Month: September 2019

Georgetown position

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Professor of Chinese Culture
Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Georgetown University

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The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Georgetown University invites applications for a tenured position of Professor in Chinese Culture.  We are looking for a senior scholar with a distinguished record of research and publication. The successful candidate will also have a strong record of excellence in teaching undergraduates, as well as in administrative experience. The successful candidate will be expected to join us as the Chair of the Department and to provide leadership in reviewing the department’s current curricular offerings and the development of a proposal for a new East Asian Studies major. The normal faculty teaching load is two courses per semester, but the chair will have a one course per semester teaching load. The person hired will be expected to have a broad understanding of East Asia and to teach the freshman seminar “East Asia: Texts and Contexts” in rotation with other department faculty, as well as upper-level courses on China, some in the Chinese language and some in English.  Evaluation of dossiers will begin immediately.

In order to receive full consideration, complete applications must be received by November 11, 2019 as follows:  Go to

https://georgetown.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Georgetown_Faculty/job/Main-Campus/Professor-of-Chinese-Culture—Department-of-East-Asian-Languages—Cultures_JR07575-1 Continue reading Georgetown position →

China’s war on Uighur culture

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Excellent update report here, on the human rights catastrophe in Xinjiang, China, including on the “single ‘state-race’” racist-nationalist and Han-supremacist ideology that is driving the Chinese government in perpetrating these atrocities. –Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Financial Times (9/12/19)
Fear and oppression in Xinjiang: China’s war on Uighur culture: Beijing’s crackdown on minorities reflects a broader push towards a single ‘state-race’
By Christian Shepherd

When Gulruy Asqar first heard that her nephew Ekram Yarmuhemmed had been taken away by the Chinese police, she feared it was her fault. It was 2016, and she had recently moved to the US from Xinjiang, the region in north-west China that is the traditional homeland of her people, the Turkic-speaking Uighurs.

Her nephew’s family had loaned her about $10,000 towards the move, and Asqar had just transferred the money back to Yarmuhemmed when police came to his home in the regional capital of Urümqi and detained him. “I felt so guilty and I cried . . . I thought I was the reason for it,” Asqar told the FT by telephone from her home in Virginia. Continue reading China’s war on Uighur culture →

Zhiwuzhi, a small bit of shelter

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Source: NYRB (5/9/19)
China: A Small Bit of Shelter
By Ian Johnson

Chen Hongguo lecturing on King Lear, China, 2018

Chen Hongguo lecturing on King Lear at Zhiwuzhi, an arts and culture space in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, China, 2018. Sim Chi Yin/Magnum Photos

At night, a spotlight illuminates four huge characters on the front of the Great Temple of Promoting Goodness in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in northwestern China: mi zang zong feng, “The Esoteric Repository of the Faith’s Traditions.” Twelve centuries ago, during China’s Tang dynasty, the temple was a center for spreading foreign ideas. Buddhist missionaries from India lived there, translating texts from Sanskrit into Chinese and advising emperors on their faith’s new ideas about life and society.

Today the temple is a tourist site. During the day visitors snap selfies and pray for good fortune; in the evening, it is dark except for the spot-lit characters. Across the street, though, the third-floor windows of a nondescript commercial building burn brightly, lighting up a sign with five English words: “I Know I Know Nothing.”

In Chinese, this Socratic paradox is rendered as Zhiwuzhi, which is the official name of what has become China’s liveliest public forum. An arts and culture space, Zhiwuzhi offers at least one lecture a day and a dozen reading groups, and it broadcasts its events on Chinese and foreign video websites like Youku and YouTube. Continue reading Zhiwuzhi, a small bit of shelter →

Art in Drama workshop

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Art in Drama: Reading Dramatic Texts at the Interstices of Performance Culture and Visual Culture

https://ceas.yale.edu/events/art-drama-reading-dramatic-texts-interstices-performance-culture-and-visual-culture

This collaborative reading workshop shall add to our understanding of the visual dimension of drama in Ming and Qing China through an interdisciplinary approach to dramatic texts that portray or engage other forms of art, such as painting, gardening, woodblock printing, costuming, and performance arts (e.g., guqin-playing, female dance, ballad singing, and court pageantries, etc.). In this workshop, we bring together drama scholars with cross-genre, cross-media, and cross-disciplinary research projects all of which involve close reading of dramatic texts as a fundamental part of their scholarship. Each participant has proposed one to two dramatic texts at the center of their ongoing research projects to be the primary material for an intensive group discussion.

Co-organized by Peng Xu (Swarthmore College) and Quincy Ngan (Yale University), the workshop will take place on Oct 12-13, 2019, at Yale. Continue reading Art in Drama workshop →

WICL-5–cfp

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Call for Papers: 5th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-5)
http://u.osu.edu/wicl/wicl-5/

The 5th Workshop on Innovations in Cantonese Linguistics (WICL-5) will take place on Sunday, 19 April 2020, at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A. The WICL conference — an event hosted every two years by different institutions in North America — focuses on new advances in Cantonese Linguistics, including innovations in methodologies, tools, and/or computing software. New approaches and research on language variation within the Cantonese (or “Yue”) subgroup of the Chinese language family, language contact phenomena, and new subfields and their interfaces are especially welcome.

Keynote speakers are: Professor Roxana Suk-Yee Fung (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Professor Genevieve Leung (University of San Francisco) Continue reading WICL-5–cfp →

HK protest artist Boms

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Source: SCMP (9/10/19)
Hong Kong protest art headed for the streets of London and Amsterdam
Work by Hong Kong street artist Boms can be seen all across the city, but his protest posters are now headed for Europe. The Young Blood Initiative will be handing out copies of his work to the public in London and Amsterdam
By Snow Xia

Graffiti artist Boms with his protest poster in a street in Mong Kok. Photo: Snow Xia

Graffiti artist Boms with his protest poster in a street in Mong Kok. Photo: Snow Xia

Boms has been run off his feet lately.

The Hong Kong street artist and dancer – who doesn’t want to be identified – has been plastering walls across the city with his protest posters, voicing his support for the large-scale anti-government movement over the past three months.

Unlike most of the protest art produced locally during this period, his drawings will also be headed for London and Amsterdam, where copies will be distributed to the public and be posted around the streets, over the next two months. Continue reading HK protest artist Boms →

China from the Margins–cfp

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CHINA FROM THE MARGINS: NEW NARRATIVES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Dates: 10-11 April, 2020
Venue: Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Department of China Studies, Suzhou (PRC)
Conference language: English
Deadline for abstract submission: October 31, 2019
Notification of acceptance: Late December 2019
The Department of China Studies of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University is pleased to announce a Call for Abstracts for the forthcoming conference “China from the margins: New narratives of the past and present”. The conference aims at unearthing, exploring and bringing light to stories usually left untold by historians, narratives from the margins of society, explorations of grassroots and popular culture beliefs, amusing anecdotes, items of lore, accounts of the strange and the unusual, etc. It is planned as a dialogue among scholars working in different disciplines whose research offers new approaches to China’s history and culture. The conference is designed to be an inclusive event, open to scholars working on any period of Chinese history and in all research fields, including but not limited to cultural history, oral history, art history and visual arts, literature, philosophy, culture and social sciences.

Continue reading China from the Margins–cfp →

Artists reflect on what has gone in HK

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Source: SCMP (9/5/19)
Out of time: artists return to darkroom, make coin collages to remind Hong Kong of what has gone
Anita Mui, Queen’s Pier, and former Legco building among icons of Hong Kong artist Giraffe Leung depicts using specially treated 20-cent coins. Multiple exposures of city streets in China, Singapore, Japan and South Korea, printed in a darkroom without digital manipulation, make up Simon Wan’s show
By Snow Xia

Giraffe Leung rubs a panel made of 20-cent coins with chemical solutions to create an image of Hong Kong at La Galerie Paris 1839 in Central. Photo: Snow Xia

Giraffe Leung rubs a panel made of 20-cent coins with chemical solutions to create an image of Hong Kong at La Galerie Paris 1839 in Central. Photo: Snow Xia

Coins and darkroom photography may be falling out of use, but they have been given new life in an exhibition that explores and evokes Hongkongers’ collective memory.

Showing at La Galerie Paris 1839, Hollywood Road, Central, “Coins – Memories of Hong Kong” by Giraffe Leung Lok-hei and “City Glow” by Simon Wan Chi-chung look at how rapid urbanisation has changed the city.

“As e-payments and virtual money have replaced traditional money globally, I want to use money to remind us of the role … people and things play in our lives [and their value],” explains Leung, whose show re-examines unremarkable objects that became or are becoming obsolete. Continue reading Artists reflect on what has gone in HK →

The Party is Struggling

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Source: China Media Project (9/6/19)
THE PARTY IS STRUGGLING
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The Party is Struggling

In his address to a training session for young leaders at the Central Party School on September 3, Xi Jinping spoke of the immense challenges facing the country and the Chinese Communist Party. The language he chose, however, was not “challenge,” “test” or “obstacle.” He spoke instead of “struggle,” or douzheng (斗争), a word that bears the weight of a painful political history — recalling the internal “struggles against the enemy” that tore Chinese society apart in the 1960s and 1970s.

For many still, douzheng invokes not just the need for unity toward common goals, or a can-do attitude, but warns instead of deep and potentially traumatizing division.

A passage from the Xinhua News Agency release on Xi Jinping’s September 3 speech, with the word “struggle” highlighted. Continue reading The Party is Struggling →

ACLA Transculturalism, Cultural Hybridity and Globalization panel–cfp

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ACLA Panel: Transculturalism, Cultural Hybridity and Globalization
Call for Papers

In the article “Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity,”Arianna Dagnino considers the term transcultural as “a mode of reflexive identity” to examine one’s cultural beliefs as well as a “critical perspective that sees cultures as relational webs and acknowledges the transitory, confluential, and mutually transforming nature of cultures.” Such dynamic notion of culture also echoes with Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial notion of hybridity, a transformational form of culture created by mixing two or more different sources and any accompanying dynamics associated with this process. Ever since the 15th century’s first globalization, we have witnessed not only people from distant regions but also their cultural heritages have continued to meet in “Third Space” (Kramsch &amp; Uryu 2012) and been hybridized with one another to create a new form of culture. This dynamic process that allows the emergence of new culture has been significantly accelerated by today’s rapid globalization of economy, the increase of human migration and the diffusion of global information technologies. Continue reading ACLA Transculturalism, Cultural Hybridity and Globalization panel–cfp →

13th Special Book Awards of China

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Although she is not mentioned in the article below, Bonnie McDougall was also among the honorees for her outstanding contributions to the translation and publication of Chinese books, in addition to her work in promoting cultural exchanges and training translators in Chinese literature.–Alison Bailey <abailey@mail.ubc.ca>

Source: China Daily (8/22/19)
China recognizes 15 in prestigious book awards
By Mei Jia

Awardees.

The Special Book Award of China, the top publishing award from the Chinese government, was given to 15 foreign translators, publishers, writers and Sinologists in Beijing on Tuesday to honor their contributions in bridging cultures and fostering understanding.

They include Polish publisher Andrzej Kacperski, who set up sections of Chinese titles in 100 Polish bookstores and hosted Reading About China book exhibitions; Staburova Jelena, the Latvian researcher of Chinese language and literature; and both the Nepali and Uzbek translators of Volume 1 of the global best-seller Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Continue reading 13th Special Book Awards of China →

Cornell should suspend its China projects

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My piece about Cornell U. and China, from last week–Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: The Cornell Daily Sun (8/27/19)
Cornell Should Suspend Its China Projects
By Magnus Fiskesjö

The massive scale of the Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang has become quite clear. Cornell should suspend all projects involving Chinese counterparts and undertake a transparent review to see if any ought to be terminated because they are aiding these atrocities.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has carried out a mass terror campaign in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, targeting millions of ethnic-minority people and forcing them to give up their culture and religion. Those who refuse are sent to brainwashing camps, where they are tormented into denying their ethnic identity and everyday faith and told to stop speaking their own language.

As I have argued elsewhere, this campaign is effectively a program of genocide. It includes a massive effort to break up families, with children confiscated and cut off from both their families and their culture. This is a mass trauma that will linger for generations. Then there is the mass detention of indigenous cultural icons, which is why the campaign is also called a “cultural genocide.” Continue reading Cornell should suspend its China projects →

Help save East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta

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Dear MCLC list members,

My colleagues and I are facing the closure of our department, and we would like to ask for your help.

The University of Alberta is trying to merge our interdisciplinary Department of East Asian Studies with Modern Languages and Cultures (MLCS), a department dedicated to European languages and literatures.  That department has three times the number of faculty as we do, meaning that any merger would put control of East Asian teaching and research at our university in the hands of Europeanists.

Although this move is being pursued by Dean Lesley Cormack of the Faculty of Arts during a period of severe budget pressure, she has admitted in writing that closing our department would not result in any cost savings to the University.  Instead we believe that, by forcibly merging our department into the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, Dean Cormack is hoping to make up for  the relative weakness of European-language classes by grouping them with our much healthier registrations in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.  While we would be glad to support and advocate for our colleagues in that department, killing off our own department to keep them afloat is the wrong solution.  And this merger would indeed do great harm to interdisciplinary research and teaching about Asia at our university: our area-studies model would largely be stripped down to language teaching, and our resources handed over to a department dedicated to European culture.
Continue reading Help save East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta →

Georgia Tech postdoc

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Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese
Faculty Position in the School of Modern Languages
Post-Doctoral Teaching Position in Chinese (up to three years)

The School of Modern Languages at The Georgia Institute of Technology (https://modlangs.gatech.edu/) invites applications for a Teaching Fellow in Chinese as part of its signature Global Languages, Cultures, and Technologies (GLACT) Postdoctoral Program, with a start date of January 1, 2020. This visiting faculty position is a full-time nine-month appointment with a 3/3 teaching load, and is renewable for up to three academic years. Fellows may teach one to two courses in the candidate’s area of research specialization and can apply for an annual course release in support of academic program development. Continue reading Georgia Tech postdoc →

Is Xi mishandling HK

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Source: NYT
Is Xi Mishandling Hong Kong Crisis? Hints of Unease in China’s Leadership
Beijing’s halting response to the protests in Hong Kong has raised questions about President Xi Jinping’s imperious style and authoritarian policies.
By Steven Lee Myers, Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher

A riot police officer in the Mong Kok area of Hong Kong on Friday. Credit: Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, warned a gathering of senior Communist Party officials in January that the country faced a raft of urgent economic and political risks, and told them to be on guard especially for “indolence, incompetence and becoming divorced from the public.”

Now, after months of political tumult in Hong Kong, the warning seems prescient. Only it is Mr. Xi himself and his government facing criticism that they are mishandling China’s biggest political crisis in years, one that he did not mention in his catalog of looming risks at the start of the year.

And although few in Beijing would dare blame Mr. Xi openly for the government’s handling of the turmoil, there is quiet grumbling that his imperious style and authoritarian concentration of power contributed to the government’s misreading of the scope of discontent in Hong Kong, which is only growing. Continue reading Is Xi mishandling HK →