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Announcements
Leo Ching
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"Champions of Justice":
How "Asian" Heroes Saved Japanese Imperialism
Leo Ching , Duke University
Thursday, 28 May 2009, 3:30 p.m.
Communications Building, Room 202
Through the analysis of postwar Japanese popular culture, especially those of children’s culture with its heroes and adventures, Ching argues that postwar Japan maintained a remarkable continuity in its orientalizing and imperializing of Southeast Asia.
Looking specifically at the genre of early “TV movies” (terebi eiga), he suggests that the impoverished condition of the immediate postwar Japan (re)produced the familiar figures of “Asian” heroes from the prewar and wartime era and redefined the notion of “justice” that enabled Japan to enjoy the trauma of its imperialist endeavors in Southeast Asia and articulate its reconfigured positionality within a U.S. dominant postwar postcolonial Asia. |
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Asian L&L Literature Colloquium Series
H. Mack Horton
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Princess Nukata and the Birth of Man'yô Poetry
H. Mack Horton, University of California at Berkeley
Friday, 30 January 2009, 3:30 p.m.
Communications Building, Room 202
Princess Nukata (Nukata no ôkimi fl. mid 7th c.) is the first important poetic figure in Man'yôshû. Her dozen or so extant verses (the count differs) reflect the intersection between the primordial world of Japanese oral invocations to the gods, declaimed on behalf of the sovereign, and newly imported concepts of the literary and cultured courtier and the individual, lyric voice.
To suggest the scope of Nukata’s oeuvre and her important transitional position in the trajectory of ancient poetry, this paper examines two of Nukata’s representative works. The first, attributed to Nukata in the headnotes and to the female sovereign Saimei in the footnotes, is situated within the lineage of ancient ritual verse composed by nameless bards and appropriated by their rulers. But it also reflects a new notion of proxy composition, and a new objectivization of the poetic self, as well as a more subtle approach to literary recollection of the past. The second verse has long been cited as evidence of a tragic romantic triangle between Nukata and two sovereigns who loved her: her husband Tenmu and Tenmu’s elder brother Tenchi, who stole her away.
There is, however, reason to suspect that the poem was not a biographical cri de coeur, but a new type of fictive banquet poem presented at Tenchi’s Sinified Ômi court. |
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Japan and The History of Writing
David Lurie, Columbia University
Thursday, 12 February 2009, 3:30 p.m.
Communications Building, Room 202
The Japanese script often comes up in discussions of the history of writing, because of its compound nature, its reputed complexity, and its status as (along with Chinese and Korean) one of the only writing
systems currently in use that did not develop out of the Semitic scripts from which the Greek and Roman alphabets and Indic writing are descended. A closer look at the development of Japanese writing confirms that it is of great interest for the history of writing, but not necessarily in the ways that are often assumed. By examining a few selected examples of early Japanese writing, from archaeological sources and from transmitted literary works of the 8th century C.E., this talk illustrates new perspectives on the relations between Japanese language and inscription that have important implications for
the literary and cultural history of East Asia, and for the study of writing in general.
Roundtable: Asia and The History of Writing
David Lurie, Columbia University
Richard Salomon, University of Washington
William Boltz, University of Washington
Zev Handel, University of Washington
Haicheng Wang, University of Washington
Friday, 13 February 2009, 3:30 p.m.
Communications Building, Room 202
Following Professor Lurie's talk on Thursday, this roundtable of experts on various regions, periods, and disciplines will discuss various issues in the early history of writing in Asia, with a focus on the migration of scriptal systems.
Co-sponsored by the East Asia Center, the Japan Studies Program, and the Simpson Center. |
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Title TBA
Leo T.S. Ching, Duke University
Thursday, 28 May 2009, 3:30 p.m.
Communications Building, Room 202
Leo Ching's research interests include colonial discourse studies, postcolonial theory, Japanese mass culture, and theories of globalization and regionalism. In addition to his book Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation, he has published in boundary 2, positions and Public Culture. |
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Centennial Lecture
A Fire Pot of Tongues:
Asian Languages in a New Global Environment
Michael Shapiro and Zev Handel
Thursday, November 19, 2008
Kane Hall, Room 120
Japanese and Chinese have now taken their place alongside European languages in the curricula of many American schools. Other Asian languages are not far behind. Will Chinese soon replace English as the global lingua franca? This lecture will explore the new global status of Asian languages and their historical interactions with European languages. There is more to this relationship than you might have imagined.
This lecture is part of the Centennial Lecture Series. |
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NEW FACULTY PUBLICATIONS
The Departments congratulates faculty members for the publication of their latest work:
Bi, N-P. (2008) Integrated Chinese, Level 1, Part 1, Textbook, Workbook, and Character Workbook (co-author). 3rd ed. Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company. |
Bhowmik, D. (2008) Writing Okinawa:
Narrative acts of identity and resistance. New York: Routledge |
Kim, S-H. You Speak Korean! Book 3, Intermediate Korean. Seattle: Paradigm Busters. |
Mori, Junko and Ohta, Amy Snyder (Eds.) (2008). Japanese Applied Linguistics. London; New York: Continuum. |
Hok-Lam Chan (2008). Legends of the Building of Old Peking. Seattle: UW Press |
Pauwels, H. (2008) The Goddess as Role Model: Sita and Radha in Scripture and on Screen. New York:Oxford University Press |
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