Author: lambrecht

lambrecht

Friday, May 22, 3:00-5:00PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St)
Daniel Johnson, “Re-collecting Old Media: The Intimate Transmissions of Amachan”

On Friday, May 22, please join us in welcoming Daniel Johnson, who will present a paper that is part of a larger project on what Daniel calls “convergence anxiety.” As Daniel explains, “This refers to the tensions between different types of users, producers, and audiences in contemporary media culture within discourses (and processes) of media convergence. The plan is to draw on a range of case studies from a variety of fields (television, internet, film, gaming, etc.) to consider some of the affective attachments and social organizations that appear around different media cultures and how those attachments animate particular media forms in anxious ways. Key to this sense of anxiety will be the question of gender and how different types of performers and consumers have their identities intensified, threatened, and turned into spectacle by shifting patterns of reception and exposure in contemporary media landscapes. This paper, ‘Re-collecting Media: The Intimate Transmissions of Amachan,‘ discusses some of these ideas in relation to a 2013 TV serialized drama from Japan. My interest in this show stems from the way it represents ‘old’ media forms like VHS and television in relation to ‘new’ media forms like broadband and online media. It is particularly through how some sense of a value system of intimacy in media culture seems to emerge from Amachan‘s investment in tangible media forms, inelastic broadcast time, and personal curation that these topics will be discussed.”

A draft of Daniel’s paper is available at this link. If you have not received the password for the post, or if you have concerns about accessibility, please feel free to contact Nicholas Lambrecht at lambrecht at uchicago.edu. Light refreshments will be served at the workshop. We look forward to seeing you on Friday!

lambrecht

From Xiao Jianqing, Manhua Shanghai (1936)

Friday, May 1, 3:00-5:00PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St)
Adhira Mangalagiri (PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, University of Chicago)
“Slave of the Colonizer: Reading the Indian Literary Figure in Chinese Literature”

This Friday at 3:00PM, please join the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop for a presentation by Adhira Mangalagiri, PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature, on representations of colonial Indian policemen in Chinese literature written between 1900 and 1940. The Indian policeman is persistently present in China’s, particularly Shanghai’s, literary production during the colonial period. However, this Indian figure has so far been treated as a historical figure, his function in literary texts often explained merely by accounting for the historical forces underlying his presence on the streets of Shanghai. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic lineages of critical thought, Adhira argues that the Indian policeman is not simply a historical artifact lurking in the backgrounds of texts. Rather, she argues that he is a central feature of the Chinese literary psyche and is crucial for reading colonial anxieties in the short stories and novels of the period.

A draft of the chapter is available at this link. If you have not received the password for the post, please feel free to contact Nicholas Lambrecht at lambrecht at uchicago.edu. Light refreshments will be served at the workshop. We look forward to seeing you on Friday!

lambrecht

Stella So, Lee Tung Street, from City of Powder: Vanishing Hong Kong (2008)

Friday, April 17, 3:00-5:00PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St)
Chun Chun Ting (PhD Candidate in EALC, University of Chicago)
“Redefining Neighborhoods: Documentary Filmmaking and
Political Empowerment in Hong Kong’s Inner City”

This Friday at 3:00PM, the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop will meet for a presentation by Chun Chun Ting, PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, on the documentary films produced by the Hong Kong artist/activist group v-artivist. Ting’s paper, which can be found here, argues that these films tease out how working class life is continually eroded and overpowered by institutional forces while also showing how the spatial practices sustained in old neighborhoods nurture a spirit of local autonomy and agency. This vision of local life provides a source of critique not only of capitalist reproductions of urban space but also of capitalism as a way of organizing economic and social life. Ting’s paper specifically looks at v-artivist’s productive collaboration with residents facing redevelopment and their screening movement to explore how they transform the viewers’ relationship with images to cultivate a community of resistance. While bulldozers continue to raze many of these neighborhoods, Ting argues that the practices of v-artivist have substantially shifted the discussion about urban renewal from the nostalgic discourse of cultural heritage to one about housing rights and communal ownership, and as such redefine these neighborhoods as sites for the exercise of citizenship and collaboration.

If you have not received the password for the paper, or if you have concerns about accessibility, please feel free to contact Nicholas Lambrecht at lambrecht at uchicago.edu. Light refreshments will be served at the workshop. We look forward to seeing you on Friday!

lambrecht

 Friday, April 10, 3:00-5:00PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St)
Daniela Licandro (East Asian Languages and Civilizations), Adhira Mangalagiri (Comparative Literature), Junko Yamazaki (Cinema and Media Studies/EALC),
and Yuqian Yan (Cinema and Media Studies/EALC)
“The Place of History in Scholarship on Asian Literature and Film Studies”

This Friday at 3:00PM, please join the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop for a discussion on the role of history in scholarship on Asian literature and film. The workshop will serve as an occasion to exchange experiences and ideas on how different approaches to history and the writing of history can fit (or might not fit) into projects on Asian topics, as well as how history informs our understanding of specific texts or phenomena, poses theoretical and practical problems, or imposes constraints on research. Starting points suggested by those leading the discussion are available here; they hope that this cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and cross-media approach will reveal shared challenges or assumptions worthy of reexamination, thus fostering further exchange and collaboration. Participants are welcome to send their own thoughts to the workshop organizers in advance, or simply show up at the workshop and join the discussion.

Light refreshments will be served at the workshop. Please contact Nicholas Lambrecht at lambrecht at uchicago.edu if you have concerns about accessibility. We look forward to seeing you on Friday!

lambrecht

Edmond Eugène Valton, The Scholar (1869)

Thursday, April 2, 4:30PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E 60th St)
Jennifer Munger (Managing Editor, The Journal of Asian Studies) and Stacie Kent (PhD
Candidate in History, University of Chicago; Managing Editor, Critical Historical Studies)
“So You’ve Got a Paper. Now What?”

Next Thursday at 4:30PM please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop and the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop for a roundtable on the topic of publishing in academic journals. Jennifer Munger and Stacie Kent will be our panelists for this discussion. Please note the special day and time of this workshop. After a busy spring break and the Japan Studies events on Monday, we look forward to seeing you again on Thursday!