CAS Events week of April 8, 2024
GETSEA Simulcast Film Screening of Indigenous Cambodian Filmmakers
GETSEA Simulcast Film Screening of Indigenous Cambodian Filmmakers
On April 9th from 4:00 pm-5:30pm the Center for Asian Studies, in partnership with GETSEA and the Bophana Institute will present a unique Simulcast Film Screening of short films by Indigenous Cambodian filmmakers, each weaving a narrative around the themes of healing, memory, and care. The screening will be held in Humanities 135.
This event is a part of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages initiative, aimed at celebrating and preserving the linguistic diversity and cultural heritage of indigenous communities.
Dull Trail (2020): Delve into the Bunong language through the lens of directors KHON Raksa, PEOU Mono & CHOEY Rickydavid. A journey through time, memory, and the unspoken narratives of the Bunong community.
My Wish (2021): Directed by KASOL Sinoun, this Jarai language film offers a unique perspective on the dreams and aspirations rooted deep within indigenous traditions and modern-day challenges.
Trung (2022): Khamnhei HEA brings to life a story in the Karvet language, capturing the essence of indigenous identity and the quest for self-discovery.
Alive Skin (2022): A collaborative masterpiece by Veasna OEM & Vantha RAT in the Khmer language, exploring the intricate relationship between individuals, communities, and their environments.
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS).
Abundance: Sexuality’s History, Book Talk by Anjali Arondekar
Wednesday, April 10 at 5pm
Humanities 250
Anjali Arondekar will give a book talk about her latest book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023). Arondekar is a Professor of Feminist Studies and the Founding Director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. In Abundance, Arondekar refutes the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality. Instead, Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge the narratives of their constant devaluation. This comparative and provocative history marshals its archival materials from a range of historical and literary sources in English, Marathi, Konkani and Portuguese. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within post/colonial, and anti/caste histories. The book extends connections between Dalit/Bahujan studies and queer studies, between historical forms and political narratives, and will push scholars to interrogate orientations to caste, sexuality and historiography in South Asia. Arondekar's first book or the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009) was the winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association, 2010.
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, History Department and Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Anthropology of Japan Series: Yusuke’s Story: Coming of Age in Care and the Precarity of Social Welfare in Japan
Wed, Apr 10, 2024, 12:20-1:10pm MT, on Zoom
Register in advance:
Dr. Christopher Chapman
PhD recipient in Anthropology, Oxford University
Children’s voices are often marginalized in child welfare, yet they offer important insight into the design and delivery of social care. Drawing on yearlong fieldwork in a residential care institution, I explore how one young person, Yusuke, sees himself and his society. I consider how his daily movements in and out of the institution form a wide itinerary of social and affective encounters. I analyze how the journeys of being-in-care index both a lived present and embodied past, sometimes invoking both at once in ambiguous, unplanned ways. Relating this to the broader trajectory of care outcomes, I suggest how the welfare system injects new forms of social precarity into children's lives by way of these forced journeys into care—how children are remade into children of the state. I find overall that the quest of seeking, listening to, and retelling marginalized stories contextualizes new possibilities for understanding the relationship between politics, space, and memory.
Mediating Feuds and Making Minorities on the Sino- Tibetan Borderlands of Late Republican and Early Maoist China
Thursday, April 11 at 6pm
Gugg 205
In early 1941, the Kuomintang dispatched a well-known scholar-official, Gao Yihan, to investigate a “grassland dispute” between two Tibetan chiefdoms on the Qinghai-Gansu border. As Gao quickly discovered, the Gyelwo-Gengya feud was part of a much larger contest put into motion by the collapse of Manchu Qing power and competition between a host of regional actors to shape the post-imperial order. It also pitted statist desires to create and enforce bounded political-legal jurisdiction against the mobile nature of pastoral society and the norms of monastic/religious authority that often stretched across state boundaries and into sometimes distant, non-contiguous communities. A decade later, state media touted the Chinese Communist Party’s purported success in finally resolving the Gyelwo-Gengya feud to be one of its foremost achievements in “nationality work” during the early period of the PRC. This paper examines efforts by the late-Republican and early-PRC states to mediate grassland disputes as key components in state-making processes designed to territorially and epistemologically discipline the Sino-Tibetan frontier according to the demands of progressively more powerful and interventionist state formations. It also suggests that the state’s inability to eliminate these types of disputes is an avenue through which to measure the incomplete nature of these transformations.
Benno Weiner is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. He is author of the Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier and co-editor of Contested Memories: Tibetan History under Mao Retold. His most recent article, “‘This Absolutely is not a Hui Rebellion!’ The Ethnopolitics of Great Han Chauvinism in Early Maoist China,” was published in the October issue of the journal Twentieth Century China.
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies and the Tibet Himalaya Initiative.
2024 Asia Symposium: Fluid Asia
Friday, April 12
Center for British and Irish Studies, Norlin Library 5th floor
This symposium explores themes of physical and social fluidities in Asia. There are many dimensions to water, as a liquid, a basis of all living organisms, a biotic infrastructure for life, a material around which complex social relations of power swirl, and a counterpoint to conceptions that area studies are based on. With this theme, CAS seeks to gather together divergent interests in ‘blue humanities’, ‘wet ontologies’, environmental justice movements associated with water, climate change induced experiences of flood and drought, and social fluidities of all sorts – from labor migrant streams to ‘be like water’ protest movements – all in the spatial and temporal contexts of Asian places. We are particularly interested in how the social effects of anthropogenic climate change are experienced through human relations with water.
Schedule:
8:45 Opening Remarks by Massimo Ruzzene (RIO Director)
9:00am - 10:30am Water Politics and Contestations
This panel examines infrastructural challenges related to water and political and social contestations around water, including hydropower development, sanitation, community water access, and the consequences of climate change.
Speakers:
Yaffa Truelove (Geography, Boulder )
Nga Dao (Geography, York University )
Win Myo Thu (Myanmar activist)
Moderator: Zannah Matson (Environmental Design, Boulder)
10:30am - 10:45am Break
10:45am - 12:15pm Social Fluidities 1: Transnational Solidarities, Social Movements, and Migration
This panel explores social fluidities and circulations, including how the rise of transnational solidarities, cross-border social movements, and global migrations are reshaping social and political life in Asia.
Speakers:
Andrew Le (Sociology, Arizona State University )
Purvi Mehta (History, Colorado College)
Clara Lee (Anthropology, Boulder)
Moderator: Shae Frydenlund (Center for Asian Studies, Boulder)
12:15pm - 1:30pm Lunch
1:30pm - 3:00pm Social Fluidities 2: Environment, Development, and Diaspora
This panel explores the relationship between material challenges and social life, including how contemporary artists respond to regional environmental challenges, diaspora politics, and contestations around development.
Speakers:
Alvin Camba (Korbel School, University of Denver)
Brianne Cohen (Art History, Boulder)
Dawa Lokyitsang (Anthropology, Boulder)
Moderator: Kathryn E. Goldfarb (Anthropology, Boulder)
3:00pm - 4:00pm Reception
4:00pm - 5:30pm Keynote: Julie Chu, University of Chicago
Upstream, Downstream, Offshore:
Constancy Amidst the Flux of Supply Chains
Before “the chain” became the dominant figure for understanding the dynamics of supply and demand in the 1980s, fluvial landscapes have long undergirded logistical projects for building out and maintaining the infrastructural channels of commerce and travel, especially around estuarial or delta zones where rivers meet the sea. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic engagements with the original “development deltas” of Post-Mao China linking coastal SEZs (Special Economic Zones) along the Pearl, Min and Yangtze rivers to global exchange, this talk offers an estuarial take on what scholars of modernity and supply chain capitalism have described as a “liquid” world full of uncertainty and volatility. But in lieu of a theory of universal flux, the talk focuses on the temporal politics of constancy that make fluvial landscapes thinkable in terms of supply chains and in turn, actionable as valued lifeways to be developed and sustained along the logistical junctures of upstream, downstream and the offshore.