June 27-28, 2016 HSS 05-57

Nanyang Technological University

http://aestheticsofglobalasia.wordpress.com/

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Contents About the Symposium 1 A Note from the Organizers 1 Schedule 2 Keynote Addresses: Abstracts and Speaker Bios 5 Speaker Bios 6

A Note from the A Note from the Organizers

Dear Participants, Welcome to the Global Asia: Critical Aesthetics, Alternative Globalities Symposium. We are thrilled to welcome so many excellent speakers from around the world and are excited for the next few days of discussion, which we expect to be provocative and intellectually stimulating. This symposium is sponsored by the Global Asia Research Cluster, Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at Nanyang Technological University. CLASS is a major research center of the College of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences. It was established in 2006 to facilitate, coordinate and encourage inter-disciplinary research at NTU. We wish to thank Associate Dean K.K. Luke, Dr. Erin Lee, Assistant Dean Shirley Sun, Ann-Marie Chua, S. Amutha, and Michelle Tan for their support. Sincerely,

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Nadine Chan

Nadine Chan (Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California) is Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University. Her work is forthcoming and published in Cinema Journal, Studies in Documentary Film, Spectator, and Oxford Bibliographies. She will be joining the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago in Fall 2016.

About the Symposium This international, interdisciplinary symposium interrogates “Global Asia”—a term used to center Asia as a driving force of cultural and economic globalization, emphasize the interconnectedness of Asia and the world, and recognize Asia as a heterogeneous cultural imaginary. We focus on a “critical aesthetics of globality”—defined as aesthetic practice that bears out critique of uneven power structures, transnational flows, empire, and so on—in Asian literature, film, media and art. How do these critical aesthetics espouse and/or critique the notion of “Global Asia,” and/or theorize alternatives?

Cheryl Naruse Cheryl Narumi Naruse (Ph.D., University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton and Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University. Her recent publications appear in biography, Genre, and  Interventions, and Verge.

Day One, 27 June 2016

  0900-0910 Center for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Opening Address

by Assistant Dean Shirley Sun 0910-0925 Welcome Remarks by Nadine Chan and Cheryl Naruse   0930-1100 Panel 1: Re-imagining Spatializations of Globality

Feng-Mei Herberer, Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Toward an Aesthetic of Archipelagic Relationality”   EK Tan, Associate Professor, State University of New York, Stony Brook “Queer Homecoming: A Translocal Remapping of Sinophone Kinship”   Arunima Paul, Independent Scholar “Of Homes in the World, India in 'Global Asia': Interrogative: Emplacements by the Contemporary Indian Documentary”   Respondent: Brian Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California

  1100-1115 BREAK   1115-1245 Panel 2: Geopolitical Aesthetics

Weihsin Gui, Associate Professor, University of California, Riverside “The Global Aesthetics of Malaysian and Singaporean Noir Fiction”

Ben Parker, Independent Scholar “Building Contradictions: Aesthetics as a Locus for Criticism in Contemporary Architecture”

Mayumo Inoue, Associate Professor, Hitotsubashi University “The Colors of Thinking after the Vietnam War”   Respondent: Sandra Khor Manickam, Assistant Professor of History, Nanyang Technological University

  1245-1345 LUNCH   1345-1445 Keynote I: “The Critical Aesthetics of Global Asias: Plasticity,

Impermanence and Structural Incoherence” Tina Chen, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, The Pennsylvania State University

  1445-1500 BREAK  

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1500-1655 Panel 3: Trans-Asian Cultures and Aesthetics

Sujatha Meegama, Assistant Professor, Nanyang Technological University “Albrecht Dürer in South Asia: Meditations on Writing Global Art Histories”

Kai Hang Cheang, Doctoral Candidate, University of California, Riverside “’Let’s Keep Our Attention on the Small’: Cuteness, Companionship and Collectivity in Asian/American Speculative Fiction”   Megan Hewitt, Doctoral Candidate, University of California, Berkeley “Kiai Kanjeng and the Aesthetics of Cultural Production: Cultural Action, Performance Arts, and Critical Pedagogies in New Social Movements of Central Java, Indonesia”   Eve Loh Kazuhara, Graduate Student, National University of Singapore “Early modern art in Japan and India: Unifying “One-Asia” through the Môrôtai style”

  Respondent: Cheryl Naruse, Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellow NTU  

1730 Shuttle departs HSS for dinner at Samy’s Curry, 25 Dempsey Road

Day Two, 28 June 2016   0915-1045 Panel 4: East/West and its Alternatives

Andrew Leong, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University “Mirror and the Globe: Commodity Theology through Marx, Auden, and Ozeki”

Susan Thananopavarn, Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke University “Global Asia in the Americas: LatinAsian Literature and the Aesthetics of Migration”   Lynn Itagaki, Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University “Dead Refugees and Immortal Nations, Sights and Sites of Global Asia”   Respondent: Tina Chen, Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies, The Pennsylvania State University

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1045-1100 BREAK   1100-1230 Panel 5: Shifting Globalities and the Imperial Event

Chris Lee, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia “Han Suyin on Contemporary Literature, c. 1961”

Peter Bloom, Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara “Malaya Speaks: Englishes and Historical Soundscapes within an Emerging Global Order”   Nancy Stalker, Associate Professor, University of Texas, Austin “Zen'ei Ikebana as Critical Aesthetic”   Respondent: Zhuo Taomo, Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellow NTU, Assistant Professor of History, Nanyang Technological University

1230-1345 LUNCH   1345-1445 Keynote II: “What was Global About Nanyang Orientalism?”

Brian Bernards, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California  

1445-1500 BREAK   1500-1630 Panel 6: Converging Asian Aesthetics

Madhumita Lahiri, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor “Global Asia and the Global North, or why South Asians no longer read Genji and the Li Sao”

Ran Ma, Associate Professor, Nagoya University “Rethinking Asian Transnational Independent Cinema: From Dahuang Picture’s Malaysian New Wave to Midi Z’s Homecoming Myanmar”

Hew Wai Weng, Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies “Global Islamic Aesthetics? Middle Eastern, Chinese and Western Forms of Islamic Expressions in Urban Malaysia and Indonesia”   Respondent: Chew Yiwei, Global Asia Postdoctoral Fellow, Nanyang Technological University

  1630-1645 BREAK   1645-1715 Closing discussion  

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Keynote Addresses

The Critical Aesthetics of Global Asias: Plasticity, Impermanence, and Structural Incoherence.

Tina Chen 27 June, 1.45-2.45pm 

If we are to recognize the importance of flow and movement as factors in the production of world history, we cannot restrict the study of Asia to any fixed geographic region of the planet, any historical period, or even, if we take Naoki Sakai’s suggestion that “we should use the word Asian in such a way as to emphasize the fluidity of the very distinction between the West and Asia rather than its persistence” seriously, any specific cultural or biologically constituted population. Given all this, what new questions and practices can we create as part of this conversation about the possibilities and limits of Global Asias as a critical approach?  And how does focusing on critical aesthetics enable us to conceptualize the diverse possibilities of Asian and Asian American cultural production in non-totalizing ways? Tina Chen is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Penn State University and author of Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture, which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2005. Her national leadership roles include stints as the co-Chair of the East of California caucus for the Association for Asian American Studies, serving on the Executive Board of the MLA's Division on Asian American Literature, and being Editor for Verge: Studies in Global Asias (published by the University of Minnesota Press). -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What was Global About Nanyang Orientalism? Brian Bernards

28 June, 1.45-2.45pm This talk tests the provocations of critical regionalism in Inter-Asia cultural studies by examining the discrepant Asias and worlds encompassed by the idea of the Nanyang, or South Seas, as it appears in modern Chinese fictionalized travelogue between 1921 and 1935. These Nanyang narratives challenge the China-West bilateralism of the global “enlightenment” impulses ascribed to Chinese literary modernity.  I argue that a kind of "Nanyang Orientalism" interpenetrates Xu Zhimo’s lyrical modernist impressionism, Xu Dishan’s feminist theological cosmopolitanism, and Ai Wu’s bare-bones socialist realism.  These literary experimentations constitute an important legacy in the Nanyang’s cross-cultural and inter-Asian signification by different global players to convey a range of subject positions situated within and between Self and Other, East and West, North and South, settler and native, and colonizer and colonized. Brian Bernards is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. He is author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature (U of Washington Press, 2015), which examines the history of Chinese migration, settlement, and creolization in Southeast Asia through the evolution of the Nanyang, or South Seas, as a postcolonial trope in literature from China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. He is coeditor of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia U P, 2013), and his work has appeared in the journals Postcolonial Studies (2012), Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (2014), and Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities (2013). His chapter, "Malaysia as Method: Xiao Hei and Ethno-Linguistic Literary Taxonomy," is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures.

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Speaker Bios

Peter J. Bloom is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He co-organized a project on Archives of Post-Independent Africa and its Diaspora as co-director of the University of California African Studies Multicampus Research Group, and published the coedited volume Spectacles of Modernization in Africa (Indiana UP, 2014). He has also co-edited Frenchness and the African Diaspora (Indiana UP, 2009), and is the author of the monograph French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), which was awarded the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. Kai Hang Cheang is a doctoral candidate in English at UC Riverside (B.A., University of Macau, M.A. Southern Illinois University). He is currently a Sawyer PhD fellow for the Alternative Futurisms project and past recipient of a Humanities Graduate Student Research Grant from UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society; a Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship from UCR; and a Graduate Professional Student Research Award from SIU. He recently published an article in Gender Forum and a encyclopedic entry in Asian American Culture: From Anime to Tiger Moms. Feng-Mei Heberer is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Global Studies & Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California after graduating from Free University Berlin. Her research focuses on Asian and Asian migrant media cultures with emphasis on questions of labor and affect. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Sexualities and the edited volumes, Asian Video Cultures and The Autobiographical Turn in German Documentary and Experimental Film. Hew Wai Weng (Ph.D. Australian National University) is Visiting Research Fellow at the ISEAS- Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore and working on a research project titled, ‘Religious Gentrification: Islam, Middle Classes and Place-Making in Urban Malaysia and Indonesia’. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden and Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. He is the author of the book - Identiti Cina Muslim di Malaysia: Persempadanan, Perundingan dan Kacukan Budaya [Chinese Muslim Identities in Malaysia: Boundary-making, Identity Negotiation and Cultural Hybridity] (2014). Megan Hewitt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California Berkeley. With a background in Indonesian literary history and contemporary social movements, her work engages with the aesthetics of cultural productions embedded in new social movements in Central Java. Sujatha Arundathi Meegama (Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University. Sujatha specializes in the art and architecture of South Asia. Her methodological interests range from artwork, which questions established binaries and boundaries to the transmission of artistic knowledge in medieval and early modern art worlds. She is currently editing a volume of essays on Sri Lankan art entitled National Narratives and Connected Cultures: Art Histories of Sri Lanka. Her research interests include Sri Lankan ivories and roadside shrines to Ganesha in the war-torn regions of Sri Lanka. Lynn Mie Itagaki (Ph.D. UCLA) is assistant professor in English; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Asian American Studies at The Ohio State University in Columbus. The past recipient of fellowships from National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council on Germany, she has recently published Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout (U of Minnesota P; March 2016) and has articles and reviews in Prose Studies, Feminist Formations, Biography, Kalfou, African American Review, Amerasia Journal, and MELUS. She is currently working on co-authored articles for the Massachusetts Review and philoSOPHIA and a book project on West Asian migration into Europe with Jennifer M. Gully. Her next book projects examine economic citizenship after the global recession of 2008 and the aesthetics and politics of the media bystander in the post-9/11 era in international human rights discourse. 6

Weihsin Gui is Associate Professor of English at the University of California-Riverside. He is the author of National Consciousness and Literary Cosmopolitics: Postcolonial Literature in a Global Moment (2013) and the editor of an essay anthology on the Singaporean poet Arthur Yap, entitled Common Lines and City Spaces (2014). He is the co-editor of “Singapore at 50,” a 2016 special issue of the postcolonial studies journal Interventions. His essays have been published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Global South, Pacific Coast Philology, and The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945.

Mayumo Inoue is an associate professor of Comparative Literature in the Graduate School of Language and Society at Hitotsubashi University.  His current work examines the intersection between sensuous forms in literature and cinema and an emergent, critical collectivity within the history of imperial formations across the US and Asia. His essay on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and cinema appeared in Criticism and his essay on American poet Charles Olson is forthcoming in Discourse.  He is a co-editor of the collection Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (forthcoming, Hong Kong UP).  He is also a founding editor of Las Barcas, a journal on art and politics in Okinawa run by younger artists and writers. Madhumita Lahiri is Assistant Professor in the English department at the University of Michigan. Her work, like her background, is emphatically global: raised in India, she was previously on the faculty at the University of Warwick (UK), before which she held postdoctoral fellowships at Brown University and at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Writing the International, which examines the aesthetic internationalisms of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore. Her work has appeared in the journals Callaloo, Interventions, Feminist Africa, and Social Dynamics, and in the edited collection India in Britain. Chris Lee is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where he directs the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program. He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation and Asian American Literature (Stanford UP 2012, winner of the Literary Criticism book award from the Association for Asian American Studies) and a co-editor of Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki (Talonbooks, 2013). His work has appeared/is forthcoming in Global South, PMLA, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Third Text, and differences. He is the Canada Area Editor of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas. His current research focuses on trans-Pacific literary thought in the Cold War Chinese diaspora and the politics of realism in contemporary Chinese Canadian literature.

Andrew Leong is an assistant professor of English and Japanese at Northwestern University. A scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century Japanese and American literature, Leong has recently published an article, “The Pocket and the Watch: A Collective Individualist Reading of Japanese American Literature,” in Verge: Studies in Global Asias. His translations of two novels by Nagahara Shoson—who wrote for a Japanese reading public in Los Angeles during the 1920s—have been collected in a single volume: Lament in the Night (Kaya, 2012).

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Eve Loh Kazuhara is a graduate student (MA, Japanese Studies) at the National University of Singapore. Her Master’s research is on Taishô period Nihonga Collectives. Eve graduated from the University of Sydney where she wrote an honours thesis on Style in the Illuminated Manuscripts of the Gita Govinda. She stumbled upon Nihonga while researching on the exchanges between Indian and Japanese artists at Santiniketan. Eve has also contributed on the entry for Nihonga and other Japanese artists in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016).   Ran Ma is teaches Cinema Studies courses at the Global-30 “Japan-in-Asia” Cultural Studies Program, Graduate School of Letters, Nagoya University, Japan. Her research interests include Asian independent cinemas and film festival studies, for which topics she has published several journal articles and book chapters, including contributions to the Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in China (2016) and BFI’s Japan Cinema Book (2017). She is currently working on her book project about Asian transnational independent cinemas. Ben Parker holds bachelor’s degrees in Asian Studies and Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. His investigation into the relationship between architecture and identity began with his honors thesis With Chinese Characteristics: Foreign Architects & National Identity in China’s Architecture, 2001-2015. He currently works as an architect and conducts research with Overland Partners, a global design firm based in San Antonio, Texas. Arunima Paul received her PhD in English, Visual and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California in December, 2014. Her dissertation is a cross-genre examination of representations of provincial and rural India in post-Liberalization popular Indian cinema. Her current projects include explorations of contemporary documentary practice and Indian writing in English, in relation to India's third decade of neoliberal reforms. Nancy Stalker (Ph.D. Stanford) is Associate Professor in the Departments of Asian Studies and History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto and the Rise of New Religions in Imperial Japan (University of Hawaii Press 2008; Hara Shobo 2009). Stalker is currently completing a monograph, Budding Fortunes:  Ikebana as Art, Industry, and Cold War Culture. She is also editing a volume entitled Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity (under contract, Oxford UP) and a textbook tentatively entitled Japanese Culture:  From the Classical to the Contemporary (under contract, University of California P). E.K. Tan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World (Cambria Press, 2013). His work has been in Interventions, Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Modern Chinese Literature, Journal of Chinese Cinemas and others. He is currently working on a project titled Queer Homecoming in Sinophone Cultures: Translocal Remapping of Kinship. Susan Thananopavarn (Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University. Her research focuses on critical intersections between Asian American and Latina/o literature and history, and she has published articles on Latina feminism in Aztlán and Asian American children’s literature in The Lion and the Unicorn.  She is currently at work on her book manuscript, LatinAsian Cartographies: History, Writing, and the National Imaginary.

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