Co-Sponsored Events
2005 - 2006
- December 3, 2005
Fredrick Cooper, Professor of History, New York University
Roundtable Discussion with Fredrick Cooper on his most recent book, "Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History"
Facilitator: Uta Poiger (History), Commentators: Moon-Ho Jung (History), Laurie Sears (History), John Toews (History)
Over the past three decades, Fredrick Cooper's influential scholarship has addressed a wide range of thematic areas including the comparative history of slavery, labor, colonialism, and post-colonial rule. His publications include "Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World" (co-edited with Ann Laura Stoler, 1997) and "Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present" (2002).
This roundtable is part of the History Department Colloquium Series and is sponsored by the Project for Critical Asian Studies, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Department of History, the African Studies Program, and the Jackson School of International Studies.
- February 24, 2006
Henk Maier, Professor of Asian Languages and Literature, University of California (Riverside)
"Tales of Confusion and Delay: Rise and Demise of Indonesian Literature"
Talking and writing about Indonesian literature is a difficult and challenging responsibility: it is a largely unknown and unnoticed entity outside and inside Indonesia. Indonesian literature seems to constantly unmake itself in local conversations - and it remains out of order even in recent discussions of world literature. What is happening to it? How to explain the failure and indifference? Perhaps it is a matter of confused beginnings and exuberant expectations. It certainly is a problem of language. And most of all, it is a matter of deficient translations.
- February 23 – 26, 2006
Workshop: Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?
A Workshop organized by Tani E. Barlow (History and Women Studies)
Workshop Website
This workshop inaugurates a multi-year Project on Culture and Politics in XXth Century China. In 2006 we will consider the Cultural Revolution as a field of scholarly research and explore the causes of the field's current epistemic and political impoverishment. Since this event has tended to elude historical consideration, we will pose questions of methodological and philosophical perspectives as well as research procedures, raise the question of how researchers, students, and teachers can handle the tidal wave of newly released archival material, and conclude by asking where the events of these years fit in broader 20th century history. The workshop concludes with a daylong Roundtable Discussion entitled “Rethinking XXth Century Chinese History.”
Sponsored by the China Studies Program and the East Asia Center at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, the Simpson Center, and the College of Arts & Sciences). Translation and Publication Assistance from the Project for Critical Asian Studies.
- March 9, 2006
Angelika von Wahl, Department of Political Science and International Relations, San Francisco State University
"Getting Away With Murder? The Struggle over Reparations in Germany and Japan after 1945 "
The lecture is part of a larger research project on reparations which is aimed at the comparative study of governmental attempts to provide material and symbolic rectification in cases of human rights abuse. While many states have participated at some time or another in the infliction of injustice and in atrocities—be it during war with neighboring states, colonization of other countries or acts within their own territory—it seems that relatively few cases of human rights abuse have produced reparations. With the rise of human rights as an internationally recognized field of rights and law, especially after the Nuremberg Trials, it becomes increasingly important to ask what factors lead governments to agree to pay reparations and, more specifically, what kind of reparations and why? While some states have publicly apologized, paid compensations, or returned lost property, other states do literally “get away with murder.” When and why are claimants and survivors successful and when and do their demands fall on deaf ears? A selection of several human rights abuse cases during WWII in Japan and Germany shows that not only the crime itself but also political factors, such as mobilization, framing of the issues and the identity of survivors, play a central role in explaining the kind and extent of government involvement.
This talk is sponsored by the Project for Critical Asian Studies, the Center for Western European Studies, and Germanics.
- April 21, 2006
"Truth and Rights in Times of Terror: The Politics of Violence in Contemporary Latin America"
As the political terrain for human rights discussions in Latin America shifts in response to global events and US policies since September 11, 2001, how do nation-states and local communities explain, historicize, and re-politicize or silence their experiences of violence? This interdisciplinary symposium brings together specialists in human rights issues to explore how ongoing national truth and reconciliation projects and the intersecting policies of the US War on Terror and the War on Drugs have reshaped the politics of violence in the Andes. The questions we aim to examine include the following: What does it mean to construct a “truth,” or a national historical record and narrative, about the massive abuses committed under counterinsurgency regimes while at the same time deferring to US dictates in the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism? How have national governments and/or local communities appropriated or critiqued the Bush administration’s rhetoric on “terrorism” and policies of militarization? How do local community members understand both their incorporation as citizens into national projects of creating historical narratives about violence and their role in international discourses on human rights and democracy? How do they critique these roles when they are simultaneously excluded from the full benefits of citizenship in the nation-state and subject to internationally sponsored state violence and coercion?
A symposium presented by Latin American Studies with support from the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Law, Society, and Justice Program, Critical Asian Studies, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
- April 27, 2006
"Love in the Multitude"
Michael Hardt, English, Duke University
How can love function as a political concept? In many ways a political conception of love has been undermined - by the quarantine of love within the confines of the couple and the family, by the segregation of love into a personal Eros and generic public forms of the love of the people, and by conceptions of love as a merging in unity, a love of the same, love becoming the same. Reading Freud and Augustine, Scholem and Bersani, Arendt and Che Guevara, this talk will be an effort to formulate a political conception of love.
Sponsored by the Institute for Transnational Studies, the Project for Critical Asian Studies and the Department of History.
- May 3, 2006
Andrew Ross, American Studies, New York University
"Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade"
This talk is based on a year's worth of field work in Yangtze Delta cities among skilled Chinese employees and foreign managers working in multinational subsidiaries.
Cosponsored by the Project for Critical Asian Studies, the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.
2004 - 2005
- October 14, 2004
Severyns-Ravenholt Lecture
Zainah Anwar, Executive Director, Sisters in Islam
“Islam and Women's Rights"
Zainah Anwar is the 2004 Severyns-Ravenholt Lecturer. Ms. Anwar is Executive Director of Sisters in Islam, a non-governmental organization working for the rights of Muslim women within the framework of Islam. Sisters in Islam, founded in 1988, is at the forefront of the women's movement which seeks to end discrimination against women in the name of religion. The group's activities in research, advocacy, public education, and legal services help to promote the development of Islam that upholds the principles of equality, justice, freedom and dignity within a democratic state. Her book, Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia: Dakwah Among the Students, has become a standard reference in the study of Islam in Malaysia. Ms Anwar has also served as a member of the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia.
- Oct 18, 2004
Charlene Makley (Reed College),
”'Speaking Bitterness': Autobiography,History and Mnemonic Politics on the Sino-Tibetan Frontier"
Makley addresses the problematic relationship between memory and historiography by exploring the cultural politics of history and narrative practice among Tibetans in the People's Republic of China.
- Dec 6, 2004
Joseph Errington, (Yale University)
”Shapes of Change in Javanese Indonesia(n): Language and Identity in Troubled Times"
Errington will examine Indonesian and Javanese language at the fluid boundary between ethnic and national identities, and a point of production for covert markers of new forms of class difference in everyday life.
- February 1, 2005
Claudia Pozzana, University of Bologna
“Thinking Poetry. Figures of Thought in Two Contemporary Chinese Poets: Bei Dao and Yang Lian”
Poetry develops its own logical strategies through the elaboration of singular figures of thought. In Bei Dao sequences of ceaseless variations aim to establish forms of distances of poetry from other rationlalities such as love and politics. In Yang Lian large architectural compositions aim to establish a distance of poetry from its own self representation. In both of them the process of unnaming the poet is a prerequisite of the existence of poem as a form of thought. Professor Pozzana is an accomplished poet, translator, and specialist in translation theory. She recently published an edited volume entitled: Yang Lian: Dove si ferma il mare; Dahai tingzhi zhi chu; Where the sea stands still, Milan: Scheiwiller, 2004.
- March 10, 2005
Walton Look Lai, History, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad
“The Other Asian American: Labor Migration to the Caribbean Region After 1838”
This talk will address the global and local circumstances leading to the migration of more than half a million laborers from China and India to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century as indentured sugar workers. These migrations, Look Lai will suggest, can be interpreted as a tropical version of American multiculturalism and as part of the larger Asian dispersal of the European colonial periphery in the age of imperialism.
Sponsored by the Department of History, the Project for Critical Asian Studies, and the Simpson
Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.
2003 - 2004
- December 5, 2003
Tariq Ali, editor, New Left Review
Author of The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, and Modernity (2002) and Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq (2003)
"Resistance and Empire"
Presented by the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and Elliott Bay Books, with generous co-sponsorship from the School of Law, the Comparative Law & Society Studies (CLASS) Center, the Middle East Center*, the Institute for Global and Regional Security Studies, Project for Critical Asian Studies, the Departments of Sociology, American Ethnic Studies, Political Science, History, Anthropology, Comparative History of Ideas (CHID), Women Studies, and Law, Societies, & Justice at the University of Washington, and Campus for Peace and Justice and the Arab American Community Coalition.
- December 1, 2003
Yu Hua, Novelist
Lecture and Film Screening: "To Live and To Write"
Co-sponsored by East Asia Center, Jackson School of International Studies, the China Studies Program and the Project for Critical Asian Studies at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
- October 20, 2003 3:30-5:30pm
Prof. Rukmini Nair, Faculty of Humanities, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi
“The Sacred Thread of Theory: Postcolonial Criticism and Its Emotional Consequences”
2002 - 2003
- January 23, 2003
Rey Chow (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities, Brown University)
"Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Biopower"
- February 6, 2003
Gail Hershatter (History & Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
"Forget Remembering: Gender in China's Rural Collective Past"
- February 6, 2003
War, Peace, and Reconciliation: A Conversation among Writers from Three Sides of the Vietnam Warwith internationally award-winning Vietnamese filmmaker, Tran Van Thuy
- April 27 & 28, 2003
Feminisms X Fundamentalisms: A Symposium on Politics, Religion, and Culture in Contemporary South Asia
Keynote Speaker: Professor Tanika Sarkar (Jawarhar Lal Nehru University)
Paper Presenters: Shelley Feldman (Cornell University), Amina Jamal (University of Toronto) Anita Weiss (University of Oregon), and Keri Olsen (Syracuse University)
