EALCTalks! SPRING 2023

Friday, February 24 at noon, 287 Dwinelle: 

Tracy Zijing Fan, “Spatializing Fictional China in Nineteenth-Century Asia: A Map in the Edo Adaptation of the Chinese Historical Novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms”

 This talk investigates how nineteenth-century Edo Japanese publishers employed maps in their adaptations of the Chinese historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms to reshape the reading experience of history via geographical information. My focus is a map appearing in the 1836 Osaka printing of the Three Kingdoms adaptation Ehon tsuzoku sangoku shi 絵本通俗三国志, which presents a “synchronic geographical image” of story titles from the novel all at once, superimposing the world of Edo Japan on the historical Chinese world for readers to locate themselves in heterogeneous fantasy. Blending past and present, this map indicates the dynamic boundary between fiction and reality in the Edo world of knowledge. 

Friday, March 10 at at noon, 287 Dwinelle: 

Yifan Zheng, “The Creation of Identities and Making of ‘Commoners’ in Early China”

 In this project, I trace the creation of legal and administrative identities the late Warring States period through official documents and bureaucratic procedures, engaging with questions such as: How were individuals identified by the state before photography and facial recognition technologies? What constituted identification information? and How were people made legible and usable for the state? I argue that when people were described and identified, they were also transformed from natural beings into rightand-duty-bearing commoners. Through this transformation, human bodies were made carriers of debt, reward, and crime that moved across the state. 

 Friday, March 17 at noon, 287 Dwinelle: 

Rachel Min Park, “Conjuring the Reality of War: South Korean Culture Films and the Visual Grammar of the Vietnam War”

  Though the “culture film” (K: munhwa yŏnghwa, J: bunka eiga) has been considered propaganda, recent scholarship points to a productive tension between reality and aesthetic representation in the form. This presentation examines how the Vietnam War was incorporated into the South Korean state’s narrative of nation-building in films from the Park Chung Hee regime, which drew on both non-fiction and fictional genres (such as documentary and melodrama) to present a seamless vision of history. A visual grammar of “debility/cure” and “gendered comfort” mediated the reality of the Vietnam War to the South Korean masses along racialized and gendered lines, establishing and shaping the affective contours by which war could be made acceptable and even desirable.

  Friday, April 7 at noon, 287 Dwinelle:

 Kelly Fan, “Character” Without Character: Social Types and a Satire of “Non-Actuality” in Yang Sao’s Play-Texts

 This talk presents preliminary research into three single-act plays written in 1927 by the Chinese left-wing writer and poet Yang Sao 楊騷. Though these texts bear the marks of scripts prepared for dramatic production, such as mise en scène and stage directions, none was ever performed — nor, it seems, were they intended for the stage. Terse, enigmatic, and populated by insistently flat characters, these playscripts (or perhaps more appropriately, “play-texts”) revel in their distance from physical instantiation in performance, and in the estrangement of reading without narration. Hypostasizing their characters as abstract social types, and producing a reading experience suspended intermedially between text and stage, Yang Sao’s play-texts may be read as satirizing the “non-actuality” of May Fourth discourses of women’s emancipation, gender naturalism, and realist verisimilitude.

 Friday, April 28 at noon, 287 Dwinelle:

 Elizabeth Fair, “Carving a Cultural Landscape: Inscriptions at the Angel Island Immigration Station” 

I discuss memorialization and inscription at the Angel Island Immigration Station in the San Francisco Bay, focusing on the poetry carved into the walls by Chinese migrant detainees during the Exclusion Era, and its web of interactions fostered by embedding in natural and built environments. What can we learn by keeping the poems materialized and site-specific? How did carving, architecture, and landscape work together for a cross-temporal community of writers and readers? I consider inscribed poetry forms, such as 摩崖 moya and 题壁詩 tibishi, which can connect memory and landscape, and how the Angel Island poets used these tools to reshape a cultural landscape.