This talk presents the multifaceted story of China’s soft power campaigns in Africa, with a special focus on Ethiopia—one of China’s closest economic and political partners on the continent. Countering the claims of China’s authoritarian export, the analysis of China’s engagement with Ethiopian elites, youth and media audiences, showcases what I describe as a “fragmented spectacle” — a grand, but disjointed display of China’s prowess. In particular, China’s soft power appeal is rooted in generosity of scale or the large-scale access to its initiatives.

This paper pushes back against the pervasive masculinist gendering of mobility in the emerging field of “InterAsian” studies. Existing research has focused on the movements of mobile men, a framework that risks naturalizing gendered notions of female stasis. In contrast the paper argues for the need to reconceptualize the concept of mobility, and the archives where we look for its traces, to capture the modes through which women travelled InterAsian spaces.

My presentation will offer a historical perspective on secularism in South Asia through a discussion of a history of religious reform movements from the early twentieth century through the end of colonial India, as a way of historicizing the creation of a constitutional secular state in India in the mid-twentieth century. Though Indian history will comprise the base of the presentation, it will address the issue of religious freedom in contemporary South Asia, drawing on cases from India and Bangladesh primarily.

After a year of Zooming and virtual film screenings, we’re excited to see our friends in person once more. Join us under the Schenley Plaza tent for our Welcome Reception on Tuesday, September 28 at 3 p.m.! There will be refreshments, chances to meet and hang out with other students and faculty interested in Asian Studies, and information about upcoming Asian Studies events. Catch a performance from one of our talented student groups and meet our Japan Studies post-doc, who will perform on the shamisen.

What is the relationship between everyday human culture and the global realities of anthropogenic climate change? My current book project, “Fueling Tokyo: Japan in the Age of Global Energy,” takes up this problem, knitting together histories of people, resources, technologies, and infrastructures to help us better understand the cultural connections that have fueled the Anthropocene in Japan. The country is the world’s third-largest economy; it imports 95% of its primary energy. Japan built an empire in pursuit of energy: labor and food calories, coal, hydroelectric sites, and oil.

Artisanal production is touted today as part of Japan’s immutable traditional culture, characterized as a rapidly disappearing form of manual labor and long-held customs that are in sharp contrast to the white collar work in office buildings or government organizations so prevalent today. Similarly, the lives of commoners in premodern Japan are often imagined as being removed from the aesthetics, poetics, and cultural heights of the aristocracy. But were these divisions of social group and status so rigidly defined?

In 1982, a Chinese American named Vincent Chin was murdered in Detroit by two white autoworkers at the height of anti-Japanese sentiments arising from massive layoffs in the auto industry. They were given a $3000 fine and 3 years probation for the murder, but no time in prison. Outraged by this injustice, Asian Americans across the nation united to form a pan-Asian identity and civil rights movement. The film Vincent Who? explores this legacy within the larger narrative of Asian American History.

Focusing on post-liberalization Bombay cinema's metamorphosis into "Bollywood" during the nineties and noughties, this presentation will theorize cultural globalization as a process of plastic worldmaking. I will track a series of global gestures, comprising entanglements of material and semiotic transformations, that have forged Bollywood performatively. At stake is an understanding of this formation as a plastic emergence, in the sense that it conjures globalities that are mutable, relational, artificial, and often incompossible.

How do we propose the most ethical yet legitimate ways for centuries-long traditions, heritages, and artisanship that require a great deal of nonhuman exploitation to continue existing in the future? This presentation tackles the problem of ontological struggles between the human and the nonhuman, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead, with a study of the practice, politics, and ethics that surround the making of a traditional Japanese musical instrument called the shamisen. All the materials that make up the shamisen are imported from other countries.

Yoga, a form of embodied self development with historical roots in the philosophy of southern Asia has become a global phenomenon. As such, the practice of yoga reflects the way in which Asia and Asian Studies in the contemporary moment must be understood in terms of the modernity of globalization. This lecture provides a critical perspective on the twists and turns of tradition that reflects the dislocation of area studies and the value of an inter-disciplinary perspective on cultural history.