Sponsored Talks
2005 - 2006
- February 13, 2006
Hwa Shin Lee, Rockefeller Resident Fellow, Project for Critical Asian Studies
"What Nationality is Your Suffering?: Korean Comfort Women's Han Through a Transnational Perspective"
Representation is often a key site for struggle within postcolonial discourses. This talk addresses violence against the non-European or the non-Western woman who is defined as "the other," by focusing on the stories of Korean sex slave, popularly known as "comfort women," in the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. Dr. Lee will survey the historical and literary representations of those nameless, voiceless, and faceless victims/survivors as a place to begin to explore the possibility of making better sense of and bringing justice to the Korean question
Dr. Lee will also discuss the broader implications for the politics of representation in this talk, raising questions such as: How can we recognize Korean comfort women beyond their current "triply-otherized" image? how should their acute and yet un(der)examined suffering be told both today and in years to come? What difference would our revisiting of the Korean question here and now make to our present understanding of the words human suffering more broadly? What theoretical resources are available that might help us to better understand the many different forms and kins of suffering across the boundaries of nations and states?
- May 15, 2006
Chie Ikeya, Rockefeller Resident Fellow, Project for Critical Asian Studies
“The Story of Sein Kyi: Remembering the Japanese Occupation of Burma (1942-1945)”
“Oh Sein Kyi, Sein Kyi,
You have erred, you have erred.
To Tokyo he has left, your Japanese lord.
Left you, he has, rotund with child.”
The body of historical narratives on the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia during the Second World War is marked by a contrast. In the largely Euro-American meta-narrative of the battle between the free, Allied forces and the fascist, Axis camp, Japan’s policies and conducts in Southeast Asia are represented through atrocities such as the infamous “comfort women,” the maltreatment of POWs in forced labor camps along the “Death Railway,” and “Sookching” or the purging of Chinese communities. The Japan-centric perspective, in contrast, sees the occupation of Southeast Asia during the war through the lens of pan-Asianism, with its benign familial ideology and the expressed goal of liberating fellow Asian peoples from the shackles of European colonialism. While these meta-narratives of the Second World War in Southeast Asia, articulated through the tropes of trauma and liberation, have been illustrative of the Euro-American and the Japanese interpretations of the war, they have failed to examine the reception of the war in Southeast Asia itself.
The talk examines historical narratives of the Japanese Occupation of Burma during the Second World War (1942-1945) and brings into dialogue the predominant Euro-American, Japanese, and Burmese narratives of the Occupation. Dr. Ikeya will present various visual and literary representations of the Occupation, including oral histories, and explore the varied ways in which the Occupation was received locally and within a broader context of Japan’s rise as a non-European, modern, imperial power, or, “the light of Asia.” Around what lieux de mémoire have individual and collective Burmese memories of the Occupation cohered? Which representations of the impact of the Japan’s emergence and defeat as an Asian imperial power and the place of WWII in the history of Southeast Asia came to be dominant and why? The talk will conclude with a discussion of one of the few memories about the Japanese Occupation that survive in the Burmese collective memory: a song that chastises a Burmese woman who is abandoned with child by a Japanese soldier. How are we to interpret this song about Sein Kyi and the symbolic role it has come to play in the historical representation of the Occupation?
2004 - 2005
- October 4, 2004
Celia Lowe (Anthropology; Project for Critical Asian Studies Advisory Board Member, UW)
”Making the Monkey: Narrating Science, Nation, and Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago”
Lowe combines science studies wtih post-colonial theory to examine the social and discursive producation of a science which is neither 'Euro' not 'ethno,' based on her research with Indonesian biologists in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
- October 11, 2004
Vicente l. Rafael (History; Project for Critical Asian Studies Advisory Board, UW)
“Castilian, or the Colonial Uncanny: Translation and the Vernacular Theater in the Spanish Philippines"
Rafael deals with the politics of translation in the formation of a proto-nationalist public sphere in the 19th century Spanish Philippines.
- April 13, 2006
Ramnarayan Rawat (Rockefeller Project for Critical Asian Studies Fellow, UW)
”Contesting Identities: Untouchable Histories and Politics in Colonial North India"
Untouchable (or Dalit) activists, especially from the Chamar caste, wrote the first 'untouchable' histories in response to those written by colonial and nationalist/Hindu historians. Chamar protests in colonial north India began in the 1920s to questions the dominant representations of their 'untouchable' status, history and occupation. These struggles were centrally concerned with reframing representations of identity in order to contest existing narratives of who they were, what they did, and where they fit within Hindu/Indian society. Chamar and Dalit histories borrowed from colonial and Hindu histories to claim a status equal to the dominant Hindu castes and, subsequently, to argue that they were the original inhabitants of India. In doing so, Chamar political organizations struggled to reformulate their identities and put into practice an agenda designed to transform their community. In this paper I will use Chamar narratives of their own history, ignored by Indian historiography, to demonstrate active participation on the part of Chamars and other Dalits to redefine their identities.
- April 28, 2005
Boreth Ly (Rockefeller Project for Critical Asian Studies Fellow, UW),
“Theaters of War: Three Defining Photographs from the Vietnam/American War"
In this talk Dr. Ly will address three much-reproduced "documentary" photographs from the Vietnam War: Malcolm Browne's "Buddhist Monk's Suicide Protest," Saigon, 1963; Eddie Adams' "Execution in Saigon Street," Saigon, 1968; and Mick Ut's "Feeling Napalm Bomb Attack," Trangbang, 1972. The events captured in these three photographs were defining moments that led to the "Fall of Saigon" on April 30, 1975, and the "reunification" of North and South Vietnam. Professor Browne's "Buddhist Monk Suicide Protest," Saigon, 1963.Ly will consider these three photographs as sites of ambiguity and collision between cultures. Moreover, he questions the very theoretical definition of "documentary" by interrogating the legibility of these three powerful images. He will provide an exmplanation as to why, after knowing their historical, religious, and political contexts, these three images stubbornly resist fixed readings. He will also argue that it is their illegibility that contributes to their replications in popular imaginations. Last, he will discuss these images in light of performance, memory, and trauma.
2003 - 2004
- October 15, 2003 3:30-5:30pm
Prof. Fred Y.L. Chiu, Sociology, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
"Colours of Money, Shades of Pride: Historicities and Moral Politics in a Strike of Women Workers at a Japanese-owned Transnational Watch Factory"
Co-sponsored by the Department of Women Studies and the Project for Critical
Asian Studies at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
- October 10, 2003
Speaker: Prof. Patricio Nunes Abinales, Political Science, Kyoto University, Japan
"Revolutionaries and Ex-Revolutionaries on the Verge of Retirement: Reflections on the Philippine Left."
Commentator: Robert Garcia, Resident Fellow, Project for Critical Asian Studies, Simpson Center of Humanities, University of Washington
This event is part of the Forum on Trauma, History, and "Asia," an initiative of the Project for Critical Asian Studies. It is also sponsored by the Southeast Asia Center of the Jackson School of International Studies.
