The first lecture in the new "Talking About Asia" series will outline some of the controversies that exist when researchers, museum specialists, political figures, and eyewitnesses from the West and China talk about the World War II refugee community in Shanghai, China.

This talk examines the transnational temporality—back and forth—created by the combined effects of visa regulations, the characteristics of transnational labor, and transnational female working bodies. On the basis of ethnographic research on Korean Chinese migrant workers moving between China and Korea, I highlight the spatial division created by this repetitive migration: Korea is a place for making money, whereas China is a place for spending money; Korea is a place for working (productive labor), China is a place for resting (reproductive labor).

With responses by Paul Bove (English), Nancy Condee (Global Studies), and Michael Goodhart (Political Science)

Readings for Thursday's colloquium can be found here.

Peter Hessler has received the 2008 National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting, a 2011 Macarthur Fellowship, and the 2001 Kiriyama Prize. He is the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze; Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip; Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West; and Oracle Bones: A Journey through Time in China, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award. He is a contributing writer for National Geographic and a staff writer at The New Yorker, for which he has served as the Beijing, China correspondent from 2000 to 2007 and currently covers Egypt.

In the early 1920s and 30s, the first purpose-built mosques were established in the United States and Japan. Despite being on the far sides of the planet in Detroit and Kobe, their foundation reflected the ability of South Asian Muslim "religious entrepreneurs" to operate on what was by the 1920s a truly global scale. In tracing the commonalities between this first institutional emergence of Islam in two new world regions, the lecture identifies the global processes of religious competition and exchange and the reasons why Indian Muslims emerged at the forefront of them.

Because of the dramatic growth of Asian economies, the salience of Asia among world historians has risen significantly in the past decades. We can see this prominence in the greater space devoted to Asia in world history textbooks, curricula, and to some extent in faculty positions. Yet because of the lingering influence of Eurocentrism and the constraints imposed by traditional Area Studies, gaps and discrepancies remain.

From a global perspective, even using the term "empire" in relation to Japanese history is not just about the past but about modernity—colonial modernity—and its implications for the present. My talk will consider various recent trends in approaching the Japanese empire writ large. Particular focus rests on the enduring problem with many broader imperial studies' continued failure to examine and/or incorporate Japan's experience into their theoretical frameworks, which only perpetuates exceptionalist ideas about Japan as "different" from home pre-supposed norm.

Arif Dirlik is now an Independent Scholar living in Oregon. Arif Dirlik was Professor of History at Duke University from 1971 – 2001. He was then Knight Professor of History and Anthropology and Director of Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies at the University of Oregon. Dirlik is one of the leading experts on the political culture and party politics of the People’s Republic of China. He is the author of more than a dozen books on Chinese Communism, Revolution, Chinese Historiography, and historiography from such presses as Oxford, California, and Duke.

What are the elements of Japanese aesthetics and design?
How is the Japanese approach to creativity different from the American approach? How can you apply these principles to your daily life?

Nicole Constable is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the director of the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her latest book, Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Migration was co-published by the University of California Press and Hong Kong University Press, and had its first official launch in Hong Kong in June. At this University of Pittsburgh book launch, Constable will speak on her work, and Shalini Puri (Department of English) and Lara Putnam (Department of History) will respond.