Reconfiguring Colonialism: Negotiations of Colonial Cultures in Japan, Korea and Taiwan

A CIRA Graduate Student Conference at UCLA Saturday, February 8, 2003

Shu-mei Shih

Saturday, February 8, 2003

Conference Schedule:

9:00 introductory remarks
Shu-Mei Shih, Director, UCLA Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia
9:15-10:45 city space and urban culture
Todd Henry, Department of History "Foundations of Empire: Japanese Articulations of Korean Otherness and the Construction of Early Colonial Seoul, 1905-1918"

Ruei-Suei Sun, Department of Urban Planning
"New Globalization or Neo-Colonization? Reconsidering the Global City Projects in Taipei and Shanghai in the 1990s"

discussant: Edward Soja, Department of Urban Planning, UCLA
11:15-12:45 language and identity
Suzette Duncan, East Asian Languages and Cultures
"Margin to Margin: Rethinking Identity in Kyo Nobuko’s An Utterly Ordinary Korean in Japan"

Christopher Hanscom, East Asian Languages and Cultures
"The Construction of Colonial Identity and the Trajectory of Language in Chon Kwangyong's 'Kapitan Ri'"

discussant: Leo Ching, Duke University
2:15-4:15 (post-)colonial aporias
Haeng-ja Chung, Department of Anthropology
"The Ethnographer with Multiple Identities in the Post Colonial Present: From (Native) Anthropologist to Call Girl?"

Sonja Kim, East Asian Languages and Cultures
"Contested Bodies: New Women's Clothing and Performance in 1920s Korea"

Yeun-Jee Song, Department of History
"Ch'inilp'a, Collaboration, and Post-Coloniality in Korean Society"

discussant: Namhee Lee, East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA

For more information visit www.international.ucla.edu/compcol.

Click here for a map showing Bunche Hall.

This conference, the culmination of a two-year, graduate-student led project on "Comparative Studies of (Post-) Colonial Cultures in East Asia: Japan, Korea, Taiwan," seeks to examine various colonial and post-colonial sites/moments of negotiation, tension, and dispersion as a means of exploring alternative narratives of colonial identity, language, memory, and space. By taking note of the multiple permutations of the colonial experience unaccounted for by nation-state-centered paradigms, we hope to analyze their complex inter-connections so as to suggest both the tenacity and mutability of colonial and post-colonial discourses and practices. Can these fragments and their inter-connections serve as the basis for new relationships among peoples and places without relying solely on the antagonisms of the colonial past and present in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan?

Our two-year project, funded by Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia (CIRA) and advised by Professors Shu-mei Shih, Miriam Silverberg, and Gi-wook Shin, has brought together students from various disciplines on the UCLA campus around the problems of comparative colonialism. Along with group readings in and discussions of key texts on imperialism and colonialism, over the past year we have held three workshops, two led by Professors Ann Stoler (University of Michigan) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago), bringing these visiting scholars' valuable perspectives to bear on our own work in East Asian colonialism.

Published: Friday, November 22, 2002

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