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A New Generation of Asian Studies: Selected Graduate Student Papers from AAS Regional Conferences – Sponsored by Council of Conferences
Organizer and Chair: Hyaeweol Choi, Arizona State University
Discussant: Frank L. Chance, University of Pennsylvania
The Council of Conferences (COC) proposed an initiative to create a COC-designated panel to be composed of the four best papers presented by graduate students at the AAS regional conferences. This initiative aims to cultivate the next generation of Asia scholars and to get them involved in regional and national conferences. Taking a bottom-up approach, we believe that the COC-designated panel will be instrumental in channeling talented students of Asian studies into the national academic community. In doing so, such panels will contribute to the long-term growth of the field. The current proposal is the first panel to come out of this new initiative. The panel includes four papers, and it covers disciplinary areas ranging from history to literature and cinema studies, touching on all regions in East Asia—China, Japan and Korea. Mihwa Choi examines Sima Guang’s arguments on funeral rituals to demonstrate the ways in which Confucian classical texts were used in the Song Dynasty to legitimize Confucian social and moral order while penalizing other worldviews and practices. Sinae Park offers a new insight into narrative strategies of women writers during the Choson Dynasty that significantly challenges the image of women as passive and powerless. Ricky Law contests the idea of a “pre-destined” ally relationship between Japan and Germany.
Wielding Ritual Censorship for Hierarchical Social Order: Sima Guang's Thinking on Funeral Rituals
Mihwa Choi, University of Chicago
The discourse and practice of the funeral ritual during the Song era shows how the authority of classical texts was used to suppress new kinds of practices which drew on people’s beliefs about the world-beyond and the spirit world. Sima Guang used a concept of ritual as a way of advocating his vision of society and politics, believing that moral reform of individuals and the government would be the basis for a social order. In the Shuyi, Sima endeavored to simultaneously revive the idea of the ritual canon and adjust its requirements to contemporary needs. He also condemned non-Confucian and non-canonical ritual practices, including Buddhist funerals, lavish burials, and geomancy. Sima thought that those who violated the canonical ritual regulations projected their own wish fulfillment into the funeral ritual with hopes that their status in the world-beyond would be improved through material investment in ritual performance. In contrast, Confucian discourse removed the spirit world from the realm of discourse, keeping it instead as a reference point for organizing and systemizing various rites. From a rigorous Confucian point of view, those non-canonical ritual practices divorced moral aspects from the concept of Heaven and the spirit world expressed in the canonical texts. Censorship was Sima’s way of solving the social problem of the growing economic power of the wealthy merchants and money-lenders by emphasizing that official rank should be the fundamental basis of social hierarchy.
'I Lament, I Deplore, and I Resent' as 'Veni, Vidi, Vici': the Hansan Yi-ssi Kohaengnok
Si Nae Park, University of British Columbia
The Hansan Yi-ssi Kohaengnok (Record of the Hardships of Lady Yi of Hansan) is an autobiographical narrative written by a yangban woman known as Lady Yi of Hansan (1659-1727). This first-person narrative is a retrospective written by Yi on the occasion of her hwangap (the completion of the 60-year zodiac cycle) celebration. In this paper I examine the "suffering and hardships” explicitly expressed by the narrator in order to evaluate previous scholarship, which follows the prevalent interpretative tendencies of homogenizing and simplifying Choson women's lives as essentially suppressed and pain-inflicted. Instead, I focus on the autobiographical self in the text and conclude that the Kohaengnok narrative is in fact Yi's carefully measured attempt at self-glorification and a claim for due recognition of her contributions to her family and her husband’s family; thus, I argue that the itemization of suffering and hardships is neither the dominant nor intended motive behind her literary production, but a deft rhetorical device she deploys to achieve her goal of constructing a positive self-image within 18th century Confucian Choson—a world in which one’s individuality is primarily celebrated for exacting fulfillment of one’s social duties.
Portraying a Potential Partner? The Japanese Press on Germany, 1919-1933
Ricky Law, University of North Carolina
This paper is part of a broader project which uses the press as one means to reinterpret the dynamics leading to Japanese-German cooperation during World War II. Previous scholarship, drawing mainly from diplomatic documents, has depicted the Berlin-Tokyo Axis as structurally inevitable by highlighting Germany’s and Japan’s shared authoritarianism, anticommunism or late imperialism and industrialization. While these approaches point out the similarities between the two countries, they downplay the tensions between a nationalistically hypersensitive Japan and a racially arrogant Germany, and do not explain the timing of the rapprochement in the 1930s. This paper thus proposes to examine the way in which the interwar Japanese press portrayed Germany to determine if the newspapers indeed accorded Germany favorable treatment as a predestined ally. Since the media enjoyed relative freedom in the era of the Taisho Democracy, newspapers from this period could serve as a barometer reflecting Japanese public opinion. To get a fair representation of the press, the paper surveys five newspapers spanning the political spectrum: Akahata, Tokyo Asahi Shinbun, Yomiuri Shinbun, Kokumin Shinbun and The Japan Times. Evidence indicates that despite the newspapers’ interest in Germany’s royalty, culture, science and economy, they did not embrace everything German but treated Germany as just another imperialistic Western power. After the rise of Nazism the press even singled out for criticism a Germany ruthless in domestic politics and aggressive in international affairs that hardly passed for a predestined partner.
From Periphery to Center: The Rise of the Korean Film Industry since the Late 1990s and Ironies of its Success
Jeongsuk Joo, State University of New York, Buffalo
Once nearly driven to extinction because of the popularity of Hollywood films in Korea, the Korean film industry has rapidly grown to challenge the dominant position of Hollywood in domestic theaters since the late 1990s. In addition to unprecedented success at home, there has been a dramatic rise in export sales of Korean films, which have drawn much attention from the world community. In this paper, I first examine the current vitality of the Korean film industry as a window to sea changes in the global media environment that defies the formula that the transnational cultural flow is equal to Americanization or cultural imperialism. Second, I also pay attention to the complex dynamics of the sea changes in the industry, which tend to involve both conformity to and appropriation of the dominant role of Hollywood. That is, since the late 1990s Korean film industry has followed the path of Hollywood, and yet it is not necessarily imitating or reaffirming Hollywood hegemony. After all, localizing Hollywood conventions has made it possible for the Korean film industry to reclaim its dominant space at home. Rather than discussing if the case of the Korean film industry constitutes a “challenge” or a “capitulation” to Hollywood hegemony, I argue that current developments within the Korean film industry highlight how the local and the global come to reconstitute each other through their complicated interactions.