The Project for Critical Asian Studies completed its second funding cycle in June 2006. The Project is currently inactive but the intellectual community created over the past decade continues to engage and grapple with the critical themes raised and explored by the Project over its ten-year history. We invite you to explore this website as a record of the project and as a resource for scholars and activists engaged in Critical Asian Studies across the globe.
History of the Project
The University of Washington's Project for Critical Asian Studies was the outcome of two generous Rockefeller Foundation Grants in the Humanities. From 1995-2001, under the direction of Ann Anagnost (Anthropology) and Tani Barlow (History and Women Studies), Critical Asian Studies focused on urgent questions of migration ethnicity, and area studies.
During the second grant period (2002-2006), the Project took up the timely effort to understand trauma in historical terms and in a restlessly re-regionalizing "Asia." Under the direction of Tani Barlow (History and Women Studies) and Madeleine Yue Dong (History and International Studies), the Project brought into analytical focus how fragments of Asia's traumatic past return as the region is pulled together by market, military, and geopolitical forces.
Forum on Trauma, History, and Asia
How can we adequately narrate the injuries and injustices that mark the history of modern Asia? What happens to the arts and human sciences when mass injustice is deeply felt but seems inexpressible? How are histories of trauma, defined as unspoken or unread injustice, mediated through the body? At what point does the suffering inflicted by the commodification of labor, everyday life, and social exchange count as trauma? How might scholars in the United States best engage with inter-Asian efforts to rethink “Asia” in relation to trauma and its accountings?
The Project for Critical Asian Studies sought to understand the wasys in which injustice is mediated through the body and what forms its “theorization” or adequate descriptions might take. In order to develop an analytic sophistication equal to the complex events we study, participants in 2002-2003 developed a matrix that would allow us to rethink and reimagine the relations between trauma, history, and “Asia.” Drawing upon terms resonant within current critical theory, the matrix proposed four sets of relationships:
Trauma – Liability
Law – Contagion
Torture – Value
Mourning – Politics
The matrix both brought these terms into tension with one another and set them into play, allowing new relations to emerge. Therefore, rather than simply connecting trauma to memory or truth, it was connected to legal notions of liability. Rather than connecting law directly to justice, it was linked to contagion. Highlighting the political saliency of metaphor enabled us to ask new questions. Is suffering contagious? Are suffering and its toxic consequences distributed by calculated strategies to both victor and victim populations? Might the Comfort Women International Tribunal be a model for addressing the claims of those who have survived violent injustice? Could there be a tribunal called to judge the rapacity of late capitalism and its depredation of the general welfare? How should lawyers read historical evidence? How might historians read the law? What should historians testify to?
To explore these questions, twenty-seven scholars came together for an inaugural conference on Trauma and History in June 2003. They included Bill Haver (Comparative Literature, Binghamton University), Rosalind Morris (Anthropology, Columbia University), Erik Mueggler (Anthropology, University of Michigan), Pheng Cheah (Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley), and Nerferti Tadiar (History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz) as well as UW faculty from the departments of Anthropology, English, History, International Studies, Political Science, and Women Studies, among others.
In Spring 2005, the Project sponsored an international conference on War, Capital, and Trauma. Events have conspired to force questions of injustice, responsibility, and unrecognized suffering onto our most urgent agenda. The second conference addressed four focal areas:
Trauma - War
Trauma - Sovereignty
Trauma - Islam
Trauma - Capital
The intentional deployment of trauma as a wartime policy and the cynical use of mass media to inoculate viewers against the suffering inflicted in their name have malignant effects. But so does the steady erosion of neighborhoods by labor migration and development projects. Urban renewal and the privatization of everyday life, class polarization and the degradation of the natural environment in the name of “development,” the super-exploitation of migrant and reproductive labor: these everyday traumas were also important themes during the second conference.
Elements of the Project for Critical Asian Studies
Critical Asian Studies consisted of many interconnected elements:
- a faculty of more than forty engaged intellectuals situated in various departments throughout the University of Washington, who organized and contributed to debates that unfolded under the Project’s sponsorship;
- a theoretical project that affiliates scholars whose primary interests lie with social theory, critical theory, political criticism, and the ongoing effort to interrogate the terms by which we think;
- a mobile coalition of graduate students, visiting speakers, visiting fellows, and associated regional faculty located throughout the Pacific Northwest;
- a zone of experiment used to propose new topical emphases or to engage emerging questions in social theory;
- an intellectual network linking associated campus events such as the 2002-2003 speaker series “Recasting Asia America,” directed by UW faculty Chandan Reddy (English) and Shawn Wong (English), which addressed new problematics in Asian American Studies;
- a workshop for developing inter-campus and intra-campus collaborations, as in the case of “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Globalization: The Philippines and Filipino Americans,” a symposium organized by Judith Henchy (UW Libraries) and Vicente Rafael (History), with a keynote presentation by internationally prominent historian Reynaldo Ileto and student reports on undergraduate and graduate research.
Engaged in similar work, the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, edited by Tani Barlow, is a resource that reinforces the work of the faculty and its theoretical projects. Entering its second decade of publication, the journal receives support from the University of Washington China Program and Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. positions is winner of the 1995 Best New Journal Award of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals of the Modern Language Association.