Symposium

Japanese-American Internment and Its Contemporary Implications

Friday, February 20 - Saturday, February 21, 2004
University of Oregon

PROGRAM

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20
Knight Library Browsing Room

2:00 - 3:30 pm
Talk by Frank Chin

3:30 - 4:00 pm
Reception

4:00 - 6:00 pm
Panel Discussion: Experiences in the Camp
Participants: Frank Chin, Frank Emi, Lawson Inada, James Hirabayashi, and Peggy Nagae

7:00 - 9:00 pm
Banquet Dinner, followed by "Four Cousins" monologue by James Hirabayashi
Gerlinger Lounge

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21
McKenzie Hall, Room 375

9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Panel Discussion: Contemporary Implications of Japanese-American Internment
Participants: Moustafa Bayoumi, Michi Okuda, Epifanio San Juan, Jr., and Delia Aguilar
Chair: Keith Aoki

12:00 - 1:30 pm: Break

1:30 - 3:00 pm
Panel Discussion: Perspectives of a New Generation
Participants: Hannah Persson, Khanh Le, Mark Padoongpatt, Maria Hwang

 

This event is free and open to the public. It is presented by the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies and cosponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the Department of History, the Ethnic Studies Program and the College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, please call 346-1521.

 

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Freeman Conference

From the Book to the Internet:
Communication Technologies, Human Motions,
and Cultural Formations in Eastern Asia

October 16-18, 2003
University of Oregon - Gerlinger Lounge
This conference is free and open to the public. For more information, please call 346-1521.

PRE-CONFERENCE ACTIVITIES
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15
Public Lecture
"Culture(s) in Eastern Asia: Views from Asia" [tentative title]
Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore
3:00 pm - Knight Library Browsing Room

Film Showing
The Life and Times of Wu Zhong Xian
A discussion with the filmmaker Evans Chan to follow
7:00 pm - Willamette Hall, Room 110

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16
3:15 pm
Opening Reception

4:00 - 6:30 pm
Migrations of People, Migrations of Texts
Roundtable Discussion:
Cynthia Brokaw (Ohio State)
Alexander Woodside (UBC)
Shu-mei Shih (UCLA)
Moderator: Arif Dirlik (UO)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17
9:00 - 11:30 am
Journalism and Radical Politics in Asia
"Cartooning and Radical Politics in Eastern Asia"
John Lent (Temple)

"Press Freedom and Political Radicalism in 19th Century Shanghai"
Natascha Vittinghof (University of Gottingen)

"Beyond Independence: The Korean Anarchist Journals in China, Japan, and Korea, 1921-1945"
Hwang Dongyoun (Soka University)

Chair: Roxann Prazniak (UO)
Discussant: Bryna Goodman (UO)

1:00 - 3:30 pm
Film and Visual Culture
"Class as an Absent Factor in Hong Kong Film Analysis: Fruit Chan and the Proletariat"
Wimal Dissanayake (University of Hong Kong)

"Bollywood V. World: Nationalists, Mullahs , Bajrang Dal and Political Potboilers"
Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University)

"Chinese Cinema at the Millennium"
Evans Chan (film-maker, Hong Kong/NY)

Chair: Michael Baskett (UO)
Discussant: Chris Berry (UC Berkeley)

4:00 - 6:30 pm
Hollywood, Japan and East Asia

Title TBA
Leo Ching (Duke University)

"The Haunted Narrating of Silent and Silenced Films"
Walter Lew (UCLA)

"History, Memory, Nostalgia: Rewriting Socialism in Contemporary Chinese Film and TV Drama"
Sheldon Lu (UC-Davis)

Chair: Dick Kraus (UO)
Discussant: Wendy Larson (UO)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18
9:00 am - 12:15 pm
The Internet and the New Politics in Eastern Asia
"Informed Nationalism: Military Websites in Chinese Cyberspace"
Zhou Yongming (University of Wisconsin),

"Youth, Temporary Autonomous Zone (alternative public space) and Internet in South Korea"
Cho Haejoang (Yonsei University)

Title TBA
Fred Chiu (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Title TBA
Zhang Xudong (New York University)

"Internet and Its Users: The Physical Dimensions of Cyberpolitics in Eastern Asia"
Matthew Ciolek (ANU)

Chair: Jeff Hanes (UO)
Discussant: Chris Connery (UC-Santa Cruz)

12:30 - 1:15 pm
Concluding Discussion
Led by Rob Wilson (UC-Santa Cruz)

This conference is presented by the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies. It is sponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies through a generous grant from the Freeman Foundation. Additional funding is provided by UCLA's Center for Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Lori O'Hollaren at 346-1521 or loholl@oregon.uoregon.edu. A complete conference schedule will be available shortly.

This conference is intended as an inquiry into the trialectics of the relationship between political power, social relationships and technology in Eastern Asia. It is too easy in our day to endow technology with deterministic power, as visual media and the internet infuse daily life, at least in some societies. On the other hand, studies of technology past and present have raised serious questions about such determinism. Technology is never innocent, but is entangled in power relationships and struggles for power in different political contexts. Whether technology shapes social relations, or serves the articulation of social relationships, secondly, has been a long-standing problem in the study of technology, which has derived renewed impetus from the contradictory impulses to globalization and localization in our day. Eastern Asia provides an important location for inquiry into these questions because of both cooperation and conflict between the United States and Eastern Asia in the development of new technologies that have accompanied the emergence of Eastern Asian economies to global visibility and prominence.

The conference is designed to inquire into the part played by different technologies of communication in regional formations of power. The stress here is on technologies of communication. We are liable to forget, in a preoccupation with contemporary visual and internet technologies, that the spread of the written word in the form of printed media was equally significant as technological interventions in cultural formations in these regions. So are we liable to forget that the spread across the region of populations from China played an important part in the regional spread of such technologies. There is a long history of the spread of technologies of communication as populations from the Ming and Qing Dynasties spread around Southeast Asia within the context of an expanding Europe. These populations spread out from China in a population explosion, but were transformed in the process to reconsider their relationship to places of origin, and, in the process, created unprecedented notions of being Chinese. Communication technologies played an important part at every stage of this process, but acquired their significance from the uses to which they were put in political and social movements.

Accordingly, the conference has been formulated to account for different technologies of communication in different social and political contexts, which is intended to bring historical depth to the discussion of the relationship between technology, power and society. The organizing principle here is derived from different technologies of communication: the book, journalism, film and TV, and the Internet. But in every stage, the intention is to inquire into the relationship between technology, and its relationship to social and political movements, as well as cultural self-definitions, which also call into question the role played by technology in modern society. The idea of "cultural formations," in the title of this proposal, is intended not as a concept to contain these complex relationships, but as an object of investigation toward their articulation.