Versatile Bodies in Global Asia
Description
Our seminar explores the potentialities of body as method in the study of Global Asian literature and culture. Engaging with interdisciplinary inquiries of literary studies, performance studies, ethnomusicology, and media history, we understand the polysemy of the body, as literary motifs, techniques of embodiment, lived experiences, as well as historical traces, with which we interrogate not only how body matters but what it capaciously enables, both conceptually and methodologically, to the study of literature, performance, and media in Global Asia.
In particular, we recognize the multivalent manifestations of the body in both premodern and modern Global Asian literature and cultures, where the versatility of the body–the technical body that mediates lived experiences, the performing body that enacts alternative imagination, the diasporic body that crosses solidified boundaries, and the posthuman body that disrupts epistemic orders–unleashes agential capacities far exceeding the scope of the Cartesean body-mind dualism, thus creating and transforming reality, subjectivity, and epistemology.
The prism of the body, an ephemeral subject that often evades textual scrutiny, also compels us to reflect methodologically strategies of reading literature and archives. The body’s persistent resistance to textualization urges us to consider the (im)possibilities of reconstructing the body from textual records - it forces us to read between the lines and read diachronically to locate its phantagmatic traces, and to acknowledge that the body simultaneously is a subject of representation yet its anti-representational proclivity demands other forms of reading strategies, such as embodied reading, affective reading, and performative reading.
In light of the versatile bodies in Global Asian literature and cultures, we invite papers that examine the plurality of the body in the context of Global Asia, of both premodern and modern times, specific national contexts as well as transnational encounters. Topics we hope to explore include, but do not confine to, representation and mediation of the body in literature and media, the politics and aesthetics of the body, sensory and affective bodies, queer and disabled bodies, embodied experiences of history and performance, bodily labor and migration, digital and virtual bodies, and reflections on body-centered analytical methodologies. Ultimately, we seek to not only illuminate the body’s diverse roles in Global Asian literature and cultures but also to envision new possibilities for Asia-centered poetics and epistemologies of the body that will open up new avenues for comparative inquiries.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yihui Sheng is an assistant professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on early modern Chinese literature and theater. She is also interested in print culture, media studies, and performance studies. She is currently working on a monograph that introduces an intermedial methodology to investigate the ways in the text, music, and stage were connected in late-Ming theatrical culture.
Speaker Bio
Yucong Hao is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at Vanderbilt University. Working at the intersection of sound studies, comparative literature, and performance studies, her work examines the transnational making of Chinese acoustic culture in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
Speaker Bio
Fenglin Selina Ju is a 2nd-year MA student in Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on digital media and sound culture within the Chinese popular culture community. Specifically, she is interested in the materiality of sound, sound production, and interactions between sensory practices and digital technologies.
Speaker Bio
Yi Lyu is an M.A. student in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in the reinterpretations of premodern Chinese narratives across text, stage, and digital media, with a focus on Chinese opera as embodied performance and the sonic dimensions of theater. Yi is also a Carolina Asia Center Public Humanities Fellow.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Hanyang Jiang is a sessional lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film and the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His current book project offers a systematic examination of huaju (spoken drama) acting theories and practices in mid-twentieth-century China.
Speaker Bio
Ms. Ni Yushang is a full-time PhD student in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. She holds a bachelor's degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and a postgraduate degree from the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests include Modern and Contemporary Sinophone Literature, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Cross-media Adaptation.
Speaker Bio
Yao Xu is a Ph.D. candidate in Dance Studies at Temple University. Her dissertation examines how independent choreographers in postsocialist China negotiate aesthetics, labor, and institutional structures. Her work appears in English- and Chinese-language journals, including a forthcoming article in the Dance Research Journal. Her scholarship has been honored with Awards from the Dance Studies Association and the Association for Asian Performance.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yaxuan Zhu is a first-year PhD student in East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests focus on emotion and body in seventeenth-century Chinese literature, as well as intellectual history in late imperial China. She completed her BA and first MA at Nankai University in China, and her second MA at the University of Michigan.
Speaker Bio
JS Wu is a scholar and artist thinking about the intersections of labor, technology, and the body in the broadly defined field of animation. They are an Assistant Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Their publications include academic essays in Animation Studies, ASAP/J, and JCMS and graphic essays for general audiences in The Believer and ANMLY. Their work as a storyboard artist can also be seen in Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You (2018).
Speaker Bio
Sheetal Majithia’s research and teaching focus on ecocriticism, comparative postcolonial studies, feminist and affect theories, and South Asian studies. She taught at UPenn, Hampshire Coll., and NYUAD before joining The Juilliard School. Her book-in-progress examines secular modernity, progress, and melodrama in Indian culture. Her research appears in SAMAR, Modern Drama, and South Asian Review and has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Institute of Indian Studies.