Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium

Spring 2021

Thursday, February 25, 2021

16:00-17:00, Room 1150

Chop Suey Desires: White Women and the Mainstreaming of the Chinese Restaurant, 1896-1929

Heather Ruth Lee

However, middle-class white women faced tremendous restrictions on their mobility. Few places were considered proper for them, so they disguised their transgressions. In 1896, Viceroy Li Hong Zhang, a Chinese statesman who was well-liked in the United States, came to New York. His highly publicized visit provided a socially acceptable reason for women to break with convention. They added Chinatown restaurants to tourist itineraries of New York or cooked Li’s favorite foods at home. White women participated in white men’s fascination with the exotic through feminized forms of consumption, and as a result domesticated Chinese food.

Commentator(s): Lala Zuo

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

Thursday, March 4, 2021

17:00-18:00, Room 1150

The Real Effects of Financial Technology

Ilaf Elard

We examine how financial technology affects household hardship in terms of personal bankruptcy. We exploit an exogenous source of variation in marketplace lending, a court verdict rendering above-usury loans issued by banks to Connecticut and New York residents null and void if the loans are sold outright to non-banks. We document a persistent rise in personal bankruptcies following the verdict and a decline in marketplace lending, particularly among low-income households. Marketplace loan defaults and other consumer credit by banks and finance companies remain unaffected, suggesting that increases in personal bankruptcy arise principally from reversing access to new lending technology.

Commentator: Jing Wang

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Lala Zuo

Thursday, March 11, 2021

16:00-17:00, Room 1150

Making Globalized Local Sound in Colonial Korea (1910-1945): Hybridity in Korea Popular Music in the 1930s

Hye Eun Choi

My talk examines the emergence of modern Korean popular music genres in the 1930s. I first explain how the profit-seeking of transnational record companies played the most significant role in the development of the recording industry in Japan and its colonies rather than Japan’s pursuit of hegemony. Korean sound professionals were therefore allowed to manage the production of Korean records since they had proven that they were more skilled at making profitable records for their own market than their Japanese counterparts. By making a case study of three representative popular music genres, namely yuhaengga, sinminyo, and chaezŭ-song, I investigate the ways in which Korean sound professionals produced records in globally informed yet locally inflected music genres, ushering in the golden age of gramophone records in colonial Korea. I further demonstrate that these professionals creatively evaded Japan’s censorship during the period of total war mobilization from the late 1930s, through flexible genre-mixing and categorizing, among other strategies.

Commentator: Heather Ruth Lee

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

Thursday, March 18, 2021

16:00-17:00, Room 1150

Stone Maidens in a “Stonie” Age: The Trouble with Allegory in Spenser’s Book of Justice

Megan Herrold

When contemplating Edmund Spenser’s allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene, Spenserians are torn. They tend to gush over the poetic and sexual possibilities of the first three books and lament the disappointments and terrors of the latter three—especially the carnage-ridden Book 5, the Book of Justice. Indeed, Book 5 can be difficult to read: even as Spenser deplores his own era as “stonie,” he also seems to suggest that the Book’s multiple scenes of dismemberment and decapitations—scenes that remind readers of his service in England’s violent colonialist project in Ireland—are the lamentable but inevitable result of a strict application of justice. But are these scenes of allegorical violence and the real horrors they represent actually inevitable? In this talk, I will show how Spenser’s description of his own age as “stonie” in the Book of Justice surprisingly preserves the possibility of another way of doing justice within the image of a stone. In scenes that conjure the image of the “stone-maiden,” a female who can astonish and stultify all who look upon her with her beauty, Spenser invokes and critiques two traditions associated with Medusa and the power of the look: Petrarchan poetry and Dantean allegory. And by invoking her, the stone-maiden looms over Book 5, reminding readers and perhaps even Spenser himself that “stonie” interpretations of justice do more than lead to harm, they also turn the “just” man himself into stone, blinding him to other routes of restorative justice also available. (Image: Caravaggio 1595 Medusa)

Commentator: Zainab Mahmood

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Lala Zuo

Thursday, March 25, 2021

17:00-18:00, Room 1150

Red Wine and Instant Noodles: Individualism and Social Class in Lifestyle Manuals for Chinese Youth

Amir Hampel

Since 2016, Chinese authors have written over a dozen best-selling books that promise to teach single urban youth how to become interesting people. By analyzing what these authors find interesting, this talk will show how seemingly liberal ideals of self-fulfillment and personal autonomy are encompassed by local hierarchies and forms of social affiliation. Books about being interesting advocate personal growth through leisure pursuits, such as doing yoga, reading literature, and drinking wine. However, for lonely singles, these practices not only instantiate the good life: they are also ways to identify themselves with cosmopolitan modernity, and to invest in their value on marriage markets. In order to become interesting to the opposite sex, authors tell their readers not only to acquire cultural capital, but also to become proficient in highly gendered forms of emotional labor. By reading these lifestyle manuals, we can glimpse how Chinese youth are trying to orient themselves in relation to multiplying signifiers of class, unsettled gender norms, and within relationships that are ambiguously market contracts and reciprocal, asymmetrical bonds. For youth seeking their fortunes in major cities, drinking a glass of red wine signifies as a modest ritual of self care, an investment in the future, an invocation of success, and a gesture of belonging.

Commentator: Xuan Li

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

Thursday, April 1, 2021

16:00-17:00, Room 1150

Anthropocene Visuality: Artists’ Films in Time After Nature

Lukas Brasiskis

A still from Harvest, dir. Misho Antadze, 2019

Against a backdrop of increasing environmental crisis, eco-conscious and ecocritical art is gaining new relevancy. This time also poses new questions and challenges for the artists working with the audiovisual medium, who face a contemporary paradox: to visualize the Anthropocene properly, one has to renounce the idea of pristine natural sites that exist outside of history, inseparably from human activities. In other words, one has to engage in apprehending ecological crisis in time after nature. In this talk, Lukas Brasiskis will present selected clips from the film programs he has curated for e-flux and MoMA featuring how moving-image art registers changing attitudes toward the environment exposes environmental damage caused by anthropocentric modernization as well as raises awareness of climate justice. The questions such as what strategies filmmakers apply to expose various angles of interconnection between the natural and the human-made as well as how to portray the environmental issues without forgetting the underprivileged communities endangered by climate change will be discussed. Comparing two discourses of ecocritical filmmaking, Brasiskis will point to new modes of the Anthropocene visuality that instead of working on behalf of power, expose the mechanisms of exclusion, subjection, and colonization, presenting the environmental crisis as both a future-oriented form of slow violence and a concrete social reality.

Commentator: Weixian Pan

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Lala Zuo

Thursday, April 15, 2021

16:00-17:00, Room 1150

Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe

Elena Vogman

Media form and transform our milieus, from geopolitical landscapes to our most intimate environs. This project studies a series of media and milieu practices developed in different settings of Institutional Psychotherapy since the 1940s. It examines efforts to produce environments, institutions, and milieus that would facilitate processes of psychological therapy and healing, in particular by psychiatrists and activists such as François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Fernand Deligny, Frantz Fanon, and Félix Guattari. Drawing on newly discovered archives, the project explores the fundamental role of art and media which crucially contributed to the emergence of psychiatric milieus. At the same time, it investigates the productive repercussions of these media-milieu practices in critical humanities discourses. The project argues that these practices had a crucial impact on the humanities in postwar Europe, in particular post-structuralism and post-colonial studies, but also media theory, film studies, and science and technology studies.

Commentator: Lukas Brasiskis

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

“Wandering Lines,” or traced trajectories of autistic children in the network of Fernand Deligny, Cevennes, France.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

16:00-17:00, Room 1150

Unsettling the "Orient": Thinking with Settler colonialism in an Asian context

Roslynn Ang

Ainu and Patagonian Women Getting Acquainted at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, Department of Anthropology [Louisiana Purchase Exposition], image from Wikimedia Commons

This is a preliminary research on the use of settler colonial theories in Asia, with a focus on Japan. Research on settler colonial structures - as the elimination of the native for the production of the settler society (Wolfe 2006) - tends to focus on white settlers in a Global North. However, post-colonial states in Asia have been using settler colonial logics to assimilate and/or eliminate Indigenous populations within their national borders. Indigenous populations in Asia are usually the minority, and have to assimilate or live in reservation-like spaces, and have no political representation or self-determination politically and/or culturally. In addition, they tend to be culturally consumed through tourism locally and globally.

This paper examines the paradox in postcolonial states’ attempt to build a decolonized nation by using settler colonial technologies on Indigenous peoples in Asia. I argue that there is a need to take into account the intersections between 1) academia’s focus on “Orient” culture as a subject of research, 2) settler colonial violence on Indigenous peoples in Asia, 3) the complexity of working class settler labor on Indigenous lands.

Commentator: Celina Hung

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Lala Zuo

Thursday, April 29, 2021

16:00-17:00, Room 1150

From Remembrancers to Remembrance: Marie de France as Progenitrix of the Text-Object

Melanie Hackney

The twelfth-century author Marie de France lived and wrote in a period of technological transition, when writing threatened – or rather, promised – to replace orality as a means of telling a story in a lasting way. This paper explores Marie’s relationship to writing in her quest for remembrance. It examines, through close textual analysis, writing’s privileged place in the Lais by illustrating her careful juxtaposition of spoken word and written text, and how she weaves the oral tradition into her work in order to highlight its fleeting nature. By contrast, Marie gives concrete, physical form to the written text, which appears as a tree branch, a ring, a tapestry, a body (human or animal), a bloodstain, or a letter. These objects become the physical embodiment of her stories, and the author frequently reminds us, both implicitly and explicitly, of her role in their composition. She then links this (pro)creative act to her theme of remembrance, underscoring the perceived advantages of the written object in recording a story. Marie’s lais provide us a glimpse into the world she inhabited, and if we look closely at her representation of her own task – one that required knowledge and skill in an increasingly prevalent technology – we can better understand a twelfth-century author’s relationship to that technology, and how she perceived its effects on the world in which she lived.

Commentator: Megan Herrold

Zoom; In-person RSVP (limited seats)

Moderated by Aner Barzilay

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