01/26/2024 Yeti Kang

PhD Student, Divinity School

Derrida and Chinese Grammatology: from writing as supplement to the surplus of wen

Time: January 26th, 3-5pm

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St)

Abstract:

Jacques Derrida’s 2001 visit to China was overshadowed by one of his controversial remarks: “China does not have any philosophy, only thought 中國沒有哲學,只有思想.” This statement, coupled with his exclusion of Chinese writing from the history of philosophy in Of Grammatology, incited a substantial and ongoing debate regarding the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy.” Simultaneously, there has been a growing scholarly inclination to disengage Chinese philosophy and language from the influences of post-structuralism, exploring new approaches to the decentering of Sinology and Chinese philosophy beyond the “Chinese/West distinction” (Klein 2022). If not rooted in the “Chinese/West distinction,” what defines the decentering of Chinese philosophy? To explore this central question, this paper begins with the problems exposed in Derrida’s treatment of China: what is exactly problematic with Derrida’s approach to Chinese writing and how does it impede a positive, constructive understanding of Chinese philosophy and language?

This paper unfolds through the trajectory of “Chinese grammatology,” a concept introduced by Yurou Zhong (Zhong 2019), which denotes a positive science of Chinese writing, concurrently resonating with Derrida’s grammatology while criticizing it. In line with Zhong’s effort to provide an alternative to Derrida’s idea of writing as “originary supplement,” this paper ventures into the realm of “the surplus of writing” in the evolution of Chinese characters. It delves into the history of Chinese grammatology, epitomized through the critical lineage of three crucial figures: Xu Shen 許慎, Zheng Qiao 鄭樵, and Tang Lan 唐蘭. In doing so, this paper uncovers pathways for understanding history and metaphysics through a grammatology that endorses a recursive progression of the xuan 玄, encompassing both Derrida’s grammatology and Chinese grammatology under a mysterious and decentered version of sino-logy and zhong-guo philosophy.

Presenter: Yeti Kang is a second-year PhD student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His work aims to contribute to the ongoing discussions in philosophy, religion, and media & technology studies by exploring how different cultural and philosophical traditions have approached issues of writing, intelligence, and communication.

Discussant: Tyler Neenan is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Tyler’s work, which is first and foremost comparative, is concerned with both convergent and divergent figures of negativity and paradox (弔詭思想)—from Zhuangzi through Song Dynasty Buddhist thought, from Kant and Hegel through Freud, Deleuze and Lacan. He is in the earliest stages of writing a dissertation tentatively entitled “Paradox and its Defenses in the Thought of Jingjue Renyue 淨覺仁岳,” the once fiercely loyal disciple of Siming Zhli 四明智禮—turned patricidal renegade, who one day “awoke as if from a dream” (恍如夢覺) and “suddenly denounced his every prior conviction” (向之所學皆非).

01/19/2024 Dr. Graeme R. Reynolds, Mock Job Talk

Postdoctoral Instructor, History

From Restricted Access to Published Archive:

The Circulation and Reception of Official Histories of Koryŏ in Chosŏn (1392–1910)

 

Time: January 19th, 4-6pm

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St)

Description of the Talk:

This presentation explores the publication and circulation of two official court histories of Koryŏ (918–1392) compiled in early Chosŏn (1392–1910): the History of Koryŏ (Koryŏsa) and the Essentials of Koryŏ History (Koryŏsa chŏryo). While both works are important historical sources today, the methods and motives of reproduction of each history led to an uneven temporal and geographical distribution, impacting how Chosŏn literati read and wrote histories outside of the court. In particular, the widespread publication of a previously restricted source in the form of the History of Koryŏ spurred new ventures in private history writing in late Chosŏn.

For this mock job talk, I would appreciate any feedback on my presentation style, errors in the talk, points that were not clear, and the like. I especially would appreciate insights and Q&A from non-historians or non-Koreanists, as the job talk is to be held at a Languages and Civilizations department where there are few historians and at present no other Koreanists.

 

Presenter:

Graeme R. Reynolds Ph. D. is a postdoctoral instructor in History at the University of Chicago. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern Korea with interests in the production and circulation of knowledge, the history of the book, and historiography.

01/12/2024 Yuanxie Shi

Ph. D. Candidate, EALC

From A Handkerchief to A Global History of Chinese Lacemaking

Time: January 5th (Fri), 3-5pm

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St)

 

Abstract: The dissertation examines the export lacemaking industry and the appropriation of rural female labor in Chaozhou and Shantou under the Socialist regime. This chapter provides a historical and material background to the topic and explains why lacemaking, this seemingly arcane topic, is important for understanding the global history of handicrafts in the twentieth century, and more specifically the trade between China and the West.

Presenter: Yuanxie Shi is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations with a research interest in craft and technology, gender and work, and socioeconomic history in China and beyond.

Discussant: Robert Merges is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Chicago

Winter 2024 Schedule

The Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop (APEA) is pleased to announce our schedule for the Winter 2024 Quarter. All events will meet from 3:00 to 5:00pm at the Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.), unless otherwise noticed. As usual, we will send reminder emails with information for the exact time and location prior to every workshop session, along with the link to the pre-circulation materials. For potential meetings via Zoom, we will send the registration link prior to the workshop session. Please join our mailing list to receive event notifications.

WINTER 2024 SCHEDULE

January 12th (online)

Yuanxie Shi, Ph. D. Candidate, EALC

“Lacemaking Ecology and Lacemakers’ Community”

Discussant: Robert Merges, Ph. D. Student, History

 

January 19th, 4-6pm (in-person)

Graeme R. Reynolds Ph. D., Postdoctoral Instructor, History

Mock Job Talk:

“From Restricted Access to Published Archive: The Circulation and Reception of Official Histories of Koryŏ in Chosŏn (1392–1910)”

 

January 26th (in-person)

Yeti Kang, Ph. D. Student, Divinity School

“Derrida and Chinese Grammatology: from writing as supplement to the surplus of wen 文”

Discussant: Tyler Neenan, Ph. D. Candidate, Divinity School

 

February 9th (in-person)

Susanna Sun, Ph. D. Student, EALC & TAPS

“‘Neither Horse nor Donkey’: Nationalization of Voice at Shanghai Music Conservatory in 1958”

Discussant: Jacob Reed, Ph. D. Candidate, Music

★Co-sponsored by the Music and Sound Workshop★

 

February 23th (in-person)

Nick Ogonek, Ph. D. Candidate, EALC

“Staying Awhile on BL Planet: Genre, Fantasy, and Role-Play in Asahara Naoto’s Kanojo ga suki na mono wa homo de atte boku de wa nai

Discussant: Jiarui Sun, Ph. D. Student, EALC

 

March 1st (in-person)

Rina Sugawara, Ph. D. Candidate, Music

“Samurai to Composer: Ozaki Sōkichi ca. 1937”

Discussant: Hoyt Long Ph. D., Professor of Japanese Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations

 

Coordinators: James Kennerly and Danlin Zhang, EALC

Faculty Sponsors: Professor Paola Iovene and Professor Melissa Van Wyk

 

Please do not hesitate to contact Danlin (danlinz@uchicago.edu) or James (kennerly@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you at this quarter’s events!

11/17/2023 Anthony Stott

PhD Candidate, EALC & Comparative Literature

The Asada Touch: An Archaeology of the Periodical in the Age of ‘New’ Media

Time: November 17th (Fri) from 3:00 to 5:00 pm

Abstract: This chapter undertakes a media archaeology of Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan, 1991–2002), Japan’s preeminent journal of theory and criticism edited by the philosopher-critics Asada Akira and Karatani Kōjin, along with other adjacent periodicals. Critical Space’s launch bore witness to the seismic geopolitical events that closed out the global short twentieth century and punctuated Japan’s transition from its bubble era to its Lost Decade. Particularly germane to this chapter’s concerns is the way in which these shocks ripple through Japan’s mediascape and how a reconsideration of the 1990s, an era identified with the emergence of “new” media, through the lens of the periodical—a form of so-called “old” media—can uncover alternative histories.

To thus excavate this mediascape via the periodical, this chapter focalizes the editorial praxis of Asada in a time where the role of the editor became ever more that of a producer. Situating Critical Space within Asada’s prior editorial endeavors in the bubble era and asking how the media history that emerges can be brought into dialogue with Euro-American periodical studies, it argues for the editorial praxis as inextricable from critique and vice versa. To these ends, this chapter embarks on multiscalar readings of Asada-edited periodicals within an expansively delineated media ecology, charting in particular how these periodicals index problems of patronage and neoliberalization, gender, and translation. Still more, by examining Asada’s editorial praxis within the radiant but forgotten histories of these periodicals, it mines the variegated critical and media-archaeological possibilities that these archives reveal against homogenizing narratives of media obsolescence.

Presenter: Anthony Stott is a PhD Candidate pursuing a joint degree in Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Both a Japanologist and comparatist, he specializes in the literature, media, and thought of contemporary Japan, with an emphasis on cultural and intellectual encounters that defy the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of Japan studies narrowly conceived. In particular, his work intervenes at the intersection of the history of criticism and media and periodical studies. His dissertation, “Formations of Critical Space: Japanese Theory, its Media History, and the Contours of Critique Beyond the Bubble,” explores questions of critique and its limits through formations of thinkers and artists around Critical Space (Hihyō kūkan, 1991–2002), Japan’s preeminent journal of theory and criticism.

Discussant: Dr. Paola Iovene is Associate Professor of modern Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (2014) and a co-editor of Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars (2021).

10/20/2023 Thomas Looser PhD

Chair & Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, New York University

Landscapes After Modernity: The Place of the Universal Human in the (Digital) Art of Xu Bing & Japan

Time: 11am-12:30pm, October 20

Location: Cobb 310

Please note the unusual time and location!

There is no pre-circulated material for this workshop.

★Co-hosted by the Digital Media Workshop

This event is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Abstract: In contrast to the landscape of the modern individualized humanist subject, the material ecologies of posthumanism still tend to be framed in terms of a digital ubiquity; the first is finite and located, the second is dispersive and multi-sited (or everywhere). Taking this divide only as a starting point, this working paper takes up what might be thought of as the landscape, or architecture, of the contemporary posthumanist subject. Using especially recent artwork from the Chinese artist Xu Bing, as well as a genealogy of work from Japan, the aim is to outline the material contours of a contemporary posthumanist landscape. At stake are some of our most basic categories, including geopolitical geography (including area studies), global ecology, and the grounds of a universal language.

Presenter: Thomas Looser (PhD in Anthropology, the University of Chicago) is Chair and Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at New York University. His areas of research include cultural anthropology and Japanese studies; art, architecture and urban form; new media studies and animation; critical theory and globalities. Previously a senior editor for the journal Mechademia, and now an editor for Asiascape: Digital Asia, and editorial advisory board member of ADVA, he is the author of Visioning Eternity: Aesthetics, Politics, and History in the Early Modern Noh Theater, and has published articles in a variety of venues including Boundary 2, Japan Forum, Mechademia, Shingenjitsu, Journal of Pacific Asia, and Cultural Anthropology.

Discussant: Thomas Lamarre (PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago) is a scholar of media, cinema and animation, intellectual history and material culture, with projects ranging from the communication networks of 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, 2000), to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, 2005), animation technologies (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009) and on television infrastructures and media ecology (The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, 2018). Current projects include research on animation that addresses the use of animals in the formation of media networks associated with colonialism and extraterritorial empire, and the consequent politics of animism and speciesism.

10/13/2023 Elvin Meng

PhD Student, EALC & Comparative Literature

“The Paleography of Babble”

Time: October 13th, 3-5pm

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St)

Co-hosted by the East Asian Transregional History Workshop

This event is generously sponsored by the Council of Advanced Studies of the University of Chicago

 

Abstract: This paper traces out divergent genealogies of discourse around the status of language in relation to nature and culture in second-millennium Chinese and Inner-Asian thought. Focusing on multiple interpretations of a single figure—the newborn child learning to speak—in the intertwined lineages Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu thought, this paper suggests that divergent conceptions of babbling as an activity that straddles any tentative nature-culture divide tend to reflect divergent conceptions of “culture” in a multilingual world. Dissenting from Sinocentric conceptions of language that have relegated non-(Chinese)-speech to the realm of non-culture, an Inner-Asian lineage can be traced that mobilizes earlier Buddhist semiotic discourses to construct concepts of language diversity (and the natural-ness of cosmic languages) compatible with the multilingual reality of Inner-Asian empires.

Presenter: Elvin Meng is a joint PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research interests include East Asian & European thought, media history & theory, translation, Manchu studies, history of linguistics & musicology, and modernism.

Discussant: Yiwen Wu is a PhD student in the joint program between East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on early modern Chinese and Japanese theater, with a focus on the dynamic relationship between role types, characters, and performance.