststructuralist therapy theories, this research undertakes a narratological analysis of the clinical stories to address issues of ethics and subjectivity. Advertized as the first Chinese psychotherapy novel by a psychologist, Save the Breast relates an experimentation of talk therapy with a group of patients to deal with the biopolitics of breast cancer as both social stigma and physio-psychic trauma against the tide of medical marketing in today’s China. Its precursor from Hong Kong, Elegy for a Breast, the first literary effort of a Chinese woman writer describing her own experience of cancer treatments, draws readers into discovering their physical corpora as well as her textual corpus, suggesting an alternative authorship in the first-person narrative of a patient text. Though composed in different styles, both works examine the doctor-patient and author-reader power/knowledge relationships by seeking therapy in narrative and reinventing narrative as therapy.

Winter Quarter 2012
Friday, January 27, 1:30 pm 2012
Eugenia Lean, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
"Men, Make-up and Chinese Modernity: Chen Diexian's Recipes for Manufacturing Success in the Woman's World (Nvzi shijie) (1915)"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 0056
1775 College Road
[flier]

Eugenia Lean, associate professor (EALAC), received her BA from Stanford University (1990), and her MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from UCLA. She is interested in a broad range of topics in late imperial and modern Chinese history with a particular focus on the history of science and industry, mass media, consumer culture, emotions andgender, as well as law and urban society.  She is also interested in issues of historiography and critical theory in the study of East Asia.  She is the author of Politics of Passion: the Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Public Sympathy in Nineteen Thirties China (UC Press, 2007), which was awarded the 2007 John K. Fairbank prize for the best book in modern East Asian history, awarded by the American Historical Association. Her current project is a cultural history of industrialization in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century China that focuses on polymath Chen Diexian, a professional writer/editor, science enthusiast, and pharmaceutical industrialist, to explore the intersection among the popularization of science, commerce, and ways of authenticating knowledge and things in an era of mass communication.

Lecture Abstract:
In1910s China, journals such as Nüzi shijie (Women’s World) began to run columns and articles that provided highly detailed technical information not on how to purchase, but on how to produce homemade soap, hair tonic, perfume, and rouge. Hardly recipes for middle-class housewives, these writings enabled a new group of urban – mostly male – elites to find technical know-how and production knowledge desirable as they engaged in carving out new identities and establishing new ways of knowing in the first decade of China’s newly-minted Republic. (Male) editors and readers quite literally “domesticated” the technical knowledge as their own by appropriating the woman’s voice and positioning this new production and scientific knowledge within the domestic everyday realm as a counterpoint to “public” political knowledge. The treatment of the domestic as scientific laboratory served moreover as a metaphor for the larger marketplace in treaty ports that was outside of the reach of the state, and where scientific, commercial and manufacturing knowledge increasingly displaced moral knowledge and statecraft as the preferred epistemological foundations for a competitive nation.

Friday, February 3, 1:30 pm 2012
ZHANG Xiaosong, Professor of Anthropology, Guizhou Normal University
"Symbols and Rituals: An Illustrated Introduction to the Civilizations of Guizhou’s Mountain"
Sponsors ICS, EASC, Chinese Flagship,
Hagerty Hall, Room 0056
1775 College Road
[flier]

Zhang Xiaosong, is a professor of anthropology at Guizhou Normal University, a member of the Standing Committee of the 11th National People’s Congress of Guizhou and a consultant to the People’s Government of Guizhou Province. She has worked in cultural anthropology for 20 years, having conducted extensive field work in Guizhou Province.  Professor Zhang is the author of more than ten books and thirty research articles about Guizhou culture.  In 2006, she published ‘Symbols and Rituals’, a major compilation of research on Guizhou’s ethnic culture and history.

Lecture Abstract:
Guizhou Province, located in southwest China, is at the center of the South China Karst World Heritage site. This picturesque but ecologically fragile region has long been cut off from the outside world. Guizhou has over 5 million people living on less than $240 a year, but it is rich in ethnic diversity.
Guizhou is home to populations of the Han, Miao, Dong, Buyi, Yi, Shui, Yao and other 18 ethnic groups.
Guizhou peoples of all ethnicities maintain community memories and artifacts of their and cultural heritage.
Since the mid-1990s, many international organizations have joined the Chinese government in becoming interested in preserving the cultural heritage of the area All are trying to find the best way to maintain the unique beauty of this area while creating responsible and sustainable means of supporting the community.
Under the impact of the nationwide "economic revolution" can Guizhou create the perfect solution for improving lives while protecting traditional culture?

Monday, February 6, 3:30 pm 2012
Wang Ning, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Tsinghua University-Beijing
“Postmodernism in China”
Co-sponsor: Department of English
University Libraries, Room 165
[flier]

Wang Ning is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Tsinghua University, and Zhiyuan Chair Professor of Humanities at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Apart from his numerous books and articles in Chinese, he has authored two books in English: Globalization and Cultural Translation (2004), and Translated Modernities: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on Globalizaton and China (2010).

Lecture Abstract:
At a moment when postmodernism in Western culture seems to have lost its momentum, Chinese postmodernism is just coming into its own. Wang Ning addresses the phenomenon of Chinese
postmodernism, framing it both in the international context of globalization and decolonization, and in the local (or “glocal”) context of Chinese cultural history over the past several decades.

Friday, February 10, 2012, 2012
ICS Graduate Forum: “Chinese Art History”
[flier]

As part of its Cultures in Contact series, the Institute for Chinese Studies will present "Making Modernity in Twentieth Century Chinese Art," a graduate student forum, on Friday, February 10 from 1 - 5:30 p.m. in 056 Hagerty Hall. The forum will consist of three sessions, beginning at 1:30 p.m. and lasting approximately an hour each. The forum will allow graduate students studying Chinese art history to present their current work and research.

Presenters will include Ahyoung Yoo and Christina Mathison, who will discuss "Sanyu: A Transnational Modernity in the Context of Artistic Diaspora" and "Hybridity in East Asian Modernity: Chen Chengbo's Paintings During the Japanese Occupation (1895-1945)," respectively, in the first session. Then Elise David will present "The Modernist Methods and Traditionalist Paintings of Wu Shujuan: Building Cross-Cultural Relations and Finding Feminine Histories," followed by Hyun Kyung Kim with "The Return of the Academy Tradition: Jin Cheng's Animal and Bird-and-Flower Paintings." The final session will find Effie Yanfei Yin discussing "'Writing' Histories of Art and Literature by Traditionalist Painting: The Construction of Fu Baoshi's Self-identity based on Subject Matter of His Painting," Yuling Huang presenting "Fu Baoshi's Hua Yuntai Shan Tu: A Modern Interpretation on an Ancient Design," and Mina Kim, with "Sharing Artistic Vocabulary between Zhu Da and the Later Generations in Modern China."

Discussants include Mayumi Kamata, Ying Zhang from the Department of History and Meow Hui Goh from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. The forum is funded in part by a Department of Education Title VI grant, and is co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art.

Friday, March 9, 4:30 pm 2012
Xiaomei Chen, Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California at Davis
"The Color Scheme of Three Revolutionary Epics in Socialist China (1964-2006): Red Legend, Grey Performance, or Black Restoration to Capitalism"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Co-sponsor: Department of East Asian Languages and LIteratures (DEALL)
Hagerty Hall, Room 0056
1775 College Road

Xiaomei Chen is professor and chair in the department of East Asian languages and Cultures at University of California at Davis.  She is the author of Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford University Press, 1995; second and expanded edition, Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), and Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (University of Hawai'i Press, 2002).   She is the co-editor, with Claire Sponsler, of East of West: Cross-Cultural Performances and the Staging of Difference (Palgrave, 2000)." She is the editor of Reading the Right Texts (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003), and Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (Columbia University Press, 2010).  This talk is part of her current book project, tentatively entitled Theater and Revolutions: Founding Fathers, National Stage, And Revisionist Histories in Twentieth-century China.

Lecture Abstract:
This power-point presentation examines the images and messages of three “song and dance revolutionary epics” in the PRC from 1964 to 2009.  First, it examines the impact of The East is Red, which showcased some of the best talents in performing arts in the first seventeen years after the founding of the PRC from 1949 to 1966.  Still treasured with fond memories in post-Mao China, The East is Red became a model for the creation of The Song of the Chinese Revolution premiered in 1984, a so-called “sister performance” to The East is Red, to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the founding of the PRC.  Having inherited the “red legend” of the The East is Red, The Song of the Chinese Revolution, nevertheless challenged the one-sided historical narratives of the CCP history as the result of having incorporated new research on revolutionary histories in the fields of modern Chinese history and the CCP historiography.  The 2009 performance of The Road to Prosperity to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, however, departed from its two precursor texts by highlighting post-Mao political regimes and its “capitalist” approach to rescue China from national disasters to the road to prosperity.  Justifying its drive to capitalism with “Chinese socialist characteristics,” The Road to Prosperity demonstrates, once again, the enduring power of revolutionary epic performance that manipulates historical narrative, political orientation, star and popular culture, and nationalistic sentiments, which embody shifting and complex identities in the formation of the new red legend in contemporary China.

Friday, March 16 and Saturday, 17
“Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL)”
Anne Yue-Hashimoto, Professor of Language and Linguistics, University of Washington
Alan C.L. Yu, Professor of Linguistics, University of Chicago
Benjamin Ka Yin T'sou, The Hong Kong Institute of Education
[poster]
WICL website: http://ling.osu.edu/wicl/
WICL program: http://ling.osu.edu/wicl/doc/WICL_Program_20120228.pdf

Autumn Quarter 2011

Friday, December 2, 1:30 pm 2011
Barry C. Keenan, Professor of History, Denison University
“Confucian Learning as the Qing Ceded to the Republic”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road
[flier]

Barry Keenan has taught history at Denison University for thirty-five years, and helped organize the East Asian Studies program at Denison.  His latest book is for non-specialists: Neo-Confucian Self-Cultivation.Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011.

His first book, The Dewey Experiment in China: Educational Reform and Political Power in the Early Republic (Cambridge: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University Press, 1977) was his Ph.D. dissertation at Claremont Graduate University.  In the summer of 2011, the Higher Education Press in Shanghai requested permission to publish a Chinese translation of that 1977 book.  His second book was: Imperial China’s Last Classical Academies: Social Change in the Lower Yangzi, 1864-1911(Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1994).

Lecture Abstract:
The Confucian revival in the PRC began to get traction in the mid-1990s, and had benefitted from much cross-fertilization from outside of China proper.  But one issue that bedevils the movement inside and outside of China is the precept Confucius himself made clear: without its actual practice, a moral value is not even fully understood.

The final moment in China’s recent history when some societal support was still possible for the actual practice of lifelong Confucian virtues was in the late-Qing.  So what was the most sophisticated and up-dated version of Confucian ethics as taught and practiced in 1895?  This version can be a legitimate platform for later revivals.

Friday, November 4, 1:30 pm 2011
Tsun-Hui Hung, Lecturer of Ethnomusicology, The Ohio State University
“One music? Two musics? How many musics?: Cognitive ethnomusicological, behavioral, and fMRI study on vocal and instrumental rhythm processing”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road
[flier]

Dr. Tsun-Hui Hung holds a B.A. in Erhu performance from the Chinese Culture University, Taiwan, a M.A. music composition from Ohio University, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Ethnomusicology from the Ohio State University. She received one of the first doctorates in Cognitive Ethnomusicology and successfully applied fMRI to ethnomusicological research. Her research interests include the cross-cultural study of pitch processing in music and speech and rhythm processing in vocal and instrumental music. Tsun-Hui is also a worldwide active artist. She has won the Excellent Prize in the National Erhu Competition in Taiwan, and has performed many times in the National Concert Hall and National Opera House in Taiwan as well as overseas. She is active in both solo and collaborative performances and has played with many major orchestras, including the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and the National Chinese Opera Company.

Lecture Abstract:
The origins of music have been and still are a mystery; there is simply no good explanation or convincing evidence on how music actually started, yet. Fitch (2006) reviews a variety of studies on animal communication and indicates that unlike humans, animals usually produce either vocal or non-vocal sounds only.  His research led to the suggestion that, in order to explore the origins of music it might be helpful not to treat music as a unitary phenomenon, but to distinguish clearly between vocally and non-vocally produced sounds and their usage. These ideas connect with comparative musicological studies showing, that even though every culture in the world has something we can call ‘music,’ many societies show a distinct preference for vocal music. Furthermore, numerous physiological and imaging studies have shown that speech and non-speech sounds are processed differently by the human brain (e.g., Belin et al., 2000). It has also been shown that vocal and instrumental melodic contours have differential effects on speech processing  (Poss et. al, 2008). This lecture explores whether there are also differences in processing of vocal and instrumental rhythms. A set of experiments investigates how humans process these two types of rhythm through reaction time measurements in behavioral experiments and through brain activation measurements in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments. In each trial two sound files, containing both vocal and instrumental rhythms were played, and participants had to decide whether either the vocal or the instrumental rhythms were the same. Results show that decisions on vocal rhythms caused higher brain activation than those on instrumental rhythms; these differences are mainly seen in early auditory pathways, e.g. temporal lobe, while activations for late auditory processing were similar for both rhythms. In the behavioral experiments participants show significantly shorter reaction time for vocal than for clapstick rhythms if rhythm pairs are the same. The results are in line with previous studies showing that vocal sounds and pitch contours are processed differently than instrumental or non-vocal ones. The fact that not only vocal and instrumental melodic contours but also vocal and instrumental rhythms are processed differently strongly supports the ideas about different phylogenetic origins of instrumental and vocal music. A preference to vocal music that is indicated by comparative musicological studies. In addition there is a preferred treatment of vocal sounds as demonstrated by many cognitive studies. This in turn seems to be a reflection of the importance of vocal communication in human societies. Our results are compatible with the idea that both vocal music and speech may originate from a common vocal communication system, whereas instrumental music originated from an accompanying system that produced sounds via manual activities.

Friday, October 7, 1:30 pm 2011
Guoqing Li, Professor of University Libraries, The Ohio State University
“Revisiting History: Personal Experiences in China Centuries Ago”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road
[flier]

Graduated from Beijing University and Indianan University, Guoqing Li is currently a professor and the Chinese Studies Librarian of OSU Libraries, and an adjunct professor of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, the Graduate School, at OSU. He is also a guest professor of Wuhan University and Guangxi Normal University, China, and the President of the Society for Chinese Studies Librarians.

Lecture Abstract:
The imperial China, the “Mystic Flowery Land”, as called by some Western travelers hundred years ago, had to open its door to the world under the force of Western Powers in 1842, thus started a painful evolution to become a new republic of China, which was established in 1911, exactly 100 years ago.  Prof. Li has been working on two research projects with a goal to provide different perspectives on that piece of history. The results are two book series titled “Qing Li Zhongguo Cong Shu 亲历中国丛书--Personal Experiences in China” and “Xi Wen Jiu Ji Hui Kan: Zhongguo Ji Lu 西文旧籍汇刊：中国记录--Chinese Studies in the West: the Chinese Record”. The former includes Chinese translations of letters, memoirs, reports, journals and so on, by Westerners such as diplomats, missionaries, business men, explores those who  visited or lived in China during that time. The latter are reprints of Western books in similar nature with Chinese introductions and translations of core information of these books. 14 titles of the first series have been published since 2004 by National Library of China Press and 20 titles of the second series by Guangxi Normal University Press so far. He will talk about the background, meanings, and future plans of the projects in his lecture.

“The Work of Culture” Lecture Series 2010-2011

Winter Quarter 2011

Friday, February 11, 1:30 pm 2011
Shana Brown, Associate Professor of History, University of Hawai'i
“The History of Realism and Truth in Chinese Photography”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road
[flier]

Shana J. Brown is Assistant Professor in History at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Her research concerns the intellectual and cultural history of modern China, with a particular focus on visual culture, art collecting practices, and gender. Her book Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography (University of Hawaii Press, July 2011) describes the contributions of Chinese antiquarianism or jinshixue to modern historical studies. Recent publications include “Chinese Women as Collectors and Bibliophiles at the Turn-of-the-Century” (2009) and “Archives at the Margins: Luo Zhenyu’s Qing Documents and Nationalism in Republican China” (2007). “Chinese Wartime Photography: Sha Fei and the Invention of the Real” will be published in 2011 in a volume on wartime China, edited by Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh. Other forthcoming publications include a study of the late-Qing calligrapher and antiquarian Yang Shoujing (1839-1915) in Japan; an essay on the early nineteenth-century female painter Xia Lingyi (fl. c. 1830); and a study of Luo Zhenyu (1866-1940) as an art dealer in Republican China. Her new book-length project is a social and intellectual history of the practice of photography in China from the 1830’s to the present.

Lecture Abstract:
The Chinese photographer Sha Fei (1912-1950) is renowned for hundreds of iconic wartime images as well as the production of the Jin-Cha-Ji Pictorial, published out of the Communist Jin-Cha-Ji base area in Hebei. An important contributor to wartime propaganda efforts, Sha Fei developed a lyrical photographic style that both highlighted and tested the bounds of Party-sanctioned conventions of documentary and portrait photography. As artistic and political documents, Sha Fei’s photographs contributed to debates within modern Chinese literary and political circles over the value of realism versus other artistic styles, as well as the relationship of modern art and documentary photography to political propaganda efforts.

Friday, February 18, 1:30 pm 2011
Ling Hon Lam, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University
"Winds, Dreams, Theater: An Archaeology of the Stratified Topoi of Emotion in The Peony Pavilion and the Rise of Theatricality in Late Sixteenth-Century China"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road
[flier]

Ling Hon Lam is an assistant professor of Chinese Literature in the Asian Studies Program, Vanderbilt University. An An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fairbank Center of Chinese Studies at Harvard University and a fellow of the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College this year, he is completing a book manuscript on theatricality and the spatiality of emotion in early modern China. His second project concerns the fate of reading in late imperial and modern Chinese media culture. His publications include “The Matriarch's Private Ears: Performance, Reading, Censorship, and the Fabrication of Interiority in The Story of the Stone” (HJAS 65.2), “Bao-yu’s Multimedia Classroom: Reading, Performance, and the Vicissitudes of the Voice from The Story of the Stone to Its Film Adaptations” (forthcoming in Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone), “Reading off the Screen: Toward Cinematic Il-literacy in Late 1950s Chinese Opera Film” (Opera Quarterly 26.2-3), and “Hybrid Commodities, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Challenge of Cross-Cultural Comparison: A Response to Moretti’s ‘The Novel: History and Theory’” (Literary Compass 7.9, co-authored with Dahlia Porter).

Lecture Abstract:
This talk re-conceives emotion less as an inner state of mind than as a spatial structure in which we find ourselves feeling along with others. This embedding structure is never abstractly ontological but subject to historical change. Professor Lam will concentrate on a specific spatial structure of emotion—namely, theatricality—pertaining to Chinese society at the turn of the 17th-century. By "theatricality" he refers to a historical mode of spatiality in which emotion was perceived not as interior to oneself but as performed in the Other's position.

The historical peculiarity of theatricality, however, must be understood in the sedimentation of earlier modes of spatiality – which he names "winds" and "dreamscapes" – from which theatricality emerged. How should we differentiate theatricality from other topos (in both senses of the word) it seems to be anachronistically juxtaposed with? More important, how should we explain this anachronism in both history and our accounts of emotion and Chinese theater? To approach these issues, he will take e Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting, 1598) as the case in point, excavating it as an archaeological site of stratified topoi of emotion in correspondence with the architectural transformations of theater in 16th- and 17th-century China.

Friday, February 25, 1:30 pm 2011
Puisan Wong, Research Scientist at the Eye & Ear Institute, The Ohio State University
Acquisition of Mandarin: Lexical Tones by Children
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road
[flier]

Puisan Wong is a research scientist in the Department of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery at the Ohio State University. She received her doctoral degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2008 and was an Assistant Professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York before joining the Ohio State University in 2009. Being a certified speech language pathologist, she is interested in understanding factors that contribute to normal and abnormal speech and language development and finding effective intervention methods that facilitate speech and language development in the disordered populations such as individuals with hearing loss.

Lecture Abstract:
Large discrepancies have been found in children’s rate of acquisition of Mandarin lexical tones. Some studies have reported that children acquire Mandarin tones in various contexts before two years of age, while others have found that even five-year-old children do not produce adult-like tones in disyllabic words. This lecture reviews factors that may have contributed to discrepancies among studies, provides evidence in support of a less biased method of determining tone accuracy, characterizes the acoustic properties of children’s correct and incorrect tone productions, presents the latest findings on the order of acquisition of tones, and discusses factors that may contribute to children’s acquisition of Chinese Mandarin lexical tones.

Friday, March 4, 1:30 pm 2011
Elisabeth Kaske , Assistant Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon University
Lecture: TBA
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Spring Quarter 2011

Friday, April 8, 1:30 pm 2011
Joshua Howard, Croft Professor of History, University of Mississippi
"The Making of a National Icon: Commemorating Nie Er, 1935-1949"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, April 15, 1:30 pm 2011
Denise Ho, Associate Assistant Professor of History, University of Kentucky
“Lecture: TBA
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, April 22, 1:30 pm 2011
Howard Choy, Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, Wittenberg University
“Narrative as Therapy: Stories of Breast Cancer by Xi Xi and Bi Shumin”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, April 29, 1:30 pm 2011
Fan Pen Chen, Associate Professor of Chinese, SUNY-Albany
“What was Madam White Snake? Vanquished Snakes as Deities of the Ancient Yue People”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, May 11, 1:30 pm 2011
Claire Roberts, Visiting Fellow, Harvard University
Lecture: TBA
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, May 13, 1:30 pm 2011
Donald Sutton, Assistant Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon University
“The Emotions and Rituals of Chinese Death (17th to 19th centuries)”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, May 20, 1:30 pm 2011
Jane DeBevoise, Chair, Asia Art Archive in America
"From Jean-Paul Sartre to Teresa Teng: Contemporary Cantonese Art in the 1980s"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, May 27, 1:30 pm 2011
Thomas Mullaney, Assistant Professor of History, Stanford University
“The Typewriter Girl in China and Japan”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, June 3,, 1:30 pm 2011
Ping WANG, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, Princeton University
“Portrayal of Nature in Early Chinese Literature”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Autumn Quarter 2010

Friday, September 24, 1:30 pm 2010
James H.-Y. Tai, Distinguished Chair Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Center of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chung Cheng University (Taiwan)
“History, Structure and Adaptation of Taiwan Sign Language”
Sponsors ICS, EASC, Department of Linguistics
Hagerty Hall, Room 180
1775 College Road

James H.-Y. TAI, Distinguished Chair Professor of Linguistics at National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, is currently also the Chief Advisor of University Affairs, and the Director of the Center of Humanities and Social Sciences at his institution. From 1987 to 1995, Professor Tai was a faculty member in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, where he taught Chinese language and linguistics, while also serving as Editor of the Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association (1987-1994). In 1995 he returned to Taiwan to establish the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Chung Cheng University, serving as the founding Director. He has been the principal investigator for the sign language research group at the Institute since 2000. The research group’s projects include the construction of an online digital dictionary of Taiwan Sign Language (http://tsl.ccu.edu.tw) and a TSL corpus for sign language research, such as the construction of a reference grammar of TSL. From sign linguistics, he has delved into the study of visual linguistics, spontaneous gesture accompanying speech, origins and evolution of human language. He has published five monographs and over sixty articles on Chinese linguistics, sign linguistics, and language and cognition.

Lecture Abstract
Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) is the language naturally developed and used by deaf persons residing on the island of Taiwan. This presentation starts with a brief introduction to the nature of sign language and its significance to the study of human language and human communication. It traces the historical development of the language as based on Japanese Sign Language with lexical items borrowed from Chinese Sign Language. The structural analysis in the presentation focuses on classifier predicates in TSL with a reference to classifiers in spoken language for a better understanding of categorization in human language. Included in the analysis are some of the important grammaticalized facial expressions in TSL.. Also addressed is the adaptation of TSL in the environment of Mandarin Chinese, changing society, and the use of signs based on Chinese characters. .This presentation ends with some personal observations on the deaf culture in Taiwan.

Friday, October 1st through Sunday, October 3rd
59th Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs (MCAA)
Sponsors EASC
Co-sponsors: DEALL, Department of History, Department of History of Art, Department of Political Science, National East Asian Languages Resource Center, The Ohio State University Chinese Flagship Program

Friday, October 8, 1:30 pm 2010
Bell Yung, Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh
“Folk Music & Local Culture: The Art of a Cantonese Bling Singer”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Bell Yung is Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. A specialist of China, his most recent books are: The Last of China’s Literati: The Music, Poetry and Life of Tsar Teh-yun (2008), Music and Cultural Rights (2009), and a complete translation of The Flower Princess, A Cantonese Opera (2010). He has also published in Chinese academic journals, and edited and/or produced a DVD, several CDs, and two museum catalogues. Born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, he received his higher education in the U.S. He is a recipient of numerous honors and fellowships including the Guggenheim, Mellon, Ford, ACLS, NEH, and Fulbright. He received the Excellence in Mentoring award from the University of Pittsburgh in 2009.

Lecture Abstract:
The blind singer Dou Wun was a master of several kinds of Cantonese folk narrative songs, and sang professionally from the mid-1920s to the late 1970s in many Hong Kong venues such as teahouses, opium dens, brothels, private homes, semi-public clubs, radio stations, and, at the end of his life, street corners. Local folk genres during the British colonial period were considered not worthy of note and largely ignored by the print media and the scholarly community. Yet these songs, catering to a segment of the Cantonese community, tell well-known stories that reflect upon Chinese culture, and use idiomatic Cantonese language and distinctive musical styles. If Hong Kong is to establish and assert its own cultural identity, one place it needs to seek is Dou Wun’s narrative songs.
The presentation will play recordings of songs excerpts, along with the lyrics in Chinese and English translation, images of Dou, and the Hong Kong teahouse where the recordings were made.

Friday, October 15, 1:30 pm 2010
Michael Brose, Associate Professor of History, University of Wyoming
“Uyghur Neo-Confucian Specialists in Koryo and Choson Korea”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Michael Brose received his Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, Asia & Middle East Studies. His dissertation was published in 2007, titled “Subjects and Masters: Uyghurs in the Mongol Empire.” His current research extends that work on non-Chinese elites into Ming China, and he has recently also begun work on the history and contemporary status of the Chinese Muslim community in Yunnan.

Lecture Abstract:
While we know that the Mongols used a great many foreigners in their administration of China, we know less about the activities of some of these same personnel in Korea at the same time. This paper examines the crucial role that some Uyghurs played in propagating Zhu Xi’s Confucian doctrines in the Korean court. What is perhaps more surprising than the role of these Uyghurs at the Korean court when the Mongols ruled China is the fact, also discussed in this paper, of their continued presence and activities in these areas after the Ming evicted the Mongols from China and a new dynasty had come to power in Korea. Thus, this paper also uncovers a rather more surprising role of non-Koreans in the ideological foundations of the long Choson Yi Dynasty.”

Monday, October 18, 6 pm 2010
CHINA Town Hall
Cathy Barbash, President, Barbash Arts Consulting, Inc.
"From One to Many: The Evolution of US-China Cultural Exchanges from Single to Multi-Stream Practice"
Lecture with Q/A 7pm-8pm

Ambassador Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., US Ambassador to China
Live Webcast at 8pm

Sponsors ICS, Mershon Center, National Committee on United States-China Relations
Mershon Center 120
1501 Neil Avenue

Monday, October 18, 7 pm 2010
Yongchao Chen, Professor of Chinese, University of Peking
"Ethnography of Living Myth and Legend Traditions in Contemporary China"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 180
1775 College Road

Friday, October 22, 1:30 pm 2010
Siyen Fei, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
"Sexuality and Empire: The Cult of Female Chastity and the Process of Empire-Making in Ming China"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Siyen Fei is assistant professor at history department, University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD degree from Stanford University. Her recent book is titled Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing (Harvard, 2010)

Lecture Abstract:
Traditionally deemed to be the quintessential symbol of patriarchal suppression of female agency, the chastity cult witnessed a dramatic rise in popularity during the sixteenth century. Despite the resultant stricter control over female sexuality, the chastity cult was never just a product of top-down state inculcation, but one of collective action. Of widely diverse social and geographic backgrounds, tens of thousands of women all observed the same code of behavior in their pursuit of chastity. What made possible this collectivity of the chastity cult and its penetrative power was a well-received social contract concerning imperial chastity awards and the host of social activisms it precipitated—a nexus of social processes that I call the “sociology of the chastity cult.” This analysis offers not only a more accurate interpretation of the chastity cult but also a new methodology for studying imperial history that is not bound by the binary of patriarchy/female agency or the dichotomy of state and society.

Friday, November 5, 1:30 pm 2010
Dongping Han, Professor of History and Political Science, Warren Wilson College
“The Cultural Revolution and the Future of China”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Dongping Han, professor of history and political science at Warren Wilson College, grew up in rural Shandong, China.  He started working on his village collective farm when he was nine years old, during the weekends and school holidays and vocations.  After graduating from a rural high school during the Cultural Revolution, Han returned to his village and worked in the village factory for five years.   In 1977, he took the college entrance exams, and was accepted into Qufu Teachers’ University.  Upon graduation, he went to Hebei University to study for his masters’ degree.  After he earned his masters degree, he taught at Zhengzhou University for three years before he went to study at Singapore National University for a diploma in Education.

He attended University of Vermont for his masters in History and received a PhD in politics from Brandeis University.

Lecture Abstract:
A good society is a society where the overwhelming majority enjoy their lives.  Dongping Han focuses his research during the Chinese Cultural Revolution years, because he feels that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was a genuine effort to empower workers and farmers, and to introduce changes to Chinese society that would treat workers and farmers fairly and justly.   During the Chinese Cultural Revolution years, the Chinese people had built one of the most equal societies in human history.
          
China faces many challenges because it has an increasing gap between the rich and poor and a host of other problems.   The wealth generated by the extraordinary growth rate has been stolen by a small number of elites.   As China boasts about its extraordinary wealth, working class people find it hard to afford housing, medical care and education
           
While the Chinese elite is condemning the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the overwhelming majority of the Chinese working class people are looking back at the revolution with fond memories, when there was equality and dignity associated with work, and when the majority were working toward a common goal.
           
The future of China will be very different because China experienced the Cultural Revolution.  Because China had the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people will always be able to look back and realize that a better society is possible.
            

Friday, November 19, 1:30 pm 2010
Kathleen M. Ryor, Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies, Carleton College
“Regional Competition and the Fabrication of a Zhe School in Late Ming China”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Kathleen M. Ryor is Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at Carleton College, where she teaches East Asian art history.  She was a past editor of the journal Ming Studies and board member of the Society for Ming Studies.  She is currently the president of the Arts of China Consortium, a scholarly organization for the field of Chinese art and art history.  Her publications include studies of military patronage of the arts, miniaturization and surrogacy in Chinese gardens during the late Ming, and contemporary Chinese painting.  Her other research projects are concerned with the relationship between painting and regional economic and political competition in southern China and a reexamination of late Zhe school painting.  She is currently finishing a book-length manuscript entitled, Sixteenth Century Concepts of the Body in the Art of Xu Wei (1521-1593), which links the artist's painting and calligraphy to a wider discourse on the importance of the physical body during the late Ming period.  She received a 2003-2004 Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship for this project.  Professor Ryor’s second book project, Martial Arts: The Military and Visual Culture in Imperial China, expands on her published work on this understudied subject.

Lecture Abstract:
While the category of the so-called Zhe School has long been seen as problematic within the study of Chinese painting history, the continued emphasis in scholarship on the professional status of the artists identified as members of the Zhe School has obscured an investigation into the use of the regional term Zhe to describe a wide range of artists and styles.  There is ample evidence, however, that at least until the end of the sixteenth century, literati who were native to or lived in Zhejiang province admired the style of painting practiced by the so-called “Wild and Heterodox” painters of the Zhe School.  This lecture will demonstrate that a regional taste for dramatic ink wash styles was part of a larger discourse in which the elite in that province promoted the cultural achievements of their region and may have challenged, either explicitly or implicitly, the cultural supremacy of neighboring Suzhou. 

Friday, December 3, 1:30 pm 2010
Christopher Lupke, Associate Professor of Chinese, Western Washington University
"Multivocality and the Problem of (Auto)Biography in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Summer at Grandpa’s"
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Christopher Lupke is an Associate Professor of Chinese and Film Studies at Washington State University. His recent publications include an edited volume New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry and guest-edited special theme volumes of the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese and positions: east asia cultures critique. He currently is in the final stages of a book on the Taiwanese auteur filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Lecture Abstract
Several of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s early creative films have been described by critics and Hou alike as biopics. Hou’s A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) is considered a loose rendering of his own childhood and adolescence; his Dust in the Wind (1986) depicts the same period, centering on the life experiences of Wu Nianzhen, a close literary collaborator of Hou’s. Summer at Grandpa’s (1984), Hou’s rendering of idyllic life in the Taiwan countryside, is often said to feature the early life of Zhu Tianwen, another literary figure who has worked on all of Hou’s films. This presentation carefully examines the main characters in Summer at Grandpa’s, noting the tensions and conflicts inherent in the assertion that the film is a biographical rendering of Zhu Tianwen’s youth. What becomes apparent in such an analysis is that the film actually contains an internal polemic of contradictory points of view between the eponymous older brother Dongdong (the Chinese title is Dongdong de Jiaqi) and his younger sister Tingting who presumably would represent the point of view of Zhu Tianwen. This tension or conflict leads us to conclude that there is a multiplicity of voices at work in the film, complicating the original promotion of it as a biopic.

“China in Global Context” Lecture Series 2009-2010

Autumn Quarter 2009

Friday, October 30, 2:30 pm 2009
Kun Shi, Director, K-12 Chinese Flagship Program, OSU
“Superstitious Beliefs?-Current Status of Shamanic Practice and Research in China”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Kun Shi has a graduate degree in anthropology from OSU. He has been the director of the OSU K-12 Chinese Flagship Program since its inception in October 2006. Previously, he served in various capacities including program evaluator of the Ohio Legislative Office of Education Oversight (2000-2005) and development director of the Asian American Community Services in central Ohio (1996-1999). He has taught in universities in Ohio and China, conducted field research in East Asia and Scandinavia, and published in Chinese and English in the areas of cultural anthropology and Chinese language education. (Kun Shi can be reached at shi.7@osu.edu)

Lecture Abstract: The talk will introduce the current status of research and practices of shamanism in China, including several new museums focused on the Tungus shamanic tradition. It will describe the presenter's fieldwork with some shamans of the Tungus-speaking peoples in Northeast China, and attempt to provide an explanation for the revival of shamanism in today's political environment. The presentation will be accompanied by photo slides and video clips.

Monday, November 2, 5:30 pm 2009
Slavic Military Symposium: Russia, China, and the SCO
Panel: Col. Peter Mansoor (Chair of Military History), Xiaoyu Pu (PhD Candidate, Political Science), Joshua Wu (PdD Candidate, Political Science), and Joseph Castleton (MA Candidate, Slavic Center)
Sponsors ICS, EASC, Slavic Center, Mershon Center for International Security Studies
Mershon Center, Room 120
1501 Neil Avenue

Saturday, November 7, 8:30 am through Sunday, November 8, noon
Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences 15th International Conference
“China in World Financial Crisis and Other Challenges—Perspectives of Humanities and Social Sciences”

Keynote Address: Daniel C.K. Chow, Joseph S. Platt-Porter Wright Morris & Arthur Professor of Law, OSU
"Anti-Counterfeiting Strategies of Multi-nationals in China"
Saturday, November 7, 9 a.m.
Mendenhall 0100 and Page Hall

More information at www.acpssus.org

Friday, November 20, 2:30 pm 2009
Christopher Agnew, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Dayton
“Ritual and Memory in the Making of the Descendants of Confucius”
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Christopher Agnew is a social and cultural historian of late imperial China.  He has published articles concerning the early modern maritime culture of north China, and the use of collective memory in the formation of Chinese lineage identity.  He is currently preparing a manuscript on the late imperial history of the Kongs of Qufu, the family recognized as the official descendants of Confucius.  After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006 he moved to the University of Dayton where he is currently an assistant professor of history.

Lecture Abstract: This lecture will detail the way in which the Kongs of Qufu, the recognized descendants of Confucius, used ritual practice and collective memory to reinforce a lineage identity and social hierarchy centered on the “Duke for Fulfilling the Sage.”  To elucidate the relationship between social power and cultural practice, the lecture will focus on three moments—each suggestive of the way the descendants of Confucius weathered the social and political crises of late imperial Chinese history.  In the first moment of the early fourteenth century, a revived ducal institution emerges under the auspices of Mongol domination with a new narrative about the collective family past.  In the second moment, elite members of the family respond to the challenges posed by the rising commercial wealth of the late Ming dynasty.  In the third moment of the early nineteenth century, the Kongs find new patrons among the popular religious societies of north China in the years before the regional upheaval of the Eight Trigrams rebellion.

Tuesday, December 8, 7:00 pm 2009
Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs
"Issues in the Bilateral US-China Relationship"
CHINA Town Hall Series: Local Connections, National Reflections
(Webcast from Washington DC from 7pm to 10pm at Mershon Center 120

Winter Quarter 2010

Friday, January 29, 1:30 pm 2010
Stephen R. MacKinnon, Professor, Department of History, Arizona State University
“New ways of thinking about Wartime China: with a special reference to the Defense of Wuhan in 1938”
In conjunction with the art exhibition on Sha Fei
Sponsors: ICS, EASC, Department of History
Hagerty Hall, Room 045
1775 College Road

Stephen R. MacKinnon worked as an expert for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, teaching and editing translations from Chinese to English between 1979 and 1981. Besides Chinese language study throughout the 1960s, he has lectured and published papers regularly in Chinese since the 1970s. Presently he is
completing a long term project with the Asia Center at Harvard on the history of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. is involves organizing and writing papers for conferences that bring together senior Chinese and Japanese scholars. e last meeting was held in Chongqing in 2009 on China's wartime diplomatic relations. An edited volume will result.

Lecture Abstract: The China War from 1937-1945 has been attracting fresh interest among historians inside and outside of China.   Looking beyond the traditional political story and its focus on the fortunes of the Nationalists and the Communists or  China as victim as in the Nanjing Massacre, broader questions are being raised about the social, cultural, and economic impact of the war on the Chinese people.  The War, and the civil war which followed, forced refugee status on the majority of the population.  Examples of new areas of research are the new institutional responses that resulted from the refugee experience as well as the survival psychology and the reshaping of culture production that came out of the war.  At another level, there is also the need for a more nuisanced understanding of the whole question of collaboration and what happened in occupied China during the war.  A balanced military history of the war has yet to be written. The speaker explores these and other questions about the impact of the China war, concluding with a case study of refugee society during the long ten month siege of Wuhan in 1938.   The Shafei exhibit and Robert Capa photos illustrate the talk.

Thursday, February 4, 1:30 pm 2010
Ying Liu, Professor & Director, Biogas Science Research Center
“Waste to Energy - Biogass Production in China”
Sponsors
Co-Sponsors: ICS
University Plaza Hotel

Friday, February 12, 2:30 pm 2010
Eric Mortensen,, Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Guilford College
“A Naxi Religious Postmortem: On the Death of Ritual Efficacy”
Sponsors: ICS, Center for Folklore Studies, Center for the Study of Religion
Jennings Hall, Room 060
1735 Neil Avenue

Eric D. Mortensen (Ph.D., Committee on Inner Asian & Altaic Studies, Harvard University) teaches East Asian and Comparative Religion at Guilford College in North Carolina. His current work focuses primarily on the folkloric and religious aspects of the pictographic textual tradition of the Naxi of Southwest China, including divination, the interface between the written and the oral, and the role of animals in the Naxi tradition. As a comparativist, his work investigates the patterns of religion and folklore in the region of the eastern Himalaya, where he has spent many years and many summers over the past eighteen years living and working with Tibetan nomads and Naxi communities in Yunnan, Sichuan, and the Tibetan Autonomous Region, in the People's Republic of China.

Lecture Abstract: The Naxi of Yunnan Province in Southwest China are renowned for their pictographic manuscripts.  The majority of these texts are ritual texts, and are notoriously difficult to translate.  The pictographs, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, were a coded script, designed to be a mnemonic aide to the ritual expert dto-mba, who already (presumably) knew the oral account of the ritual for which the text was composed.  Thus, the texts are rarely narrative in structure, and the pictographs might, for example, be only suggestive of “allegorical expressions,” which served to remind the dto-mba of a formulaic proverb or brief story that they would insert into the performance of the ritual text.  Pictographs often represent particular terms – nouns, adjectives, and verbs – represented explicitly in the illustrative drawing of the graph.  However, other pictographs have only phonetic meaning, which do not correspond to the drawn pictographs.  Others represent longer phrases, allegorical expressions that are part of the ritual tradition of the Naxi.  There are no comprehensive dictionaries of these allegorical expressions (although Joseph Rock’s 1963 & 1972 two-part dictionary contains just over one hundred), and different dto-mba read these expressions differently, depending on their own background, experience, and religious education, as well as on the performative context of the recitation of the particular text.

Mortensen will argue that the regularity of allegorical expressions represented by obscure pictographs in Naxi ritual manuscripts makes the translation of such texts from Southwest China highly problematic.  The pictographs, devised as a mnemonic device to assist the dto-bma ritual expert in the chanting of religious texts, require a depth of knowledge of the folkloric compendia of Naxi religious culture to be successfully recited, let alone effectively translated. 

Friday, March 5, 1:30 pm 2010
Thomas Hahn, Visiting Fellow & Lecturer, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University
“Machinations & Manipulations: Obervations on Faking the Photographic Image in China”
In conjunction with the art exhibition on Sha Fei
Sponsors: ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 045
1775 College Road

Thomas Hahn was educated at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, and received training in Chinese language, literature and history, European philosophy and cultural anthropology. After spending three years of post-graduate studies and teaching in China, he returned to Germany to pursue a project coordinator position on the subject of education in pre-modern China. At the same time, Hahn underwent basic and advanced library training. In 1990 a librarian position was created at the Institute for Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University, which Mr. Hahn filled for close to nine years. During this time he continued his academic studies in Chinese history (historical geography) and was awarded a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1996.

Dr. Hahn has been active on a national and international level, especially in the area of digital cartography as well as in the field of multilingual information and learning environments. He is the editor of various academic publications as well as two journals, and is active in the Internet community in an effort to help build digital library components pertaining to East Asian studies.

Lecture Abstract: Nineteenth-century photographic output was almost exclusively perceived as a viable and marketable commercial product. The appearance of the picture postcard based on photography as a means for personal and “private” communication began around 1900. Pictures from the “Orient” or the Far East stressed the picturesque, the exotic, the “eternal” and the timeless of the represented culture. Western tastes especially favored architecture, landscapes, beheading scenes and genre themes, usually prearranged, playing on stereotypes (literally “images perpetuated without change“) and satisfying preconditioned expectations.  For years Thomas Hahn has been collecting old, historical photographs from China and has built up quite an impressive collection. A number of his photographs are posted online through his website on http://hahn.zenfolio.com.

Friday, March 12, 1:30 pm 2010
Marjorie Chan, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, OSU
“Love You to the Bone and Other Songs: Rhyming, Tempo, and Humor in Early Cantopop”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 045
1775 College Road

Marjorie K. M. Chan is Associate Professor of Chinese language and linguistics in the  Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. She oversees the M.A. and Ph.D. program in Chinese linguistics in her department, and teaches the full range of graduate courses in Chinese linguistics. Her Chinese linguistic research and publications focus on phonetics-phonology interface (with particular interest in prosodic phenomena) and dialectology (especially Cantonese, including synchronic and diachronic issues). Recent conference presentations and publications have explored issues in tone and intonation phenomena in Mandarin Chinese, language and gender, vernacular written Cantonese (based on 19th century missionary works, etc.), as well as forays into linguistic aspects of humor. In 2008, she organized the 20th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-20) at Ohio State University, and edited (with Hana Kang) a two-volume NACCL-20 proceedings afterwards. In the same year, she guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (2008) on second-language acquisition.

Lecture Abstract: There is a strong connection between the tempo of a melody and the mood conveyed by the singer. It is probably universal that happy songs are likely to be sung to quicker melodies than are sad songs. By extension, songs with lyrics intended to elicit smiles or laughter also tend to be sung at a quicker tempo than those with lyrics expressing melancholy or sadness. Interestingly, for Cantonese songs, syllable structure may also contribute to the conveyance of mood, insofar as songs with Rusheng (入聲) syllables (that is, those ending in –p, -t, or -k) occurring at the end of a line, tend to be limited to lyrics that convey a light-hearted mood, accompanied by melodies that have a relatively quick tempo. In other words, Rusheng rhymes in Cantonese contribute to a quickened tempo in the conveyance of mood.

This presentation analyzes several light-hearted Hong Kong Cantopop songs from the 1950s and 1960s sung by different artists. One such song, Ai Ni Ru Gu愛你入骨, is included in the title and given a tongue-in-cheek, literal translation of “Love you to the bone.” The song is a duet sung by versatile comedic singer and performer, Zheng Junmian (鄭君綿), together with female singer, Bai Ying (白瑛). The humorous content of the song can be seen in the opening three lines sung by the young man (with the Rusheng syllables in the lyrics bolded and in red): 我愛你入骨 / 皆因你係得 / 標準三圍認真第一 (I love you to the bone / Because you’re A-okay / All three measurements are number one).

 In the presentation, the lyrics will be accompanied by audio sound files. Some background will be provided, and social implications of this post-WW II period in Hong Kong will be explored, as this period captures a unique blending of East and West, and of modern and traditional, that is richly reflected in these early Cantopop songs.

Spring Quarter 2010

Friday, April 2, 1:30 pm 2010
Wendy Swartz, Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, Columbia University
“Naturalness in Xie Lingyun's Poetic Works”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Wendy Swartz is Associate Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese Literature at Columbia University. Her research is primarily on medieval Chinese poetry and poetics. She has published articles on Tao Yuanming and Xie Lingyun and is the author of Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427-1900) (2008, Harvard University Press).

Lecture Abstract: This paper revisits the question of literary naturalness in Xie Lingyun’s poetic works from two vantage points. The first part examines the notion of ziran 自然 as it was applied to Xie by Southern Dynasties critics and demonstrates the need to historicize the term, whose significations shifted dramatically over time. The second part discusses Xie’s citations of the Yijing, or Classic of Changes, in his representative landscape works, including the “Fu on Dwelling in the Mountains.” Scholarship on Xie Lingyun up to now has rarely shown exclusive attention to Xie’s use of the Yijing, which in fact reveals much about the conceptual and structural framework of his mode of representation and about how he orders the world he sees. I will argue that Xie’s poetry exemplifies a literary naturalness that is informed by his reading of the Yijing, an important aspect largely ignored by scholars today.

Friday, April 9, 1:30 pm 2010
Li Jin, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, Oberlin College
“Leftist Melancholia & Class Consciousness: the Case of Qu Qiubai”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, April 16, 1:30 pm 2010
Sherry Mou, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies, Depauw University
“The Emperor and His New Shadow: A Fifth-Generation Representation of the First Emperor”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC, DEALL
In conjunction with the DEALL Alumni Series
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, April 23, 1:30 pm 2010
Xiandong (Sherab) Chen, Associate Professor, University Libraries, The Ohio State University
“Chinese Tea Culture”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, April 30, 1:30 pm 2010
Joshua Van Lieu, Department of History, University of Washington
“Diverging Visions of Serving the Great: Choson-Qing Negotiations of Tribute, 1879-1890”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC, History
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

Friday, May 7, 1:30 pm 2010
Liana Chen, Senior Lecturer, Department of Chinese, Penn State University
“Guest Ritual and Tribute-Paying Dramas of the Qianlong Reign”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC
Hagerty Hall, Room 062
1775 College Road

“Future of the Past” Lecture Series 2008-2009

In 2009, East Asia Studies Center will be celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its founding. Hence, the Future of the Past Lecture Series will highlight (1) critical, self-reflexive and/or innovative approaches to the study of the Chinese-speaking world as well as (2) research that showcases the contribution of tradition and traditions to the creation of modernity. For future updates and additions, please check: www.ics.osu.edu.

Spring Quarter 2009

Thursday, April 2, 4:30pm 2009
Nick Kaldis, Associate Professor, Chinese Cinema, Language, and Literature in the Department of Asian & Asian-American Studies, Binghamton University (SUNY)
“Couching Race in the Global Era: Intra-Asian Racism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”
DEALL Alumni Lecture
Sponsors ICS, EASC
Co-Sponsors: DEALL
Jennings Hall, Room 140
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. Nick Kaldis is Associate Professor of Chinese Cinema, Language, and Literature in the Department of Asian & Asian-American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY).  He has published essays on modern Chinese literature, Taiwan nature writing, contemporary Chinese film (from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the PRC), and numerous translations. He recently completed a manuscript on Lu Xun’s Yecao, and is co-editing and a translated collection of nature writing essays by Taiwanese author Liu Kexiang. 

Lecture Abstract: Widely and often wildly praised by international audiences and film critics, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, dir. Ang Lee; hereafter also referred to as CTHD) is one of the most successful Chinese-language films of all time.  Much of the academic scholarship on the film explores its global dimensions; the director himself and his long-time collaborator James Schamus have likewise stated in interviews and articles that the film is an authentically transnational co-production, with Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, American, and other constituents contributing to its funding, personnel, locations, languages, audiences, profits, and awards.  It is also, famously, the first Chinese-language film with record-breaking international box office and video profits.  While transnational in its production and reception, CTHD is thoroughly “Chinese” in its diegesis, taking place entirely within the (imagined) historical, geographical, and linguistic boundaries of Qing Dynasty China.  This combination of localized content with global box office success and international film awards has led many Chinese viewers to praise the film for attracting a world-wide audience with an edifying representation of Chinese people and culture while simultaneously establishing an influential Chinese presence in the global film market.  In CTHD, cultural globalization and cultural nationalism are wed harmoniously, embodying what Fran Martin has aptly characterized as the film’s construction of a new “Pan-Chinese cultural nationalism that constructs a triumphal, post-modern version of ‘Chineseness’ (149).

While a variety of scholars, journalists, filmmakers, and others have looked at the film from multiple theoretical perspectives, analyzing both its content and production --its ostensible “Chineseness,” its relationship to Hollywood film, its (purported) feminist subtext, its Orienalizing characteristics, its funding and profits, its reception in Asia, etc.--, what has yet to be receive appropriate attention is the ubiquitous logic of racial binarism in the film.  Han Chinese in this film are models of social conformity and propriety, displaying obedience to social mores, government authority, and laws, and upholding the quasi-Confucian jianghu (江 湖 “knight-errant culture”) codes of righteousness, honesty, loyalty, trust, and respect. The lead non-Han characters, on the other hand, are violators of the same social mores, laws, and values dear to the Han characters. They display animal-like barbarity, prioritize the carnal over the mental and spiritual, abandoning themselves to lust and impetuously act on their emotional impulses.

Prior to presenting numerous examples of its racially dichotomized narrative structure, I will first demonstrate that, in the considerable body of extant scholarship on the film, this critical racial component in the structure and content of CTHD has not been apprehended.  I then briefly touch upon the film’s popular and critical reception, followed by numerous examples of the film’s racial binarism.  Finally, I conclude with an elaboration of what I believe to be the reasons for (and implications of) the appearance of such a racial logic in a 21st-century transnational Chinese-language film.

Friday, April 3, 3:30pm
Ying Liu, Director, Biogas Science Research Center, Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences
“Chinese Biogas Energy Program--Sucess in Environmental Technology Adoption”
Co-sponsors: ICS
Kottman Hall, Room 244
21 Coffey Road

Friday, April 10, 2:30 pm 2009
Marsha Haufler, Professor, The Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas
"Beyond Yongle: Tibeto-Chinese Thangkas for the Mid-Ming Court"
Co-sponsors: EASC, Department of History of Art
Jennings Hall, Room 060
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. Marsha Haufler, who publishes as Marsha Weidner, is Professor of Art History at the University of Kansas, where she has taught since 1991. She is also Chair of the Editorial Board of Archives of Asian Art. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkley. Her area of specialization is Chinese painting, with emphases on Mongol patronage, women as artists and patrons, and, most recently, Buddhism in the history of later Chinese painting.  Her publications related to her lecture topic include the exhibition catalogue Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism (1994) and the edited volume Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism (2001), as well as two articles, “Sino-Tibetan Thangkas of the Chenghua and Zhengde Periods in Western Collections” in Palace Museum Journal (October 2007) and  "A Vaishravana Thangka from the Ming Dynasty" in Orientations (Nov/Dec. 2008). She is working on a book on Buddhist monasteries as centers of aesthetic engagement in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). 

Lecture Abstract: The production of Tibetan Buddhist art for the Chinese court of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) reached a high point during the Yongle period (1403-24), as is well known and often illustrated. This talk looks “beyond Yongle” to the Chenghua (1465-87) and Zhengde (1506-21) periods by examining a number of thangkas that came out of China in the early twentieth century. The Chenghua paintings illustrate the exquisite culmination of the 15th-century Tibeto-Chinese tradition. The early-16th century thangkas not only represent a significant departure from this tradition, but also a unique moment in the history of Ming imperial patronage of Tibetan Buddhism.  

Monday, April 20, 4 pm 2009
Man-houng Lin, Senior Researcher, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica/Director, National Archives, Taipei, Taiwan
“Recent Research on the Taipei Treaty”
Sponsors: ICS, EASC, Mershon Center, Department of History
Co-sponsors: Department of History, Mershon Center
Mershon Center, Room 120
1501 Neil Avenue

Friday, April 24, 2:30 pm 2009
R. Kent Guy, Professor and Chair, Department of History, University of Washington
“The Development of Qing Studies: Retrospect and Prospect--Why Do Empires Kill?”
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 060
1735 Neil Avenue

Friday, May 8, 2:30 pm
Jeremy Wallace, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, The Ohio State University
"Stability in Motion: China’s Changing Urban-Rural Policies"
Co-sponsors: EASC, ICS
Jennings Hall, Room 060
1735 Neil Avenue

Tuesday, May 12, 4:30 2009
Don Lopez, Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan
"Building a Better Buddha"
Sponsors: Center for the Study of Religion
Co-sponsors: ICS, EASC
Science and Engineering Library, Room 090

Friday, May 15, 11:30 am 2009
Mai Ngai, Lung Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, Columbia University
"The True Story of Ah Jake: Language and Justice in Nineteenth-Century Sierra County, California"
Asian American Distinguished Lecture
Sponsors: Asian American Studies and ICS
Location: Hale Culture Center

Friday, May 22, 2:30pm 2009
Richard Kent, Associate Professor, Department of Art & Art History, Franklin & Marshall College
“Early Chinese Fine-Art Photography: Cultural Nationalism & Embrace of Modernity”
Co-sponsors: EASC, Department of History of Art
Jennings Hall, Room 060
1735 Neil Avenue

Friday, May 29, 2:30 pm
Heather Inwood, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University
Lecture: Cyber Folk: Multimedia Poetry in the Aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 060
1735 Neil Avenue

Spring Quarter 2009

Friday, October 3, 2:30 pm 2008
William Sargent, H.A. Crosby Forbes Curator, Asian Export Art, Peabody Essex Museum
“Send Us No More Dragons...: Chinese Porcelains and Decorative Arts for the Western Market”
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 136
1735 Neil Avenue

William R. Sargent is the H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian export art at the Peabody Essex Museum.  He has been with the collection, considered the largest and most comprehensive of its type in the world, for over thirty years.  Before focusing on Asian export decorative arts he published exhibition catalogs on American art and contemporary prints.  He has delivered lectures throughout the United States, as well as in Australia, Canada, England, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, China (Guangzhou and Jingdezhen) and Hong Kong.  He attended the Winterthur Summer Institute and the Attingham Summer School, and received two International Partnership Among Museum (IPAM) Awards.  His publications include The Copeland Collection: Chinese and Japanese Ceramic Figures (1991) and Views of the Pearl River Delta: Macao, Canton and Hong Kong (1996).  He is currently preparing a catalog of the Chinese export porcelain in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum.

Lecture Abstract: In the early seventeenth century the Portuguese trading ships San Jago and Santa Catarina were captured by the Dutch and the contents of blue and white porcelain were sold at auction to tremendous success, creating a hungry audience for China trade ceramics and other  wares.  Most Dutch painters of still-lifes in the early to mid-seventeenth century incorporated the “kraakware” porcelains from ships such as these as evidence of worldly knowledge, wealth and power.  By the eighteenth century the desire of Europeans and Americans to acquire the luxuries of China led to the massive trade in Chinese export porcelain, furniture, lacquer, silver, paintings, textiles, and wall-coverings.  The influence of these arts became highly important facets of interior design in England, on the Continent, and in the American colonies.   

While the artistic interaction between Asia and the West often resulted in misunderstanding, misinterpretation and humor, it just as often resulted in an enrichment of the art in question so that it is not what is lost in translation that’s lasting, but what is often altered, occasionally improved, sometime gained, and always engaging.  The history and art of the China trade remains one of the most fascinating and relevant, though often neglected, aspects of contemporary Western culture.   

Friday, October 10, 2:30 pm 2008
Margaret Wan, Assistant Professor, Department of Languages and Literature, University of Utah
“Drum Ballad Texts as Local Literature in the Qing: Audiences and Reading Practices”
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 136
1735 Neil Avenue

Margaret Wan is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah.  She has published on Chinese fiction, the interaction of Chinese ballad texts and the novel, and local literature, including “The Chantefable and the Novel: The Cases of Lü Mudan and Tianbao tu” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (2004). Her forthcoming book, “Green Peony” and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel (State University of New York Press, 2009), illuminates the world of popular fiction around the turn of the nineteenth century, examining a wide range of novels and ballad texts.   She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. 

Lecture Abstract: Drum ballad texts (guci 鼓詞) form a large corpus of popular literature in the Qing dynasty.  Recorded in a format that invokes oral performance, these prosimetric ballads circulated in manuscript, woodblock, and lithographic editions.  By the early twentieth century, more than 2,300 known titles existed.  Despite their great numbers, drum ballad texts have garnered little scholarly attention. What are these texts?  Who read them? More specifically, what can the material texts of these drum balladstell us about their audiences?  How much do these Qing drum ballad texts rely on knowledge of the conventions of the living oral performance tradition?  Have they become purely “desktop” entertainment? 

This presentation will focus on martial arts stories in Qing dynastydrum ballads from Beijing, Hebei, and Shenyang.  The material texts hold clues to how these drum balladswere circulated and read.  For example, shops in Beijing rented long works by dividing them into independent volumes intended as daily installments, and other texts suggest similar use.  Readers ran the gamut of society, crossing class, ethnic and gender lines, from women and merchants to Manchus and denizens of the palace.  The physical format also reveals clues to whether each text was organized to appeal to the eye or the ear.  Examining these clues suggests different reading practices or different degrees of familiarity with performance in each of the drum ballad texts.  While discussing these ballads’ respective places on the spectrum of orality and literacy, I examine how these popular texts are tailored for specific audiences.  Understanding how these popular stories circulated in drum ballads as well as novels, with potentially different audiences and different effects, will help paint a fuller picture of the range of fictional practices available in late imperial China and their relationships to each other, their audiences, and the broader culture.

Friday, October 17 and Saturday, October 18 2008
“China Plural: Local Identity, Contesting Visions, and Construction Nation” Conference
Sponsors: ICS, EASC, Title VI Federal Grant
Co-sponsors: Mershon Center, Office of International Affairs, Department of History, Center for Folklore Studies, DEALL and Women’s Studies
Haggerty 180
1775 College Road

Click here for more details on the conference.

Click here for the link about the Mershon Center from the Mershon Center's website.

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Monday, October 27, Time: 12:30-2:30 2008
Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Associate Professor of Film and Video in Asian American Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Film and Women's Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara
Film: "The Fact of Asian Women"
Co-sponsors: ICS, Program in Asian American Studies, Department of Women's Studies, and Office of Minority Affairs
Room: University Hall, Room 56
Location: 230 N. Oval Mall

Celine Parrenas Shimizu will be screening her film and taking questions and answers.

THE FACT OF ASIAN WOMEN --Contemporary Asian American female actors re-enact scenes from popular Hollywood films. Featuring three generations of Asian American femme fatales in Hollywood, the film re-examines the fantastic figure of the “lotus blossom” and “dragon lady” exemplified in the roles played by Anna May Wong in the 1920s’-1940s, the “prostitute with a heart of gold” embodied by Nancy Kwan in the 1960s’ and the contemporary “dominatrix” Lucy Liu. Performing these characters, young contemporary actors collide with the “ghosts” of Asian women in Hollywood through the revised endings of their major films performed on the streets of San Francisco. The actors then discuss sexuality in their roles and in terms of their own self-formation as actresses of color. For the website of the film, click here.

Friday, October 31, 2:30 pm 2008
Elana Chipman, Postdoctoral Researcher, The Ohio State University
Title: "Sincerity, authenticity and the discourse of "tradition" in Taiwanese cultural activism"
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 136
1735 Neil Avenue

Elana Chipman is the Postdoctoral Researcher at the East Asian Studies Program for 2008-09. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a long-standing commitment to the study of Chinese cultures and has conducted field research in both Taiwan and Fujian Province. Her dissertation research focused on local and national identity production through cultural activism and on popular religious practice in Chinese cultures. Her current research project entails a move into the field of environmental anthropology through an investigation of the relationship between transnational environmental discourses and transforming ritual practice in East Asia.

Lecture Abstract: In this presentation, I examine the way "tradition" is deployed as a form of value in Taiwanese culture activism. Local activists in Beigang, a pilgrimage town in rural Taiwan, devote much of their energies to documenting local ritual traditions as a way of staking claims in the context of both local and translocal poltiical-economic competition.  Their publications and conversations situate Beigang as a source of traditional authenticity and piety, while their competitors are presented as fakes. Using the discourses, debates and competitions surrounding one specific figure which is central to contemporary local ritual, I will illuminate the multiple meanings of "tradition" and "authenticity" that are at play and in conflict in present-day Taiwan, as the island's politics and culture continue to transform.

Friday, November 7, 2:30 pm 2008
Ting Chang, Assistant Professor, Critical Histories of the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University
“China through the Peephole: The Representations of China in Nineteenth-Century European Travel Narratives, Collections and Performances”
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 136
1735 Neil Avenue

I will examine Edmond de Goncourt's collection of Chinese porcelain in Paris and Albert Smith's display of “China” in London.  The former, an important writer and cultural authority, took part with other French collectors in the identification and classification of Chinese porcelain.  Although Goncourt’s private collection was restricted to only friends and acquaintances, he shared his philosophy and system of display in his book, La Maison d’un artiste of 1881.  On the other side of the English Channel, Albert Smith disseminated a series of images of China and Hong Kong after a brief visit in 1858.  He presented ‘China’ in public performances at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London that could be subsequently replicated in private through the purchase of an optical device.  Smith had a different, expanded sense of China, one that was less literal and material than Goncourt’s collection.  I wish to examine these two displays in terms of their diverse media, format and space.  Both the static presentation of aesthetic objects in glass cabinets and the dynamic transformation of images through a stereoscope were underpinned, I suggest, by fantasies of “China”. 

I will begin with a brief discussion of encounters with Chinese material culture in mid nineteenth-century London.  Two important occasions were Nathan Dunn’s collection, known as ‘10,000 Chinese Things,’ exhibited in London from 1842 to 1844, and the arrival of the Chinese junk, the Keying, on the Thames in 1848.  A decade later, the British writer and performer Albert Smith gave illustrated narratives of his voyage to China at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, the epicenter of popular entertainments in nineteenth-century London.  In all three instances (Dunn’s museum, Keying, Smith’s performance) the public paid to enjoy a spectacle of ‘China’ located outside the physical and conceptual space of the museum or art collection.  I suggest that the British exhibition of ‘China’ mostly operated in a circuit of commodities, spectacles and commercial entertainments which affected its public reception.  In contrast, the art collection of Edmond de Goncourt in Paris in the same period offered an altogether different position.  According to Goncourt, the nature of Chinese porcelain demanded a rarified, aesthetic treatment that was the very opposite of popular entertainment.  I argue that his view of China was motivated by fantasies of both the distant empire and his own country.

Friday, November 14, 2:30pm 2008
Mr. Juwen Zhang, Associate Professor of Chinese, Department of Japanese and Chinese, Willamette University/Executive Vice President, Western States Folklore Society
“Folklore in the Movement of Nationalism and Neo-Nationalism in China”
Co-sponsors: EASC, Center for Folklore Studies, Asian American Studies Program
Jennings Hall, Room 136
1735 Neil Avenue

Professor Zhang earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, along with Urban Studies Certificate. He also attended the graduate programs in Dartmouth College and in Shenyang Normal University in China. His academic training has led his research interests to topics such as, Chinese ritual studies, folklore performance, ethnic identity, humor, material culture, popular culture, and Chinese/Asian American folklore. His current research is on the Rites of Passage in Chinese Societies and Filmic Folklore.

Lecture Abstract: From the formation of the concept of “Folk-Lore” in Britain to the rising wave of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage through the United Nations, there is an essential strand of force that results from and is still impacting the idea of nationalism.  However, that concept of nationalism has gained new meanings in new contexts, either in the sense of specific local nativism or broad globalism.  This transition of meaning in China from the traditional nationalism to the current neo-nationalism is the central concern in this talk.  This talk points out that folklorists face the challenge of re-orienting themselves to identify the core of the issue and to seek the right methodology, and suggests that studying such ideas as “core marker” and “arbitrary marker” in constructing local and national identity help us seek methods to understand the process of claiming identity to local folklore or intangible cultural heritage.

Friday, January 23, 2:30pm 2009
Ms. Qi Sun, Fulbright Scholar in Residence, Central State University/Associate Professor, Tongji University (Shanghai)
"The Return of Motherhood in Chinese Movies"
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 160
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. Qi SUN  is an associate professor in Tongji University, Shanghai, China and Fulbright Scholar in Residence in Central State University, Ohio, at present. She gained her Ph.D. degree for Cultural Study of Theater in East China Normal University, Shanghai  and her master degree in Fudan University in China. Her college study was done in Qiqihar Normal University, Heilongjiang, China.  She has been engaged in teaching for 24 years in various universities of China, in a wide range of subjects from theater, movie to English for MBA and Law. She won the research fellowship of Chinese State Council for young teachers for her Visiting Scholarship in Limerick University, Ireland. Her doctoral dissertation, “Game on A Quicksand—A Discourse Study of Harold Pinter’s Plays”, was honored a doctoral thesis of excellence and is in the process of publication. She also published broadly in various academic journals in China.

Lecture Abstract: The motif of women in the images of mother—deprived mothers, underprivileged mothers, sacredified mothers, independent and courageous mothers—never ceases to be a subject of depicting Chinese reality in Chinese film-making history.  Viewing a group of movies in the strand of mother-child relationship, we find the historical continuity of complex and subtle signification in the works, by which we see a vein of women’s victimization as well as their strategic bouts of wriggling and grappling for their rights that runs deep from the past to the present.

Goddess/Shen Ni (1934) is regarded as an unsurpassable pinnacle in Chinese silence movies and exhibits its bravery by featuring a mother who works as a prostitute to raise her son. Sang Hu’ adaptation of Lu Xun’s The New Year’s Sacrifice (1956) continues the theme of victimized and deprived mothers, so does the fifth generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Special Operation Room (1989), only in the light of post-cultural-revolution reflection.

The “red” classics, The Bitter Cauliflower /Ku Cai Hua (1965), puts revolutionary/patriotic mothers on the altar of sacrifices to show a nationalistic bearing that even Zhang Yimou cannot boast to be free from. His Red Sorghum (1987)sacredifies an ideal mother/grandma in the lush red sorghum wine of heroism.

 Entering 21st century, Chinese movies also shows the dawning light of a new century. The sixth generation works, In Love We Trust/Zuo-You(2006) and Lost in Beijing/Ping Guo(2007) call back Motherhood by giving up the clichéd strictures of holding Chinese patriarchal system to the account of women’s fate, and placing it back in the hand of women themselves. All such censor-conscious movies, including Feng Xiaogang’s A World Without Thieves (2006), show their ethical fiber to challenge the mainstream Chinese moral bottom lines with their nuts and bolts. All the women warriors are mothers or expecting mothers who strategically but unrelentingly fight for and gain their rights of being a Mother. The appeals they hold unanimously place hope on the children who serve to redeem Mothers, as well as fathers, with their call for love.

Wednesday, January 28, noon 2009
Thomas J. Christensen, Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Director of the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, Princeton University
“Crafting a China Strategy: Some Recent Lessons for the New Administration”
Sponsor: Mershon Center
Mershon Center for International Security Studies
1501 Neil Avenue

Thomas J. Christensen is Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Director of the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University.  From 2006 to 2008 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. 
Click here to read more about this event.

Friday, January 30, 2:30 pm 2009
Bonnie Cheng, Assistant Professor, Art History, Oberlin College
“Cultural Patrimony & Early Medieval Material Culture”
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 164
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. Bonnie Cheng is currently Assistant Professor of Art and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, The Status of Authority: Tombs and Political Spaces of the Northern Dynasties, which examines the funeary art of the Northern Dynasties, focusing broadly on tombs of ruling imperial families and associated officials.

Lecture Abstract: Modern interpretations of art from medieval China occupy a peculiar two-pronged perspective.  On one hand, the period is hailed for innovations in painting and Buddhist sculpture.  On the other, it is also derided because nomadic tribes conquered and ruled the Central Plains region, forcing the Han-Chinese to relocate to the south and disrupting the "continuity" of Chinese culture.  While recent studies of later conquest dynasties assert a position that counters this Sinicization model, standard categorization of art into cultural traditions of the Chinese and non-Chinese still persists in writings on this period, despite widespread recognition of the intermingling of populations and artistic practices.

This talk will consider the contradictory nature of these positions on the legacy of early medieval material culture in an effort to uncover a more productive interpretative framework for understanding changes that occurred over the centuries before the Tang.  Examining artifacts from tombs of the fifth and sixth centuries, I will explore the issue of ethnic identity as a means to explain changes in medieval art and culture.  Were rulers of medieval China informed by discernibly "ethnic" attitudes in their adoption of specific cultural practices?   Or do modern scholars project an anachronistic conception of ethnicity on to the distant past to express a contemporary form of cultural patrimony?

Friday, February 6, 2:30 pm 2009
Michel Hockx, Chair of Chinese at University of London and Visiting Professor at Harvard University
“For Poetic Effect: Uses of Chinese Language in Electronic Poetry”
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 164
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. Michel Hockx studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University and Liaoning University. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1994. In 1996 he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In 2002 he was appointed to the Chair of Chinese in the University of London. He is a Visiting Professor at Harvard for the Spring term. Michel Hockx’s research covers two main areas of interest: modern Chinese poetry and poetics, and the sociology of modern Chinese literature. His 1994 monograph A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity discusses the literary ideals and practices of China’s earliest modern poets. His work on sociological aspects of modern Chinese literature began with the publication of an edited volume, The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, in 1999, and culminated in his 2003 monograph Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. More recently he has turned his attention to contemporary Chinese literature, especially the texts and practices of internet literature. Some of this research is presented as a chapter in his Culture in the Contemporary PRC (2005, co-edited with Julia Strauss).

Lecture Abstract: This paper discusses electronic poetry featuring aspects of the Chinese language, including original Chinese-language works, Chinese translations of western works, as well as interactive e-poems that can be displayed in various languages. The emphasis is on ways in which aspects of the Chinese language are used to produce poetic experiences that rely less on the semantic value of words and more on visual stimuli and unconventional sound effects. Visual techniques to be showcased include the “textual morphing” of western writing into Chinese writing and back, used in the work of John Cayley; animated text in work by Jim Andrews and its Chinese-language translations by the Taiwanese e-writer Shuen-shing Lee; and multimedia effects in works by the Chinese-American concrete poet Dajuin Yao. Recent experiments with the use of Flash technology in online poetry from the PRC will also be discussed.

In its conclusion, the paper argues that online electronic poetry from the PRC is significantly less experimental than that produced by Chinese-language e-poets elsewhere. It will also show that PRC scholarship on “web poetry”, though theoretically highly sophisticated, is rarely able to draw on examples or case studies created in the PRC itself to make its arguments. The paper will offer the hypothesis that this discrepancy results from a strong lingering conservatism about poetry and poetics in PRC literary circles, which dictates that poetry should have strong communicative functions and that intelligibility must never be impeded. The audience will be invited to evaluate this hypothesis and to offer alternative explanations. 

Friday, February 13, 2:30 pm 2009
Jianqing Shen, Professor of Comparative Literature at Beijing Language and Culture University and Visiting Professory of Comparative Literature at Harvard University
“Eugene O'Neill in China: Textual Traveling, Cultural Conflicts and Dialogue”
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 164
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. Jianqing Shen, Professor of Comparative Literature, is a faculty member of Chinese Department, College of Humanities, Beijing Language and Culture University (China). She is a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, now affiliated with Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, and, Department of English, University of Texas-Arlington.  In the year 2005, as a Visiting Professor, she taught Chinese contemporary culture and language at East Asian Department, the Ohio State University. She has published several books and many essays on drama and fiction. Her research interests include comparative studies of Chinese and American theaters, and, studies of gender, race and ethnicity issues. Her recent research is focused on Eugene O’Neill and China.  

Lecture Abstract: The main theme of this lecture stems from the speaker’s recent research project of O’Neill’s drama and its interaction with Chinese theater. It is focused on examining the acceptance, transformation and localization of O’Neill’s drama in mainland China. It aims to make philosophical and aesthetical analysis of the conflicts and compromise between American and Chinese cultures in the theater, and, to discuss the necessities as well as possibilities of mutual tolerance and understanding between two different cultures and harmonious co-existence in this world of diversity.

Friday, February 20, 2:30 pm 2009
Jennifer Feeley, Assistant Professor, Asian & Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Iowa
"From Print to Cyberspace: Transformations in Chinese Women's Poetic Communities, 1898-2008"
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 164
1735 Neil Avenue

Jennifer Feeley is an Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Iowa.  She received her PhD in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2008, where she completed a dissertation on early twentieth-century Chinese women poets and canonicity.  Her translations of contemporary Chinese poetry have been published in various books and journals, and her article on Hong Kong poet Yau Ching is forthcoming from the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese.

Lecture Abstract: In late imperial China, the rapid expansion of the popular press, combined with the proliferation of girls’ schools and the unprecedented appearance of women’s organizations, fostered an intellectual climate that helped usher in a revolutionary journalistic enterprise, the women’s press (nübao).  Following the 1898 debut of Chinese Girl’s Progress (Nü xuebao), women came to publicly engage in publishing and writing, acts that contributed to the formation of a new political culture and construction of a newly gendered public sphere.  Poised at the threshold of a transitional era, educated women found themselves negotiating the relatively private role of the traditional talented woman (cainü) from the inner chambers with that of the public self-invention of the modern woman.  Approximately thirty different women’s periodicals emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century, many of which devoted sections to classical-style poetry.  Composed in literary Chinese and adhering to traditional forms, these poems incorporated a new lexicon and content reflective of the politically charged context of the late Qing dynasty, demonstrating a new social function for women’s poetry signaled by the merging of revolutionary thought with poetic skill. 

A hundred years after the founding of Chinese Girl’s Progress, poets Zhou Zan and Zhai Yongming established the unofficial women’s poetry journal Wings (Yi) in Beijing with the intention of showcasing female-authored works primarily on the basis of their artistic merit.  Originally a print publication, Wings is now also available online and has expanded to include various electronic discussion forums on topics concerning gender, literature, culture, and world affairs, creating a virtual assemblage of international readers and writers.  Ten years prior to Wings, another unofficial women’s poetry publication, The Women’s Poetry Paper (Nüzi shibao), was established in Sichuan.  Like Wings, it has now extended into the digital realm; unlike Wings, however, gender consciousness, more than literary quality, is one of the main determinants for inclusion. 

This talk will explore the evolution of Chinese women’s poetry groups over approximately the last hundred years, beginning with the loosely formed imagined print communities of the early twentieth century and continuing to female poetry circles of the present day.  Particular attention will be given to groupings from three historical junctures: the turn-of-the-century late Qing women’s press; the Wild Rose Society and Shanghai Women’s Bookstore of the Republican era; and contemporary women’s poetry journals and online communities such as Wings and The Women’s Poetry Paper. Questions to be addressed include the changing definitions and dynamics of such groups; how standards for assessing women’s poetic production have progressed during the past century, if at all; and the transformation of the relationship among poetry, gender, and media in modern and contemporary China.

Friday, February 27, 2:30 pm 2009
Andrea Bachner, Assistant Professor, Comparative and World Literatures, The Ohio State University
"Future's Other Pasts: Primitivism in Contemporary Sinophone Texts"
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 164
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. Andrea Bachner is an Assistant Professor of Comparative and World Literatures in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University.  She has published articles on critical theory, interculturality, literature and cinema in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and is currently working on a book project:  Alterity, Mediality, and the Sinograph investigates how contemporary sinophone writers and artists reshape, decenter, and reflect upon the Chinese writing system and its cultural archive from positions of diaspora, interculturality, as well as regional, ethnic, and cultural difference, and how they engage with, translate, and contest Western theories of writing and mediality.

Lecture Abstract: Primitivism, understood as an aesthetic and philosophical strategy that draws inspiration from nature or so-called pre-civilized cultures, is usually linked to Western, especially modernist cultural paradigms. After Rey Chow’s invocation of primitivism in her discussion of China’s Fifth-Generation film, but more forcefully after the unprecedented success of Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem (Lang tuteng) in 2004, a fascination with the primal has to be acknowledged as an important creative force in contemporary Chinese culture as well. This talk will discuss three Chinese primitivist novels from different sinophone contexts: Jiang Rong’s PRC novel Wolf Totem, The Remains of Life (Yusheng, 1999) by Taiwanese writer Wuhe, and Monkey Cup (Houbei, 2000) by Malaysian-Chinese novelist Zhang Guixing. It will focus on how these texts use primitivism to renegotiate the complexity of “Chineseness” from their specific cultural contexts in the face of interculturality.

Friday, March 6, 2:30 pm 2009
David Knechtges, Professor, Asian Languages and Literature, University of Washington
"The Problems with Anthologies: The Case of the Poems of Ying Qu (190-252)
Co-sponsors: EASC
Jennings Hall, Room 164
1735 Neil Avenue

Dr. David R. Knechtges is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Washington. He also has taught at Yale, Wisconsin, and Harvard. He  is the author of  over 100 articles and nine books including Two Studies of the Han Fu (1968), The Han Rhapsody: A Study of the Fu of Yang Hsiung (53 B.C. –A.D.18) (1976), The Han shu Biography of Yang Xiong (1982), Wen-xuan or Selections of Refined Literature. Volume One. Rhapsodies on Metropolises and Capitals (1982), Wen xuan or Selections of Refined Literature. Volume Two. Rhapsodies on Sacrifices, Hunts, Travel, Palaces and Halls, Rivers and Seas (1987), Wen xuan, Volume Three, Rhapsodies on Natural Phenomena, Birds and Animals, Aspirations and Feelings, Sorrowful Laments, Literature, Music and Passions (1996), Editor and co-translator, Gong Kechang. Studies of the Han Fu (1997), Court Culture and Literature in Early China (2002), Co-editor, with Paul Kroll. Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History (2003), Co-editor, with Eugene Vance, Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture, East and West, 2005. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lecture Abstract: The shi poems in the Wen xuan are classified into twenty-three categories. There is one troublesome category designated “Bai yi” 百一, which literally means “one hundred one” or “one of a hundred.” The “Bai yi” category in the Wen xuan contains only one poem by a single poet, Ying Qu 應璩 (190–252). Li Shan 李善 (d. 689) in his commentary to the Wen xuan records four explanations of title “Bai yi” all of which state that Ying Qu’s poems contained veiled criticisms of contemporary affairs. In this paper, I examine the extant fragments of Ying Qu’s poems. I also consider the question of why some sources designate his poems not as “Bai yi,” but xin shi 新詩 or “new poems.” I adduce evidence to show that Ying Qu was considered throughout the Wei, Jin, Nanbeichao period the premier author of poems critical of contemporary affairs, and his poems were called “new” because he was the first poet to use the pentasyllabic form to write a series of critical poems. I also reconsider Ying Qu’s “Bai yi” poem included in the Wen xuan and argue that it may actually contain an implicit criticism of the court.

“Rethinking China” Lecture Series

Founded in 2001, the Institute for Chinese Studies sees its mission to study the Chinese world in its full regional, linguistic, cultural and ethnic complexity. As the People’s Republic of China is reemerging as a major international force, it is important to look to beyond a monolithic perception of “China” and instead develop a dynamic, diverse and multicultural view of what is designated as “China” and “Chinese.”

In the current hype surrounding China’s resurgence, history often gets lost. To counter such amnesia, ICS seeks to foster historical perspectives designed to show “China” as a process of complex interactions between shifting centers and peripheries, indigenous peoples and internal settlers, foreign sojourners and immigrant communities, universalist aspirations and ethnic minority rule, transregional and cross-border exchanges, and between competing historiographies within China and beyond.
In order to explore these multiple linguistic and cultural facets, the 2006-07 ICS Lecture Series “Rethinking China” was born. Topics to be explored by speakers in the coming year include the border-crossing of shamanistic practices, Tibetan Buddhism and state-building in modern China, Southwestern Chinese folklore, Taiwanese documentary filmmaking, and contemporary Chinese-Malay writers among others.

OSU College of Humanities coverage of this lecture series:
http://humanities.osu.edu/news/express/yr2006/september_article03.cfm



Fall 2007 "Rethinking China" Presentation

November 2, 2007
Steven B. Miles (Washington University in St. Louis)
Lecture: “Social Mobility, Local Identity, and Cultural Production in Nineteenth-Century Guangzhou”
Time and Location: 1:30pm; 110 Orton Hall

Steven Miles is an assistant professor in the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests encompass the social and cultural history of early modern China, including the geographical and social mobility in the creation of a Cantonese frontier along the West River basin during the early modern era. In his presentation, Prof. Miles will revisit the main themes of his recent book, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006).  Prof. Miles describes how he came to focus on Guangzhou’s famous Xuehaitang academy as part of a shift from intellectual history to local social and cultural history. He argues that the group of scholars most closely associated with the Xuehaitang was largely composed of urban, in-migrating, socially ascendant elites.  Through the production of localist texts celebrating “Cantonese” culture, literati associated with the Xuehaitang articulated a local identity different from that found in texts produced by the lineage-based elites of the Pearl River delta hinterland.

“RealWorlds” Lecture Series
Real Professionals - Real Experiences - Real World Business. Within the context of Ohio State’s commitment to becoming a truly global university, ICS's new "RealWorlds" Lecture Series will feature a diverse line-up of successful business professionals. These professionals will share their experiences, expertise, and insights on international careers and related issues. The RealWorlds lecture series aims to stimulate students’ imaginations, facilitate the development of an international perspective, raise interest in international study, and demonstrate the many paths towards global careers (particularly relating to China and Asia). Download the RealWorlds flier here.



Fall 2007 “RealWorlds” Presentations

October 24, 2007
Jeanne Bartholomew; International Business and Development Consultant
Presentation: "So…you want to pursue an International Career?”
Location: 305 Schoenbaum Hall
Time: 12:30pm

Jeanne Bartholomew is an OSU graduate and Ohio entrepreneur with, quite literally, a world of experience. Over the past 15 years, Jeanne has negotiated business deals in China, managed or consulted on World Bank and UNDP projects in Mongolia, provided marketing advice to apple growers in Moldova, and even witnessed first-hand the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia while serving as a rural development specialist on a USDA project. Jeanne has authored, coauthored, edited and translated numerous publications, project proposals and studies for governments, NGOs, and businesses around the globe. As the inaugural speaker in ICS’s new “RealWorlds Lecture Series”, Jeanne will share her vast experience, provide valuable insight, and discuss the realities involved in preparing for and pursuing an international career. Students, faculty, and members of the general public are welcome to attend what promises to be a fascinating presentation.


November 1, 2007
Orian Williams; Financial Leadership Development Program Analyst, Johnson & Johnson
Presentation: "Local goes Global: A recent OSU alumnus's story of building an international career in business"
Location:330 Schoenbaum Hall
Time:12:30pm

Recent Ohio State alumnus, Orian Williams, has made it his life's passion to become a leading expert on the Asian Pacific Rim. During his time as an undergraduate he was able to become involved in a number of activities and programs both within and outside of the traditional classroom, which would ultimately prepare him for a career including a number of international travel assignments in Asia and elsewhere. Since graduating from OSU his work in financial audit in the Pacific Rim and domestically for a Fortune 100 company has taken him to Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Japan. Orian will describe the components of his collegiate experiences that best prepared him for his role as a financial analyst working globally, including coursework, international study, language study and tutoring, internships, and extracurricular activities that were integral to his future in global business markets. Orian holds dual degrees in Business Administration (Fisher) and International Studies (Arts & Sciences). Orian looks forward to the chance to share his story with students and members of the university community interested in international studies and international careers.


November 16, 2007
Edward Fisher; Property and Casualty Practice Leader, Oswald Companies
Lecture: “From Toys to Pet Food: Product Liability, the US, and China”
Location:305 Schoenbaum Hall
Time:12:30pm

Edward Fisher is Property and Casualty Practice Leader and one of the senior Employee-Owners of the Oswald Companies—the largest independent broker in the state of Ohio (45th in the US), with $45,000,000 in revenue, 400 employees, and a 115 year history. Ed has over 25 years of experience as an insurance professional, and has worked on the risk management programs of some of the world’s largest companies including General Motors, TRW, British Petroleum, Marathon Oil and Owens-Illinois. Recent news headlines have highlighted the potential risk to children, adult consumers, US distributors, US retailers, and “iconic” brand global manufacturers arising from deficient products manufactured and imported into the U.S. marketplace. Even international relations between the US and China are being affected by these events. Ed Fisher’s presentation will explore the legal background, product liability/risk management issues impacting US distributors, US brand manufacturers, Chinese manufacturers, and US governmental agencies. What are the legal liability ramifications to US companies? How will US consumers respond? Are there insurance solutions?  The timely subject matter of Ed Fisher’s presentation will be of interest to all consumers, business professionals, and students interested in a global career.

Spring 2007 “Rethinking China” Lectures

April 13, 2007
Christopher Atwood (Indiana University)
Lecture: "Clansmen from the Barbarian Tribes: Can We Actually Find Them North of China?"
Time and Location: 1:30pm; Room 251 Hagerty Hall

Christopher Atwood received his PhD from Indiana University in 1994.  His research interests include Mongolian nationalism in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia (China); Mongol and Chinese elites in the Mongol Empire; family history and demography.  His current projects include translations of Chinese primary sources on the Mongol world empire; family and marriage in Mongolia's imperial and Qing-era upper class. Dr. Atwood’s publications include Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire and Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades 1911-1931.

April 19, 2007
Sarah Fraser (Chair, Department of Art History; Northwestern University)
Lecture: “Antiquarianism or Primitivism?: The Edge of the Chinese Imagination in Republican China (1928-1947)”
Time and Location: 5pm; Room 162 Hopkins Hall

Dr. Sarah Fraser teaches and researches primarily in Chinese painting with an emphasis on questions of gender, national identity formation, and artistic enterprise. Her books include Performing the Visual: Buddhist Wall Painting Practice in China and Central Asia, 618-960. (Stanford University Press, 2004), which concerns Chinese theories of spontaneity and workshop production in the middle period. Fraser's edited volume on Buddhist material culture published by the Shanghai Fine Arts Publishers, 2003, Merit, Opulence and the Buddhist Network of Wealth, contains the Chinese proceedings of a major conference she organized with Peking University in 2001. Fraser also directs an international research project on Buddhist art at Northwestern. Under the auspices of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this path breaking 3-D digital archive features wall paintings and manuscripts from western China in a multimedia environment.  She served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2000-2003 and now serves as Chair. This event is co-hosted with OSU Department of History of Art: http://history-of-art.osu.edu/ . For more information, please contact Prof. Susan Huntington Huntington.1@osu.edu.

April 26-27, 2007
Dan Shao (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Lecture: “From Conquerors to the Colonized: Manchus' Pasts in the Present”
Time and Location: 1:30pm; Room 130 Page Hall

Dr. Shao is assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her chief areas of research include China’s borderlands (Manchuria/Northeast China), issues of ethnicity (Manchus), Sino-Japanese relations, and the legal history of Modern China. Prof. Shao’s publications include: Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire. Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.; "Between Empire and Nation: Manchus and Manchuria in the early 20th century," Special Issue on Manchuria as a borderland, East Asian History, forthcoming, December 2005. She is currently working on her book, Borderlanders in Empire and Nation: Manchus, Manchoukuo and Manchuria (1909-1985) and another paper titled "Chinese by Definition: Jus Sanguinis and Nationality Law, 1909-1982".
Based on interviews, unpublished investigation reports, local gazetteers (difangzhi), genealogical records, and memoirs, Prof. Shao’s presentation will analyze the reconfiguration of the Manchus' ethnic and national identities, viewed through the prism of their memories of two Manchu empires­—the  late Qing Empire and “Manchoukuo” (1932-1945).

May 3, 2007
Laurent Sagart (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique [CNRS]; Paris, France)
Lecture: The Baxter-Sagart System of Old Chinese Reconstruction, Version 0.97
Time and Location: 3:30pm; Room 359 Hagerty Hall

Dr. Sagart is Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Paris, France). His research interests encompass Chinese dialectology, especially the Gan-Hakka dialects; Old Chinese reconstruction; morphology and etymology; Chinese loanwords into neighboring languages; and genetic relationships of Chinese-Tibeto-Burman with Austronesian. He has been Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University (1987-89), at the University of Hawai'i (1992-1993), at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2000, 2001), and at La Trobe University in Australia (1999). He is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University. Dr. Sagart is the author of The Roots of Old Chinese, and serves as a member of the editorial committees of Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale, and of Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris.

May 11, 2007
Justin Tighe (The Ohio State University; University of Melbourne)
Lecture: “Rethinking the Frontier: Northwest Travel in Republican China”
Time and Location: 1:30pm; Room 251 Hagerty Hall

Dr. Justin Tighe, a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, is currently a post-doctoral fellow sponsored by the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University. His research interests include late Qing / Republican constructions of Inner Asia and their significance in the making of empire and nation state. Tighe is the author of Constructing Suiyuan: The Politics of Northwestern Territory and Development in Early Twentieth Century China (Brill 2005). He is currently teaching a course at OSU titled “Taiwan: Transformation and Identity,” which examines contemporary Taiwan within its historical context, focusing on the cultural and physical landscape changes over the past 400 years. During Spring 2007 he will teach a course titled “China and Inner Asia”.

May 30, 2007
Li Yu (Williams College)
Lecture: “Women’s Reading in Late Imperial China”
Time and Location: 3:30pm; Room 115 Mendenhall Lab

Dr. Yu is an assistant professor of Chinese language and culture at Williams College. Her research interests encompass Chinese language pedagogy, the history of reading in late Imperial China, and multimedia learning materials development. Li Yu’s current research involves utilizing data made possible through the recently launched McGill-Harvard Yenching digital library to examine poems written by women poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. Through this research, Dr. Yu hopes to develop a better understanding of the poets’ self image as readers (mostly through the perspective of gender) and the concept of dushu  (reading/learning), while at the same time trying to construct a detailed overview of elite women's reading experiences as a whole.
Dr. Yu’s lecture will explore the reading activities of several historical female readers/writers of the Jiangnan area, and investigates how the act of reading played a critical role in elite women’s daily life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Event co-sponsored with OSU’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL): http://deall.osu.edu/

Previous 2006-2007 “Rethinking China” Lectures

ICS “Rethinking China” Inaugural Lecture:
“China and the Islamic World in the Medieval Period: A General View”
Dr. Liu Yingsheng
Nanjing University
Thursday August 3rd, 2006

This talk will address the historical relationships between China and pre-Islamic and Islamic societies.  The presentation will explore the early contacts between the Chinese and Muslims, with particular attention to the formation of the Muslim (Huihui) minority group in China. The lecture will cover the social status and language practices of Muslims in medieval China.
Professor Yingsheng LIU received his Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1985. Since 1988, he is a Professor of History at Nanjing University, where he also heads the Institute for Asian Studies and the Institute for Korean Studies. He also serves as the deputy chair National Chinese National Society of the History of Mongols since 1997 and the chair of the Chinese National Society of Mongol-Yuan Studies since 2004. He is a specialist on Sino-Islamic relations and has published extensively in that field.

Liu Yingsheng Flier (PDF)

“Silver Butterflies: Displaying Miao (Hmong) Folklife in China”
Ms. Wu Yifang
 Guizhou Provincial Museum
Wednesday October 25th, 2006

      Wu Yifang is a public sector folklorist in the ethnic minority division of the Guizhou Provincial Museum in mountainous Guizhou province in southwest China.  Numbering about 8 million, the Miao (or Hmong) are one of the largest ethnic minority groups in China, with strong traditions of folk song and story, folk dance, and a material culture that includes weaving and silver work. Along with PowerPoint presentation images, Wu will demonstrate a number of these folk traditions and discuss how they are integrated into museum and tourist displays.  The daughter of Miao scholar and epic singer, Jin Dan, Wu will also perform a short segment of a Miao antiphonal epic recently translated by Prof. Mark Bender, DEALL. Everyone is welcome to this exciting presentation which will enhance our understanding of the diversity of China.

Wu Yifang Flier (PDF)

“Shamanistic Remains as Seen from Xinjiang Archaeology”
Dr. Wang Binghua
Friday Nov. 17th, 2006

The Institute for Chinese Studies is proud to present Dr. Wang Binghua, renowned scholar and specialist of Xinjiang archaeology. Dr. Wang is currently a visiting scholar at Yale University, and his research on the mummies of Xinjiang, China has been featured in both NOVA and Discovery Channel documentaries.
Dr. Wang’s presentation will begin with a focus on recent archaeological work in Xinjiang, which has revealed early shamanistic remains in the Altai, Lop Nor, and Turfan areas.  Additionally, he will discuss some basic concepts in shamanistic worship, drawing examples from the Hezhen, Ewenki, and Oroqen peoples.  He will also discuss the objects of shamanistic worship, and their associated rituals. Included in Dr. Wang’s presentation will be a discussion regarding archaeological discoveries of shamanistic remains in the Altai Mountains, the Lop Nor Xiaohe, Gumugou, Turfan Yanghai, and Hami Wubao Bronze Age burial grounds; as well as the burial grounds of Turkish leader Bilga Khaghan (AD 716-734) in Mongolia.

Wang Binghua Flier (PDF)

“Translating the West”
Dr. Kuei-fen Chiu
National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan
Friday Feb. 9th, 2007

The Institute for Chinese Studies is proud to present Dr. Kuei-fen Chiu, Professor of Taiwan Literature in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Tsing-Hua University. Since the early 1990s, she has been teaching and conducting research on postcolonial theories, feminist literary criticism, and Taiwan women’s fiction. Her recent areas of research include documentary studies, historiography and popular culture from below.

“Translating the West”
“Translating the West” is a problem for many non-Western countries. While cultural translation may be seen as an indispensable constituent of modernity, the practice of ‘translating the West” is always tied up with the question of Western cultural imperialism. Dubbed as “literature of Westernization,” Taiwanese modernist literature in the 1960s generated heated debates that have far-reaching repercussions to date. Focusing on the controversy raised by Taiwanese modernist writers’ determined pursuit of modernity through “Westernization”, this talk will re-think the issues revolving around the practice of translating the West in the field of Taiwanese literary production. How should we re-conceptualize the problem of “translating the West” which has become, in a sense, part of the tradition of literary production in Taiwan and many non-Western countries?

Kuei-fen Chiu Flier (PDF)