Lecture

Asia Now: The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class

Type: 
Monday, December 6, 2021 - 16:30 to 17:45
Event Location: 
211 David Lawrence Hall or online via Zoom

China’s ongoing economic reforms have produced new types of legal, political, economic, social, and familial subjects. The revolutionary political subject of Maoism—“the People”—has been atomized into independent economic subjects responsible for their own welfare outside of work. This has been marked by the abolition of the so-called “iron rice bowl,” or a system of cradle to grave welfare for privileged urban workers, in contrast to exploited rural citizenry who have historically subsidized China’s urban industry.

From Collectively Close to Communally Distant and Back Again: Four Models of Annotation and Interpretation in the Digital Humanities

Type: 
Thursday, November 11, 2021 - 17:30 to 19:30
Event Location: 
CL 232

Dr. Burges is the principal investigator on Mediate, a platform for the digital annotation of audiovisual and time-based media with cross-disciplinary applications. His primary collaborators on Mediate are Emily Sherwood,Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab and Studio X at the University of Rochester, and Joshua Romphf, the head programmer of the Digital Scholarship Lab at theUniversity of Rochester. Burges is the author of Out of Sync & Out of Work: History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture(Rutgers UP, 2018) and co-editor, with Amy J.

The Great Exodus from China

Type: 
Wednesday, November 3, 2021 - 19:30
Event Location: 
via Zoom

The Great Exodus examines one of the least understood forced migrations in modern East Asia—the human exodus from China to Taiwan following the Nationalist collapse and Chinese Communist victory in 1949. Peeling back layers of Cold War ideological constructs on the subject, the book tells a very different story from the conventional historiography.

Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History

Type: 
Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - 15:00
Event Location: 
via Zoom

By examining two case studies on how the Chinese diaspora came to shape biomedicine in China and Taiwan from 1937 to 1970, this talk makes the case for a new historical concept of "global medicine." "Global medicine" highlights the multivalent and multidirectional flows of medical practices and ideas circulating the world that shaped Chinese East Asia in the 20th century.

Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japanese Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945

Type: 
Monday, November 15, 2021 - 16:30
Event Location: 
211 David Lawrence Hall or via Zoom

This talk examines how Japanese colonizers and Taiwanese subjects transformed colonial Taiwan—the sub-tropical island Japan acquired from China in 1895—into a staging ground for imperial expansion across the East and South China seas. Taking advantage of Taiwan's proximity and cultural affinities with South China and Southeast Asia, Japanese colonial leaders innovated new strategies to compete with the Chinese and Western powers for regional hegemony.

Becoming (and Un-Becoming) Masters of their Own Homes: From United Front to Rebellion on Tibetan Borderland of Early-Maoist China

Type: 
Monday, November 8, 2021 - 16:30
Event Location: 
211 David Lawrence Hall or via Zoom

When in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party “liberated” the ethnocultural frontier region known to Tibetans as Amdo, its goal was not just to construct a state, but to create a nation—not just control, but transformation. While state building might have been accomplished through coercion, Party leaders understood that nation making required narratives and policies capable of convincing Amdo’s diverse inhabitants of their communion with a wider political community.