Daniel Behar
Intertextuality and Inter-Asian Transmissions in Kheir al-Din Al-Asadi’s Songs of the Shrine
The Aleppo-born poet Kheir al-Din al-Asadi (1900-1971) – a Sufi mystic, lexicographer and linguist, as well as a passionate ethnographer of his native city – lived through the historical vicissitudes of Aleppo’s transition from prosperity and prestige under Ottoman rule (1516-1918) to French colonial domination (1920) and Syrian national independence (1946). Over the course of the 1940s, he composed a series of visionary prose poems collected in a volume titled Aghani al-Qubba (Songs of the Shrine; 1950-51). In this book, he seeks to retrieve something of the city’s hidden spiritual legacy as part of a far-reaching network of pious Sufis, the flipside of its familiar standing as a world center of material commerce between East and West. Each chapter – a self-proclaimed Quran-like sūra – opens with a short glossary of obscure locutions and a list of intertexts by which it is inspired, texts deriving from the rich corpus of divine love poetry in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Urdu and whose substrata consist of historical legends originating from as far as South East Asia. I will highlight one of the collection’s poems to suggest how we may interpret this mode of explicit intertextuality across the cultures and languages of Asia. The esoteric code of lisān al-ghayb (the sobriquet of the Persian poet Hafiz), is invoked, I argue, to reshape Pan-Asiatic Sufism as a universe of beauty sufficient unto itself, an alternative to the corrupt historical world. In al-Asadi’s fiction of a holistic Sufi monad, the poem written in Arabic encapsulates the Great Unity of mystical love cultivated by a long line of poets and philosophers: a transhistorical, multilingual, transregional phenomenon more durable than any national-territorial formation.
Brian Bernards
A Thai Winter Sonata: Inter-Asian Tourism and K-Drama Desire in Hello Stranger
This presentation examines the role of cinematic adaptation, inter-Asian tourism and bride/labor migration, and the desire created by the Southeast Asian reception, translation, and domestication of Korean television serial dramas in Thai director Banjong Pisanthanakun’s บรรจง ปิสัญธนะกูล 2010 popular film, Hello Stranger กวน มึน โฮ. Adapted from a 2006 Thai- language travelogue novel, Two Shadows in Korea สองเงาในเกาหลี by Zcongklot Bangyikhan ทรงกลด บางยี่ขัน, Hello Stranger, which received official sponsorship and funding from the Korean Tourism Authority, comments on obsessive K-Wave fandom in Thailand through a story of a nameless couple that meets on a tour of shooting locations for the Korean serial dramas that launched the first Korean Wave (or Hallyu) in the early 2000s, including Winter Sonata 겨울연가, Coffee Prince 커피프린스 1호점, and Jewel in the Palace 대장금. The main couple in Hello Stranger role-plays and ventriloquizes the romantic intrigues of the Korean dramas to satirically parody their dubbed translation and domestication among Thai fans. Banjong’s film, which shattered Thai box office records in 2010, reflects—and subsequently inspired—a drastic uptick in Thai tourism to South Korea. I argue that through the Thai tourist reenactment and simulated role-play of Korean dramas in Hello Stranger, Banjong latently invokes the broader backdrop of Southeast Asian labor and bride migration to South Korea and critiques the Thai desire not for proximity to an authentic Korean culture but for a kind of “East Asian whiteness” represented by bourgeois modernity, urban cosmopolitanism, cosmetic enhancement, and northern hemispheric seasonal climatology.
Shine Choi
Re-viewing North Korea’s Cultural Diplomacy and Monuments in Asia and Africa: Theory and methods notes on doing located global research
Why are North Koreans building high profile, gargantuan political statues, museums and parks across Africa and Asia? Rather than dismiss these developments as another bizarre set of activities under a peculiar dictatorship, this research examines these ‘surprising’ cultural projects as rich locations from which to study long neglected Asia-Africa connections and Third World politics. Partly, what needs rethinking is the prevailing western, Westphalian perspective that claims there can only be one coherent objective reality, one prevailing international order, one manifestation of sovereignty and diplomacy. To see North Korea and international politics better, what needs foregrounding are the multiple subterranean non-western forms of politics, diplomacy and worlds that have always existed. Using feminist and postcolonial methodologies, this paper interrogates North Korea’s cultural diplomacy and Asia-Africa relations for just such subterranean politics and realities using preliminary fieldwork in Namibia, Angola, Senegal, Cambodia and China, which has specific bilateral as well as regional and/or global historical and contemporary political linkages with North Korea. The goal of this paper is to move beyond our research practices that use, collect and draw from our knowledge ‘about’ North Korea, and to rework the scope of area studies research to develop located understanding of global politics ‘with’ North Korean sources, material and people. Given its emphasis on cultural sites and the visual artefact of monuments and museums, the paper presents theoretical tools and methods attentive to visual-textual processes for reworking the field of North Korean studies and fields and archives we visit.
Satoru Hashimoto
Intra-Asian Reading; or, How Lu Xun Enters into a World Literature
This paper examines the Japanese translator and scholar of modern Chinese literature, critic, and essayist Takeuchi Yoshimi’s (1910-77) criticisms and translations of Lu Xun’s (1881-1936) works during the wartime and postwar periods, and interrogates their implications for the conception of world literature. Analyzing Takeuchi’s wartime monograph on Lu Xun and its gesture of copious citations, as well as his postwar reengagement with Chinese modernity through repeated translations of Lu Xun’s writings, the paper teases out a mode of reading that engages the worldliness of literary texts and thus is informed by critical self-reflection on the condition of possibility for their circulation. This mode of reading calls for a transformation of the reader/critic’s self, which bespeaks an act of tuning to voices that routes of literary exchanges may fail to convey. Through Takeuchi’s engagement, Lu Xun’s works find themselves on an intra-Asian horizon of reading that contemporary literary discourse often pays little attention to, thereby initiating a movement of universalizing that produces a world literature by brining to the fore literary phenomena excluded from its concept.
Ungsan Kim
Cruising the Ghostly Remains: Haunted Movie Theaters as Queer Heterotopias
Queer Asian cinema has mutated and evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Driven by vibrant cinephile cultures, the inception of many different international film festivals in the region, and the increasing ubiquity of accessible and affordable digital production technologies, it has now become a political modality beyond the parochial narrative of LGBT-themed films. Manifesting its double capacity as a political medium of alliance and a sensorial medium of archiving and representing the past, contemporary queer Asian cinema has ardently engaged in the critique of progressive time and the imagination of alternative forms of sociality. Perhaps not surprisingly, many queer films from the region today investigate the past as a means of critiquing heteronormative time. They also reimagine and reinstate alternative queer kinship by tracing forgotten histories of queer intimacy. In this paper, I explore the inscription of a ghostly past in the films of two East Asian directors, Tsai Ming-liang and Im Cheol-min. While the style and structure of their films differ dramatically, both filmmakers depict “haunted” movie theaters—historical sites of queer cruising in the metropoles of both Taiwan and South Korea—in order to generate what I call a heterotopic imagination or “queerscapes.” The similar motifs and styles found in two directors’ films despite their difference in ethnicity, cultural and generational backgrounds, and media usage demonstrate that queer Asian filmmakers’ cinematic imagination is deeply intertwined with the vernacular history of queer people in the region, epitomizing the queer inter-Asian structures of feeling.
Annette Damayanti Lienau
Indonesian Poetry and Revolutionary Vernaculars
This chapter engages with the emergent orientations of nationalist “vernacular” culture in Indonesia during the 1940s. It considers how writing in Indonesia’s nationalized language, locally known as Bahasa Indonesia, was shadowed by the polemics over colonial literacies and scriptural Arabic. It traces literary tensions that arose when elites trained in Dutch and other European literacies engaged in controversial forms of cultural translation between Qur’anic Arabic and the Indonesian language, in order to defend a religiously egalitarian vision for the fledgling republic. In this context, I re-read the most iconic poems of Chairil Anwar, the leading poet of the Indonesian revolution (or “generation of 1945”), along with the political and revolutionary rhetoric of Ahmed Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president. I illustrate how Anwar’s poetry reflects the tensions and ambivalence around Sukarno’s use of language as a nationalist leader and rhetorician, and consider the role that Anwar’s egalitarian forms of locution played in his reception as a nationalist poet.
Moving from poetry to political rhetoric in the Indonesian language during the formative years of the national independence movement, the paper engages in connected readings between Chairil Anwar’s poetry and rhetorical motifs associated with Sukarno as a revolutionary leader and as a secular visionary for a future Indonesia. Across Anwar’s poems, I consider the stakes and fracture points of national belonging as they appear through the tensions between a speaker’s sense of individual and collective consciousness, between a desire for belonging and an individual’s sense of distinction and skepticism in the midst of collective action. In the process, I examine how the imagined stakes of national belonging culminate with one of Anwar’s most iconic poems envisioning a symbolic “pact” with Sukarno on the point of Indonesia’s declaration of independence. Through the conjoinment of a specific set of motifs employed by both Anwar and Sukarno to characterize the spirit of revolutionary change as “flood” or “fire,” Anwar’s poetry invoking Sukarno appears connected to broader political debates on the future of the Indonesian republic as an emerging (and pluralist or secular) nation-state. After moving through these points, the chapter finally considers how forms of Indonesian nationalist rhetoric were elevated by Sukarno to an international stage at the first conference of independent Asian-African states in Bandung, Indonesia (in 1955), when Sukarno again lent poetic form to idealist political abstractions of parity and pluralism on a global scale.
Yuanfei Wang
Learning the Barbarian Tongue: Chinese-Japanese Dictionaries and Waka Poetry in Late Ming China
This paper studies Chinese-Japanese dictionaries and Chinese translation of waka poetry in late Ming China. The rampant piracy raids led some Chinese scholar-officials compile travelogues on Japan in order to understand what they believed to be Ming China’s enemy. This paper will examine Xue Jun’s 薛俊 Survey of Japan ( 日本考, 1523), Zheng Shungong’s 鄭舜功 travelogue The Mirror on Japan (日本一鑑, 1566-1573), and Hou Jigao’s 侯繼高 Geography and Culture of Japan (日本風土錄, 1592-1593). Specifically, the paper will examine the three travelogues’ Japanese-Chinese dictionaries and their translation and transliteration of waka poetry. It will discuss how knowledge of Japanese language was developed in these sixteenth- century accounts of Japanese hiragana, phonemes, grammar, and poetry. The paper will also emphasize how the phonetic aspects of Japanese language in these travelogues became prominent, since the sound of the barbarian language was transcribed in Wu dialect and discussed in comparison with Chinese dialects.
Emily Wilcox
Performing Inter-Asia: Cross-Ethnic Dance and Embodied Solidarities
This paper is part of my new book project examining inter-Asian performance as a site for understanding Asian solidarity politics in the twentieth century. In the project, I look at a series of dancers who performed roles of other Asian characters and/or dance styles in the context of different forms of Pan-Asian or inter-Asian solidarity ideologies. These include a Korean modern dancer who performs new Asian dance choreographies as embodiments of Japanese Pan- Asianism; a Japanese ballerina who performs the Chinese revolutionary story The White-Haired Girl as part of Cold War-era “People's Diplomacy”; a Chinese dancer who performs South and Southeast Asian dances to advance Bandung-era inter-Asia alliances; a Uyghur woman who teaches Han dancers to perform Uyghur dance as part of the construction of PRC socialist multiculturalism; an Afro-Asian Chinese diaspora dancer who performs Central Asian and Chinese women in the context of transnational leftism and Soviet ideologies of “the revolutionary East”; and Chinese dancers who perform the role of Congolese resistance fighters in the context of an expanded “Afro-Asia” notion of the East that includes Africa.
Ethnic and racial impersonation are important but understudied phenomena in Asian performance research, especially impersonation across inter-Asian and Afro-Asian communities. In this project, I examine instances of inter-Asia and Afro-Asia cross-ethnic performance in the context of solidarity movements. By focusing on examples in dance from the interwar period to the Cold War, I center women performers’ contributions to and reimagining of Asian solidarity discourse in diverse historical and political contexts. As Asian solidarity shifted in time and place, these impersonations reflected new hierarchies within and beyond Asia, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of employing impersonation to embody anti-racist critique and political solidarity.
Miya Q. Xie
The Literary Territorialization of Manchuria: Rethinking East Asia through Frontier
This paper is a draft introduction to my book manuscript on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese literature written in and about the northeastern Asian frontier of Manchuria. The book conceptualizes Manchuria, a northeastern Asian frontier contested by multiple countries in the first half of the twentieth century, as an unexpected site of literary creation and connection. Many East Asian writers went to Manchuria and wrote about Manchuria, and these frontier texts generated some of the most creative, and critical, articulations about nations, empires, and states in the region. Writers that I discuss in the book include the Chinese northeastern writers such as Xiao Hong and Duanmu Hongiang, the Korean writers who wrote in Manchuria such as Yŏm, Sang-sŏp and An Sukil, the Japanese writer Abe Kōbō who grew up in Manchuria, and the Taiwanese writer Zhong Lihe who started literary writing there. I grasp the multi-lingual, multi- national literature of Manchuria through the lens of “literary territorialization,” a term I use to refer to the process through which a given space is transformed into a national territory through literature. Literary territorialization is a dynamic, relational process, as writers keep adjusting and inventing strategies and techniques of narrating nation through literature in accordance to the shifting borders—geographic and imaginary—as well as the shifting relations among different nations. Literature of Manchuria therefore demonstrates how regional demarcation and contestation should not be understood as producing nothing but division; instead, contested bordering processes mediate connection and promote circulation among different national members of the region even as they alienate them against each other.