ROUGH WORK with Yiyun Peng, Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell, History

Beyond Workshops: Spatial Distribution of Paper-making Communities and Properties in Upland Southeast China, 1700-1950

Paper-making was a prevalent and profitable industry in upland Southeast China in the late imperial and republican periods. Previous analyses have largely focused on paper workshops and studied their output, paper-making skills, and so forth. In other words, the paper industry was depicted as an agglomerate of paper-workers in small workshops. But the activities of paper-makers in the workshops were only part of the industry. This paper looks beyond the workshops and reveals the spatial distribution of various components, including its communities and properties, of the whole industry.

In all, this new way of looking at the industry provides a new perspective on the interactions of production and environment and of different groups of producers, and demonstrates the heterogeneity of utilizing the highlands and the ways in which people across space stretched their influence to the remote uplands to make the most of their living environment.

Please read the paper in advance - when you register, you'll receive a link to it via the registration confirmation email.

ROUGH WORK: Discussing research in progress, hence the term, rough work. This rough work session is hosted by the East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (GSSC).

Although Hamka (Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah, 1908-1981) embraced modernist ideas of purity, he also embraced the idea that Islam manifested itself differently in different places and times. Indeed, this was natural and necessary. As a Indonesian writer of great popularity and authority, and also as an influential public actor, Hamka attempted to formulate Islam for his own country’s place and time. In his lifetime, history moved with lightning speed through eras of colonialism, foreign occupation, revolution, and nation-state building. An astounding flood of new ideas and experiences flooded Indonesia’s “estuary,” as he put it. This seminar talk will take up how Hamka attempted to reconcile Islam with some of these new ideas and experiences, including revolution, democracy, communism, and the nation.

Writing and Printing for Praying: Colophons of Dali Buddhist Scriptures

Yuanyuan Duan, Ph.D. student, Cornell

This presentation introduces the colophons of the Sinitic Buddhist scriptures from Dali, Yunnan dating back to the 12th-17th centuries. These colophons usually consist of the information of the patrons who had the text copied or printed, the prayers stating their motivations to do so, and the date of manufacture. By examining the form and content of the colophons, especially the benediction directed at specific individuals, we will get a glimpse of what people believed that they could gain through engaging in writing or printing Buddhist scriptures, and how monastic and lay communities in Dali handled their everyday existence from the independent Dali Kingdom era (937-1253) to the period of being incorporated as the southwestern frontier of the Ming empire.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic (古文) text. The group typically meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are lead by local, national, and international scholars. No prior experience or preparation is necessary.

African Islamic modernity is a discourse, a historical condition, and a project that highlights the entanglements of African racial identities, Islamic forms of life, and modernity as the globally hegemonic mode of social, economic, and political being. While there are many lineages by which one might trace the story of entanglement — situated differently in various locations, traditions, and contexts — the contemporary nation-state of Senegal is the ideal setting to think through these relationships. It is a space marked by a millennium of Islamic presence and over five centuries of integration in the global economy sequentially defined by the trans-Atlantic slave-trade, colonization, and neoliberal economic structural adjustment. It is also a space in which conflicting Africanist and Orientalist discourses have competed to represent a society that consistently escapes both constructions. Between and beyond these discourses, there is an important national discourse that narrates a story of modernity in three key episodes: 1) Islamic revolution that enshrines Islamic principles of governance, 2) anti-colonial messianism that carves out an autonomous space of Islamic economics, and 3) Racial accommodation in which the colonial state and Sufi orders negotiate the terms of the social contract. In this talk, I will show how these episodes together constitute a history of the present.

The seminar will introduce some examples of activities and transregional relations of Muslims in Tang, Song, and Yuan China (618-1279 CE). The talk will specifically concentrate of traders and physicians, and also introduce a few of the more important names that we know from this period. The scope of our inquiry here is intentionally kept wide, so that we can tap into various aspects of Muslim activities in the social, economic, and political life of then- contemporary China. The topics discussed in this seminar cover a period of some six hundred years, during the Medieval/Early Modern period of Chinese History.

In 2017, the government of Dubai announced plans to create the first human settlement on Mars within one hundred years. This article considers how the ‘Mars 2117’ project and its Earth-bound beta tests represent an increasingly global vanguard relationship to the materials we call nature, combined with a world-forming narrative where the goal of politics is about making a new kind of habitat, rather than the creation of a polis. Mars 2117 reveals the ways in which the present grounds for authoritarian legitimacy specifically in the UAE are, in effect, on loan, for which the future functions as a form of collateral for its present day governance structure, and is hedged upon the engineered anticipation of a people, a place, and most importantly, an infrastructure to come. This form of authority is being innovated to skip over political contradictions, environmental limits, and the precarity of a tumultuous and potential catastrophic future caused by the feedback between peak oil and irreversible climate change. Anticipatory authoritarianism is an answer, even if not a solution, to a dialectic of destruction created by contemporary global labor practices and carbon economy-ecology.

Continuing Presence of Discarded Bodies: Occupational Harm, Necro-Activism, and Living Justice with Eunjung Kim, Syracuse University.

Starting from the two activist campsites set up in Seoul, one by the coalition of disability organizations and the other by the Supporters for the Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry, Kim explores a history of occupational health movements and their intersections with disability rights movements in South Korea. Against the bureaucratic technology of rating the degree of disability and harm, necro-activism emerges in the form of persistent involvements of dead bodies, mourning, and other-than-human presence, making claims for justice as an ongoing practice of everyday life and afterlife.

Bio: Eunjung Kim is an Associate Professor of women’s and gender studies and disability studies at Syracuse University.

Julia Chang (Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies and core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell) will be serving as respondent to Eunjung’s talk.

Andrew Campana (Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies) hosts and moderates.

The event image is of a statue by Pak Yujin (박유진). Description: A statue of Hwang Yumi is sitting in a chair in the corner of the room below the window with daylight shining through. After working at a Samsung Electronics semiconductor plant, Hwang Yumi died of acute myeloid leukemia. She is wearing striped hospital pants, a top, a pink cap, and pink socks. She is looking down toward the floor and her two hands are on her thighs in fists. There are two potted plants on the windowsill. Next to the chair is an outlet with a single white plug and cord trailing out of the frame of the image.

(Co-)Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities