session F: sunday, October 11, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m.

 

F1 Gender and Politics in South Asia | 5200 Posvar

Chair: VALERIAN DESOUSA, West Chester University of Pennsylvania

CHARLOTTE GILES, University of Texas at Austin

“Dedh Ishqiya”: Obscuring the Female-Bond

Through his Bollywood film, Dedh Ishqiya, Abhishek Chaubey addresses matters of comfort and discomfort through the use of typically heteronormative conventions in film. Chaubey uses the sakhi bond, as well as other conventions, to draw the viewer into a seemingly heteronormative and conventional (therefore, comfortable) film. But this viewer is then brutally let down when the film subverts those conventional tropes in favor of a non-heteronormative romance. The Bollywood film Dedh Ishqiya, tells the story of a wealthy widow's search for a new poet husband in the setting of an Urdu poetry gathering (mushaira). She is accompanied and supported by her female friend, handmaiden, and lover, Munniya.
Chaubey adjusts the expected heteronormative narrative by referencing Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu short story, Lihaaf, forcing the viewer to examine their own conceptions of comfort, especially those related to sexuality and romance.

 

SHALINI AYYAGARI, University of Pittsburgh

Singing for Singh: Music and Electoral Politics in Rajasthan, India

The 2014 Parliamentary elections in India's northwestern state of Rajasthan proceeded as anticipated in May 2014, with the controversial and independent running Jaswant Singh coming in second to the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate. In this paper I argue that Singh’s relative success stemmed from the backing of the Manganiyar, a community of hereditary musicians from Rajasthan, who composed new songs in support of Singh’s campaign. This election serves as an example of unprecedented involvement in politics amongst the Manganiyar, a low caste community ingrained in musical patronage relations with a history of non-involvement in electoral politics. What does it mean for the Manganiyar to assert themselves in contemporary political arenas and how does this involvement speak to a new cultivation of self-determination, social responsibility, and community advancement? What can be extrapolated from this case study to examine new ways of political involvement through musical practice in South Asia?

 

SAGNIKA CHANDA, University of Pittsburgh

“Indian Army Rape Us”: Kristeva’s Herethics and the Semiotic Bodies of Mothers of Manorama

Motherhood, a metaphor for women’s politics in today’s northeastern India, is also suspected to be an effective conveyer of patriarchy. In my paper I discuss the specific protest launched by the Apunba Lup Meira Paibi mothers of Manipur in northeastern India who stripped naked and demonstrated before the Assam Police Headquarters in protest of the brutalized rape and killing of Thangjam Manorama. I examine the protest also known as “Mothers of Manorama” via Kristeva’s “Herethics” where “maternity is a bridge between singularity and ethics”. The maternal body of the Apunba Lup mothers is utilized as an abject and real object through this concept of herethics. I argue that the semiotic body of the mothers exemplifies Kristeva’s herethics whereby the “child” Manorama, “othered” by the state, is claimed by the mothers. Through their nakedness they position their own bodies as an “abject other” and display a maternal love for both.

 

T. NICOLE GOULET, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Representations of Hindu Goddesses After the Rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey

This paper presentation addresses the ways in which representations of Hindu goddesses were used after the 2012 rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi, India.  In particular, this paper examines examples such as the 'Abused Goddesses' advertisement campaign, and the comic book, "Priya's Shakti."  The aim is to analyze the ways in which people have used ideas about Hinduism and Hindu goddesses to challenge the assumption that Hinduism supports and propagates domestic violence.

 

 

F2 Economic Development and Civil Society in Urban and Rural China | 5400 Posvar

Chair: JAMES COOK, University of Pittsburgh

LOUIS SCHWARTZ, University of Pittsburgh

Achieving Environmental Progess: Is Civil Society Participation Indispensable?

There is consensus that China's environment has become so degraded that it threatens the health and welfare of its citizens.  Despite this recognition of the need to take decisive action to ameliorate environmental conditions in China, the Chinese government is sending mixed signals as to their willingness to have civil society participate in bringing about change in China.  With respect to environmental issues, the participation of civil society has been an important part of the process of making meaningful progress in emissions reductions and remediation in developed countries.  How can the goal of cleaning up China's environment be met in the absence of robust participation of civil society?  Conversely, is it imaginable to have a top down solution that will be effective?

 

LULU LIU, University of Pittsburgh

Entrepreneurship or Distress? Self-employment and Economic Development in Urban China

In economics, entrepreneurship' is usually used interchangeably with self-employment. However, as Glaeser (2007) puts it, this “makes little distinction between Michael Bloomberg and a hot dog vendor”. A high rate of self-employment may represent entrepreneurship derived from economic liberalization, or it may indicate a lack of jobs in the primary sector. In this paper, I examine the nature of self-employment in urban China: is it a sign of entrepreneurship or distress? I separate self-employment into own-account workers and self-employed owner-managers, and found that the former are most likely to be distressed workers who cannot find jobs in the primary sector, while the latter are more likely to be true entrepreneurs.

 

JI YUN LEE, Sungkyunkwan University

Corruption-deciding Factor of China in Transition Period seen from the Perspective of ‘Rent-seeking’

Corruption problem is a factor causing serious unrest in Chinese society which can eventually threaten the stability of Chinese Communist political system. Considering that corruptions of government officials triggered Tiananmen Square Incident, maintenance of system stability is more important than anything else and for Chinese Communist Party, prevention of corruption is critical for the stability. Although anticorruption effort of Chinese Communist Party has continued through several anticorruption movements since it declared Anticorruption War in 1993, China is still struggling in the quagmire of corruption, especially when seeing that China's Anti-Corruption Index stays in the 80th among 177 nations.
   The purpose of this study is to draw out a plan for political reform in China by looking into corruption of China in transition period focusing on Shenyang and Xiamen incidents from the perspective of rent-seeking. For this purpose, starting from the claim that corruption threatens system stability in China, the study looks into corruption in terms of rent-seeking.

 

LAN FANG, Shaanxi Normal University

Economic Behaviors of Farmers and Government in Relation to Irrigation: A Case Study from Shanxi Province, China

In this paper, an ordered choice model is employed to analyze and rank the impacts of several agricultural water related indicators on farmers’ and government’s behaviors. These water related indicators are water-saving technologies, agricultural water prices, government subsidies, water rights and Water User Association. This research was conducted in several irrigation districts in Shanxi Province. Our model results show that increasing water prices and governmental subsidies plays the most important role in affecting farmers’ and government’s water saving behaviors, as compared to investments in irrigation technologies, increased water trading rights and joining the Water User Association. Furthermore, compared with government’s behaviors, the optimized individual farmers’ behaviors contribute significantly more to improving local social welfare.

 

HOWARD (JINGHAO) SUN, Zhejang University

Living by Water in Late Imperial China: Environmental Changes and Local Society in the Northern Canal Areas, 1289-1850

The proposed project focuses on environmental changes and their consequences in North China in the late imperial period. My main purpose is to examine the environmental history of the Grand Canal in relation to the ecological, social and political history in the north. The Grand Canal was a man-made factor that reshaped the physical natural condition of a large part of North China.

My focus will be on southwestern Shandong: with the canal port city Jining as the regional center, and its surrounding areas and places along the canal and canal-related networks in Yanzhou prefecture and Caozhou prefecture as Jining’s periphery or hinterland. I will examine how the Grand Canal’s infrastructural system, transport and tribute shipment functions, and commercial activities brought diverse impacts to different localities in the region. At the moment, I propose a few directions to work on:

            First, I will analyze the physiographical environment of Southwestern Shandong, including the Yellow River and public works for water control and irrigation. As the hydraulic projects were closely connected to and even subordinate to the maintenance of the canal infrastructure and transportation, this will require scrutiny of complex circumstances.

Second, I will reveal how the functioning of the Grand Canal fundamentally reshaped the local ecosystem in southwestern Shandong. A few huge reservoirs or lakes were built or enlarged, and were managed by the government to ensure the supply of water for the Grand Canal.

Third, with the Grand Canal as the axis or anchor, I will examine interaction between the changing environment and human forces (both society and state). The northern canal belt witnessed the emergence of a specific path and model of commercialization and urbanization such as in Jining and its satellite market towns: a canal transportation and canal trade-driven and oriented marketing system and economy were formed. This exogenous pattern of development was different from that of the Yangzi delta; economic activities in Jining were largely regulated and determined by government policy. In contrast, prosperity in the Yangzi Delta was grounded on the economic development and market expansion of its own region following an endogenous pattern of growth.

 Fourth, I will illuminate human responses to the social and political complications related to coping with the canal and canal-related environmental issues or problems. I propose to examine the interface between state surveillance over the complex hydraulic systems and local initiative in the region to reveal important mechanisms in the relationship between state and local society. On the one hand, in urban Jining and its vicinities we may see local forces’ activism to some extent undermine the display of state power:  the Jining gentry groups were large and powerful. On the other hand, peripheries were powerless as their smaller elite groups and rural communities were not afforded the use of reservoir water, and were therefore vulnerable to frequent droughts sand flooding alternately. They even became the victims of the prosperous Grand Canal: the lifeblood of the empire, and the adjacent urbanized belt. So, we can see the disparity between rich urban Jining and its poor rural peripheries/hinterland in the region. 

In short, I seek to employ an environmental historical approach to explore the Grand Canal region of northern China during the late imperial period. Environmental elements will be treated not as a background, but dynamic determinants to interact with human responses, to construct a complicated narrative that is characteristic of environmental history.

 

F3 Understanding WWII and Occupied Japan | 5200 Posvar

Chair: RACHAEL HUTCHINSON, University of Delaware

MASAKO NAKAGAWA, Villanova University

American Defense Attorneys at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials

The defendants at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East were represented by American Lawyers as well as Japanese counselors.  The US government provided twenty some American attorneys at the beginning of the trials.  At the Nuremberg Trials all defendants were represented by German lawyers, but the Japanese defense lawyers were unfamiliar with Anglo-American legal system, and few of them were fluent in English.  Daily transcripts of the trial proceeding were issued in English while Japanese transcripts somehow took a month to come out.  The Japanese lawyers were at loss dealing with such speedy efficiency. Thus American lawyers played prominent roles during the trials.
It is widely believed that the American lawyers considerably improved the quality of the defense as their dedication to their profession left a long lasting mark in history.

 

PAUL REAGAN, Temple University

Sugihara Chiune and the Rescue of European Jews in World War II

In this work underway I hope to examine what led this solitary diplomat to defy the dictates of his superiors in Tokyo as well as the terrifying threat of the Nazis and Soviet communists.
For example, I attempt to answer the following questions:
Why did Japan have a consulate in Lithuania? Moscow, Berlin, perhaps Prague would have been seemingly natural considering the nature of diplomatic relations in 1940.
I propose the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had strategic considerations paramount in the decisions that would determine the lives of millions.
Who were the “enemies” of Japan?
How did Japan strategically place itself in view of its interests in China and Manchuria?
What is the perception of the Jewish people in Japan?
And, fundamentally what inspired this young diplomat to save the lives of thousands of Jewish people?
It is a complicated story but I shall refer to the diaries of Sugihara and the 14 volumes surprisingly spared destruction in the so-called “Bonfire of the Bureaucrats”. There is a list of those individuals given “transit visas” to enable the Jewish refugees from Poland, Lithuania, Holland and elsewhere in Europe to escape the horrors that lay ahead.
Finally, what happened to Sugihara and his family as a result of his heroism and defiance of the policies and attitudes of his superiors in Japan?

 

MICHAEL LYNCH, Kent State University

Critiquing the Revision of History: Recent Japanese Films dealing with the Second World War

My paper examines how several recent Japanese films critique the nationalistic revision of World War II, as seen prominently in Prime Minister Abe's administration.  These films emphasize the folly of the war and the immense suffering experienced by the people of Japan.  The films represent the hope for moving from conflict to cooperation in Japan's relationships with its Asian neighbors. 

 

 

F4 Integrate TV Commercials into Chinese Culture Learning | 209 Lawrence Hall

Chair: YU XIA, University of Pittsburgh

YU XIA, YUXING WANG, LIANG CHANG, LIN SHI,

University of Pittsburgh

With the explosion of Internet, language teachers are receiving a large amount of teaching materials from online resources, among which television commercials, designed by and for native speakers, are suitable and beneficial for language learners because of its briefness, repetitiveness, and sound and vision support.  Besides, these 30 to 45 seconds videos provide language teachers with an approach to teach not only language, but also culture and critical thinking.

 

F5 Displaying Patronage in Pre-Modern Japan | 1501 Posvar

Chair: KAREN GERHART, University of Pittsburgh

Discussant: MRINALINI RAJAGOPALAN, University of Pittsburgh

CAROLYN WARGULA, University of Pittsburgh

From Recipient to Patron: Strands of Women’s Devotion in Embroidered Esoteric Buddhist Images

Throughout the Heian period (798-1185), male courtiers commissioned embroidered images for the memorial services of their royal mothers, but during the Kamakura period (1185-1333), women became active patrons, often incorporating their own hair in the images to attain merit for this life and the next.  I will examine Heian- and Kamakura-period court diaries, historical chronicles, and temple records that describe the production and dedication of embroidered esoteric Buddhist icons to analyze and clarify the shifting role of aristocratic laywomen from recipients to patrons.  My presentation seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on the role of women in esoteric ritual practices and patronage and offers additional proof that concern for women’s salvation did not emerge with the popularization of the Pure Land Buddhist faith, but much earlier.

 

ELIZABETH MORRISSEY, University of Pittsburgh

Retired Empress and Buddhist Patron: The Illustrated Legends of Ishiyama-dera and the Donation of Higashisonjō-in

Higashisanjō-in, consort of emperor En’yū and mother of emperor Ichijō, is the only individual in the 14th-century illustrated handscroll of the Ishiyama-dera engi e to have two separate scenes devoted to her patronage of the temple depicted in the scrolls.  I will examine the second scene that records her final visit to Ishiyama-dera in the year 1001, during which time she sponsored and donated a set of curtains to Ishiyama-dera’s sacred hidden icon of a Nyoirin Kannon.  Through analysis of the painted scene in the scroll and its text, supplemented with descriptions of this event recorded in Eiga monogatari and records of comparable patronage of Buddhist temples by aristocrats, I argue that the scroll’s emphasis on Higashisanjo’in’s donation reflects her elite status and confirms her as one of Ishiyama-dera’s most powerful patrons by linking her intimately, via the curtains, to the sacred image they conceal.

 

ELIZABETH SELF, University of Pittsburgh

Portrait of Jōkōin: Posthumous Identity and Patron

Jōkōin (1570-1633), also called Hatsu, was a wife, mother, and Buddhist nun. She was the daughter of Asai Nagamasa, lord of Odani Castle, and a highly connected woman in the late 16th  and early 17th century political world as niece of Oda Nobunaga and relative by marriage of both Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Hidetada.  I will examine an elaborately decorated portrait of Jōkōin, likely created after her death and displayed for her memorial services, that is preserved today in Jōkō-ji (Fukui Prefecture).  Although the painting has no inscription, through visual analysis and primary documents, I will explore a number of clues embedded within the painting that can be used to reveal important information both about the posthumous identity of Jōkōin and about the possible identity of the portrait’s commissioner. 

 

JUNGEUN LEE, University of Pittsburgh

Displaying Collections as Strategies of Legitimation in Medieval Kyoto

The Ashikaga shoguns were avid patrons of the arts, known especially for their collections of Chinese paintings, ceramics, and bronzes, which they often displayed both for their own enjoyment and for the visits of eminent guests to their palaces. The Ashikaga also ordered the production of inventories of their collections and instructions for their proper display.  I will examine Kundaikan sōchōki and Okazarisho and discuss the Buddhist and secular precedents for these rules of display, while focusing on the sociopolitical meaning of formal, regulated displays and their special significance for the sixth Ashikaga shogun, Yoshinori (1394-1441; r. 1429-1441) during the visit of Emperor Go-Hamazono (1419-1471; r. 1428-1464).

 

F6 Women in Motion: Gendered Transnationalism in Asia | 1501 Posvar

Chairs: HYO WOO and CAROL CHAN, University of Pittsburgh

Discussant: LAURA BROWN, University of Pittsburgh

HYO WOO, University of Pittsburgh

Traveling between the Empires in Induk Park’s September Monkey (1954)

This paper examines the global mobility of Induk Park—a Korean cosmopolitan woman writer who lived during Japanese colonialism—as explored in her travelogue September Monkey. The book deals with Park’s experience of the 1930’s America compared with her memory of the Japanese empire. It portrays the hidden tensions between global imperialism and local colonialism, as the Korean female subject navigates different colonial legacies and languages. Park’s global-scale mobility was exceptional for an Asian woman at that time. She travelled to America and Europe multiple times attesting the Christian success in Asia to American audience. September Monkey demonstrates Park’s frustration with patriarchal oppression of women in colonial Korea and her glorification of America as an alternative. This paper focuses on how Park’s perspective as an Asian female intellectual sheds a useful light on the complicated workings of empire.

 

CAROL CHAN, University of Pittsburgh

In Sickness and in Wealth: Negotiating Transnational Gendered Shame and Desires in Migrant-Origin Villages

Public and mediatized representations of transnational labor migrants from Indonesia typically include financially successful return migrants, or tragic victims of various forms of sickness, abuse, and harm. How do migrants’ kin, peers, and neighbors in migrant-origin locales perceive, evaluate, and negotiate the promises and risks of gendered migration? Why do some choose to leave or migrate again, while others choose to return, or stay? Based on 13 months of participant observation and semi-structured interviews in two migrant-origin rural villages of Cilacap and Jogjakarta in Central Java, I present and analyze local narratives of “sickness” and “success” related to female migration. “Sickness” and (economic) “success” were most frequently evoked and discussed by residents as common consequences of transnational labor migration. However, the “true” causes of migration-related sickness and success of migrant women in particular were also often sources of doubt, gossip, and speculation. This presentation looks at how and why particular stories of sickness and success are circulated among residents of migrant-origin communities, while other stories may be kept secret or “forgotten”. I argue and illustrate how, through public circulation and discussion of specific migration-related narratives, residents negotiate individually and together public and private gendered shame and desires associated with transnational labor migration. This study departs from current focus on migrants and households’ remittance behavior or social reintegration of former migrants, to highlight how local perceptions and practices of gendered morality and religious piety structure and influence the affective and ethical dimensions of contemporary transnational labor migration.

 

IEVA TRETJUKA, University of Pittsburgh

On the Move: Foreign Women in Japan’s Scientific Institutions

Scientific labor regimes in advanced capitalist economies promote the ideal of flexible scientific subjectivity, epitomized by transnational mobility. However, despite the seeming neutrality, geographic mobility of academic knowledge workers is a gendered and gendering process. In Japan, policy makers efforts to improve the country's scientific institutions include both the recruitment of foreign researchers in temporary positions, and the promotion of hiring of women scientists. Meanwhile, however, as my ethnographic research with young foreign life scientists in Osaka shows, foreign women researchers often find themselves to be a double minority in their institutions. Focusing on the experiences of young foreign women scientists in Osaka, my paper investigates the ways researchers construct and negotiate their identities both as scientists-on-the-move and as women-on-the-move in the context of the ideal of transnational scientific mobility and the organization of Japan's scientific labor regimes.

 

F7 Asian Kinship and Support Networks: Practices and Representations | 1501 Posvar

Chair: PATRICK BECKHORN, University of Pittsburgh

Discussant: MARIAN AGUIAR, Carnegie Mellon University

PATRICK BECKHORN, University of Pittsburgh

Household Strategies for Support among Rickshaw Pullers in Delhi, India

My paper looks at the family organization and support networks of cycle rickshaw pullers in North India. Drawing on ethnographic data collected during two summers of fieldwork, I discuss family life in the villages from which rickshaw pullers originate, including some changing roles for women when their kinsmen migrate away. I also describe how male members of impoverished rural households who migrate to urban centers to work as rickshaw pullers maintain ties to their families and create new households in the city. The new households that rickshaw pullers create often exhibit highly fluid, contingent, and open-ended forms, and include both ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ kinsmen. I explore how rickshaw pullers who enjoy patriarchic privilege in their domestic village life understand and experience their makeshift migrant households – households that may support new masculinities and more symmetrical social relations.

 

AQDAS AFTAB, Carnegie Mellon University

Reading the Subaltern Body in Manto’s Short Stories

My paper examines the invisibility of the subaltern woman’s body during the period of decolonization and nation constitution in India and Pakistan (1940s and 50s). Specifically, I look at Saadat Hasan Manto’s narratives of sex workers and “dirty” working-class women in relation to the critiques that Manto received from other Marxist writers. Manto was widely criticized, even by the progressive writers of the time, for being “obscene” and “perverse.”  By analyzing the critiques directed at Manto, I argue that Manto generated cultural shock by constructing the sexually deviant bodies’ intimate features of (un)touchability that positioned these bodies outside respectable kinship and family networks. I maintain that the audience’s reactions of disgust stemmed not from reading narratives of “obscene” sex, but from experiencing the “dirty” class-ed body of the subaltern woman who was legally and socially excluded from the nation-family social structure.

 

LAUREN KRISHNAMURTI, University of Pittsburgh

Support Networks and Internet Suicide in Asia: Instagram and the Online Death of jojotsai1012

In March 2014 a young Chinese woman, identified by the Instagram name jojotsai1012, posted a series of photos on the image-sharing website which documented her suicide. Reflecting on the controversial relationship between suicide contagion and the internet in China and Japan, I analyze jojotsai1012’s followers as they create and mediate a new space—a “public” (Warner 2002)—by translating her Chinese text in order to connect a global audience. While the internet offers social support for those managing mental health issues, websites promoting self-harm have been criticized for glorifying destructive behaviors: the wave of internet group suicides in Japan in the late 1990s brought the issue of suicide contagion on the internet to the forefront of public health concerns in East Asia (Fushimi 2009; Hitosugi 2009; Ozawa-de Silva 2008, 2010). I argue here that the response to jojotsai1012’s suicide provides a counter-narrative to those that relate the sociality of the internet to suicide contagion in the East Asian context.