EASC Events
East Asian Security Series Begins
This spring the East Asian Studies Center began sponsoring an informal lecture series on the topic of East Asian security issues. The talks are held at the Borders bookstore at Eastland Plaza in Bloomington. Jacques L. Fuqua, Associate Director of the East Asian Studies Center and retired Lieutenant Colonel gave the first talk, "The Axis of Uncertainty: US-South Korea-North Korea Security Relations," on March 22. He addressed questions such as: Why is North Korea's diplomacy characterized by such a "brinksmanship" posture? Why have the Bush administration's policies toward North Korea failed? Why do some experts believe that the US-South Korea bilateral relationship will become more strained during the current nuclear crisis on the peninsula instead of bringing the US and South Korea closer together? Can South Korea's Sunshine Policy toward North Korea succeed? This presentation touched on these and other pertinent current issues confronting the Bush administration and its bilateral relationship with South Korea, while proving a contextual background that lays the foundation for the current crisis. Mr. Fuqua recommended the book The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Revised and Updated Edition) by Don Oberdorfer for further study.
On April 26 Scott Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Political
Science and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, gave
the second lecture in the series, "China: America's Enemy, America's
Ally."
The United States has alternated between treating China as a close ally
at some moments and as America's most dangerous challenger -- strategic,
economic, and ideological -- at others. Such wavering reflects the deep
divisions among Americans' views about the Middle Kingdom. This presentation
provided a window into the fractious, polarized, and sometimes funny debate
over China policy that Americans have been engaged in during the past quarter
century. The discussion was based on Kennedy's new book, China Cross
Talk: The American Debate over China Policy since Normalization, A Reader
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
First
Midwest Chinese Studies Summit Held at IUPUI
On April 18, 2003, the East Asian Studies Center along with affiliated faculty hosted the Midwest Chinese Studies Summit. The summit was held in the Law School facilities on the campus of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Beginning in the afternoon, two sessions engaged China scholars from the Midwest in discussions on the current state of China studies and the ways to make the focus stronger. Dr. David Wong of Columbia University and Dr. Prasenjit Duara of the University of Chicago led the first session that focused upon the current plurality of work produced by China scholars. The following session was led by Dr. Kristen Stapleton of the University of Kentucky and focused on strategies for China scholars to strengthen the field's identity. This summit was open to all faculty members with an interest in the field of Chinese studies in the Midwest, their graduate students, and knowledgeable parties outside the academy.
.High School Honors Seminar Draws a Large Crowd
More
than 75 high school juniors and seniors and their teachers from ten high
schools around Indiana attended the 2003 High School Honors Seminar, which
was held on the I.U. Bloomington campus. The theme for the seminar was "Manga
and Anime: Traditional Culture in Modern Media." Many young
people today are attracted to the study of Japan through their experience
with anime. However they often misinterpret aspects of these media
due to a lack of understanding of the cultural and historical background
of anime/manga. This day of lectures and activities was designed
to help high school students begin to understand the aspects of traditional
Japanese culture as they are reflected in these popular media. Due to the
popularity of the topic, a second seminar will be held on September 16,
2003 to accommodate the more than 100 students who were not able to get
into the April seminar.
New York Times Arts and Leisure Weekend Chinese Film Festival
The China film weekend was a great success. Each of the three
movies shown, Postmen in the Mountains, The Saga of Mulan and
The Journey to the Western Xia Empire was well-attended and gave students
and members of the greater community a chance to see some rare Chinese
films. The festival began with Postmen in the Mountains, the most
widely acclaimed of the three films. The story's simple but universal
theme of a father's struggle to understand his son combined with the exquisite
scenery drew enthusiastic response from the audience.
The Saga of Mulan, performed by the Beijing Opera, is based on
the ancient Chinese legendary tale that became known to US audiences through
an animated version produced by the Disney Studios. Paola Voci, a Chinese
film specialist and recent graduate of the EALC Ph.D. program, was pleasantly
surprised by the audience response. "I showed The Saga of Mulan
on a sunny and warm Saturday afternoon, and it still attracted a crowd.
Despite the unfamiliar Beijing Opera format, even the non-Chinese audience
enjoyed the film." According to Voci, the film elicited varied reactions
from the diverse audience. "I noticed, for instance, that some tragic
moments were perceived as comical by those who were not familiar with
the acting and singing conventions of the Beijing Opera. As a result,
some were laughing while a couple of older Chinese ladies were moved to
tears."
The Journey to the Western Xia Empire is a Chinese "western,"
or a xibu pian, which is a film shot in the northwestern regions, often
in a desert-like or mountains setting. Voci was even more impressed by
the number of people who came to the Buskirk Chumley Theater to see this
film on Sunday night. "The content and historical setting of the
film was unfamiliar to much of the audience, but they responded very positively
and many of them came up to ask questions at the end."
Spring Lecture Series Comes to a Close
EASC's Spring colloquium series came to a close on April 25 with
I.U.B. Associate Professor of Religion, Jan Nattier's talk, "'Three
Disasters and Four Opportunities': On Interpreting Early Chinese Buddhist
Translations." Nattier's talk, along with the post-modern lecture about
Haruki Murakami given by Harvard professor of Japanese Literature, Jay Rubin,
focused on issues of translation and drew a diverse crowd. All of the Spring
colloquium lectures were well-attended and well-received, covering a wide
range of topics.
There were also two special lectures this semester by Dru Gladney and Wang
Ping. Both of these lectures were great successes. Dru Gladney, an anthropologist
who has done extensive work in both the PRC and Central Asia, gave a stimulating
talk -- to a packed room of about 60 students and faculty members -- on
shifting senses of cultural and political identity among the people's of
China's Northwestern frontier region.
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Wang Ping, who was in Bloomington to give a reading of her
poetry in a series sponsored by the Kinsey Institute and the Creative Writing
Program, gave an informal talk to students and faculty interested in East
Asia on her book dealing with footbinding. That work, Aching for Beauty
(read a review in this newsletter), is a fascinating
study which is both very personal and scholarly. In her conversation about
it, she spoke in insightful and sometimes quite moving ways about the things
that motivated her to write the book and how in doing so she drew upon both
her own experiences growing up in China and her graduate studies in the
United States.
While the fall lecture series schedule is still under construction, here
are some dates for your fall calendar.
October 31st - Paul Cohen, Wellesley College
November 14th - Gail Hershatter, University of Santa Cruz
TBA - Greg Waller, University of Kentucky
Look at our website to obtain updated information: http://www.indiana.edu/~easc/eaq/.
EASC to Co-sponsor Lecture by Former Ambassador Lilley
On November 13, 2003, Ambassador Lilley, presently a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, will give a lecture for the Buskirk-Chumley Theater Public Affairs Lecture Series. Ambassador Lilley has had a distinguished career in government and academe, having held a variety of important posts in or related to East Asia. Ambassador Lilley began his academic career as a professor of international studies at Johns Hopkins University and subsequently held such notable positions as director of the American Institute in Taiwan, Fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, and director of University of Maryland's Institute for Global Chinese Affairs. His career in public service spanned three decades and includes such postings as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs and US ambassador to the Peoples' Republic of China and the Republic of Korea.
Ambassador Lilley is well known for his prolific writing on security and trade issues related to East Asia. In addition to the several books he has co edited on the China-Taiwan issue, trade with China, and the Chinese military, he has written numerous articles for the Foreign Policy Journal, US News and World Report, Washington Post, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and a host of others. Ambassador Lilley also makes frequent television appearances on network and cables news broadcasts such as ABC's Nightline, PBS's NewsHour, as well as CNN, CNN International, NBC and CBS.
In addition to the new hire in the School of Education, Heidi Ross, and
the College of Arts and Sciences, Ethan Michelson, EASC would like to introduce
two more new faculty members.
Scott O'Bryan, Ph.D. Columbia University, currently an Assistant Professor
at the University of Alabama, will join the East Asian Languages and Cultures
and History Departments in the fall of 2003. He was awarded a Post-Doctoral
Fellowship in Asian Studies from the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia
University (2000-2001) and a Leonard Hastings Schoff Publication Award from
the Office of University Seminars, Columbia University (2001).
O'Bryan's specialty is postwar Japan, particularly postwar economic policy
and thought, and he is interested in the intellectual infrastructure of
"high growth" in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. He examines Japanese
capitalism in the twentieth century as intellectual history, analyzing the
ways of thinking about the economy that made it possible to measure and
assess economic growth and that underlay the consensus that emerged about
economic growth: the emphasis on GNP and national income (made famous in
Ikeda Hayato's promise to double national income over the course of the
1960s). O'Bryan is also interested in the role consumption played in Japanese
economic growth, and about the ways that consumption was "sold"
to the Japanese public as a virtue. In the future he plans to work on projects
concerning the environmental and peace movements in Japan.
Dr. O'Bryan is currently revising his dissertation, "Growth
Solutions: Economic Knowledge and Problems of Capitalism in Post-War Japan,
1945-1960" into a book manuscript. An article titled "The Science
of National Income Accounting and Economic Knowledge in Twentieth-Century
Japan," appeared in the Japan Studies Review, spring 2002. His chapter
on the rise of new statistical forms of economic analysis in the mid-twentieth-century
is forthcoming in a volume edited in Japan by Nakamura Masanori (2003).
He has also published translations and book reviews in Positions: Asian
Cultures Critique, Journal of Economic History, U.S.-Japan Women's Journal,
and Japan Studies Review.
Dr. O'Bryan will teach EALC E352 "War and Peace in Modern Japan"
and History J400 "'Revolution and Nationalism in Modern Asia"
at I.U. Bloomington this fall and "Topics in East Asian History"
and "Modern Japan" in the spring.
Marvin Sterling is coming to I.U. for a one-year appointment in the Anthropology
Department. Sterling recently received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology
from UCLA. His dissertation was titled, "In the Shadow of the Universal
Other: Performative Identifications with Jamaican Culture in Japan."
He has written an ethnography of African-American sailors at Yokosuka Naval
Base in Japan. Since June, he has been living in New York City, starting
a new research project on Japanese engagements with black musical subcultures
in New York City, and working for the Educational Testing Service, where
he identifies, prepares and submits academic reading material to be used
on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).
His areas of specialty are expressive culture and national identity, anthropology
of the body, Japanese popular culture, and ethnomusicology, and he will
teach ethnographic courses about the culture of Japan, a topical seminar
on expressive culture and the body, Japanese popular culture, and global
hip-hop music. Dr. Sterling's diverse background ensures that he will be
widely welcomed here at I.U. Bloomington. Rick Wilk, Chair of the Anthropology
Department explains, "This may be the first time East Asian Languages
and Cultures, African American and Diaspora Cultures, and the Center for
Latin American and Caribbean studies have all wanted to see the same person
hired! Our graduate students have been wildly enthusiastic about his work
on popular culture and nationalism. We are really excited at the prospect
of developing East Asian anthropology as a specialty within our department."
Journal of Chinese Religions Published
Vol. 30 (2002) of the Journal of Chinese Religions is now available. This issue has seven articles, including a study of a foundational text in Daoist alchemy, a translation and study of a popular tale about the bodhisattva Guanyin's virtuous parrot, a study of Buddhist beliefs about the afterlife as revealed in pre-Tang tomb documents, an article on the earliest Chan Buddhist autobiographical narrative, and an article by John McRae in which he casts the Chan master Shenhui as an evangelist.
JCR has been published by the Center since 1998. The co-editors are Stephen Bokenkamp and Robert Campany, with Clarke Hudson replacing Joanne Quimby as assistant this year. Russell Kirkland (a 1986 PhD graduate of EALC) also stepped down as JCR book review editor recently, after more than a decade of service.
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Copyright 2001, The Trustees of Indiana University