Programme - ACAH

“The Prospect … towards the East”: Reorienting Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Keynote Presentation: Dr Eun Kyung Min

The title of this talk is taken from Jonathan Swift’s 1704 A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought last Friday, Between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James’s Library. According to Swift’s boisterous account, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns begins as a dispute over real estate on the hills of Parnassus and ends as a bookish but bloody skirmish between the two camps in St. James’s Library. In the Battle, the ancients, who occupy the highest summit, manage successfully to defend their property from the encroachments of the moderns who are jealous of the ancients’ better “Prospect ... towards the East.” In this talk, I will draw out the larger implications of this phrase by examining how eighteenth-century British writers looked at and toward East Asia in an effort to conceptualise modern British literature in comparative and global perspective. I will also offer a brief overview of significant critical studies that have recently emerged to retell the story of the cross-cultural encounter between East Asia and eighteenth-century British literature. Works to be discussed include William Temple’s Miscellanea essays (1690), Addison and Steele’s Spectator papers (1711-12), Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (serialised in The Public Ledger, 1760-61), and Thomas Percy’s Hau Kiou Choaan (1761). I will also discuss the critical work of Robert Markley, David Porter, Chi-ming Yang, and Eugenia Zuroski.

Image | Woodcut from the Battle (cropped)

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British Romanticism in China: Received, Revised, and Resurrected

Keynote Presentation: Professor Li Ou

The reception history of British Romanticism in twentieth-century China unfolds a drama of vicissitude, corresponding to the tumultuous course of the Chinese national history and violently shifting literary politics. While all foreign literature, texts or trends, are reconfigured by its interaction with the national tradition, the afterlife of British Romanticism in China is distinguished by the radically divided and polarised responses it had received in the past century. This paper considers British Romanticism from several of its key aspects, namely, radicalism, self-expressiveness, and naturalism, and examines how each of them had been treated with drastically contradictory stances in China along with the conflicting ideologies taking turns dominating the Chinese centre stage. It also discusses the significance of the intermediary of Japanese, German, and Soviet sources in the Chinese reception of British Romanticism, and being twice removed from the original might have contributed to the predominant emphasis on what is without instead of what is within British Romantic poetry. Despite the consistently instrumentalist approach China had taken to British Romanticism, the paper concludes with the profound, though implicit, legacy British Romanticism had left in China. Almost all the leading modern Chinese poets who had participated in the formation of Chinese new (vernacular) poetry had been inspired in one way or another by their British fellow poets, who thereby inscribed their names on the Chinese poetic tradition. The remarkable tenacity of British Romanticism in surviving the trying circumstances in China derived, after all, from its power of poetry.

Image | Lord Byron by Richard Westall (1813)

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From DAMIN to the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative

Featured Presentation: Professor Georges Depeyrot

In 2011, the DAMIN program was launched with the aim of trying to understand the processes behind monetary and economic unifications during the 19th century. This program was a wide continuation of many previous cooperative bi- or trilateral programs focused on the relation within the Roman Empire and involving several countries in Europe and in Western Asia. All this previous research insisted on the fact that monetary unification, whatever the currency used, was always accompanied by economic unification.

The purpose of the DAMIN program was to link a large group of academics all around the world and to try to analyse and understand the evolution of the monetary system in the 19th century. At the beginning of the century, each country had its own monetary system and its own currency. But the general tendency was to unify the currency to facilitate the economic development and to facilitate trade, one of the necessities of the industrial revolution. Step by step, the main countries tried to develop multilateral treaties to facilitate means of payment, the most important of which was the Latin Monetary Union of December 1865 that made all the gold and silver coins issued by the signatory countries legal tender.

The subsequent discovery of the silver mines in the USA disturbed the LMU treaty and the countries were obliged to end the bimetallic system and to shift to the monometallic gold standard. The DAMIN program analysed these phenomena, and to date has seen more than 50 volumes published, hours of video footage, and conferences held all over the world. DAMIN has proved the necessity of large cooperative programs to link academics, as the only way to create the synergies necessary to analyse international economic trends and economic relations.

The DAMIN team is now to be included in the wider IAFOR Silk Road Initiative. The two programs are already very similar in that they both wish to understand the development of long distance trade and its consequences on all the aspects of human life. Trade is not only trade of artefacts but with the merchants, came languages, religions, arts, philosophies, and technology, and following trade came armies and invaders. With the Mongols going West, the Italians going East, and myriad other movements between, the Silk Road Initiative offers a fantastic field of analysis and reflection on the development of human societies, and the impact of contacts between populations, civilisations and cultures.

This presentation will offer an overview of the DAMIN project so far, and going forward as part of the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative.

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The Ceramic Road

Featured Presentation: Dr Yutaka Mino

Through ceramics a strong bond developed linking East and West in the Middle Ages, that was also a bridge to promote cultures between East and West. This presentation will discuss and investigate this ‘Ceramic road’ by using examples of Chinese and Japanese ceramics now in Asia, the Near East, Europe and the United States.

The presentation will focus in particular on Fustat, the old Islamic city whose ruins now lie in the southern outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, and where an enormous number of fragments of Chinese ceramics were excavated. Dated from between the 10th to 18th centuries, it is fascinating to trace the many places through which the various vases and plates had passed, and to think about the thousands of miles they had traveled.

Image | 12th Century Bowl (Wan) with Peony, Chrysanthemum and Prunus Sprays

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Ikebana Workshop

Featured Workshop Presentation: Dr Shoso Shimbo

The ongoing destruction of our environment by man-made pollution continues to push the world toward catastrophic consequences. The roots of some of these problems are often traced to the rise of Western modernity as well as the Western attitude to nature, where nature is objectified and exploited as a resource.

In response, we are seeing the emergence of an eco-centric perspective in contemporary art. Environmental artists have been using various approaches from focusing on raising awareness to searching for solutions or setting out a plan for social transformation.

Some of them have noted that certain non-Western cultures could inform a valuable shift in aesthetic experience. In many Indigenous cultures, nature often centres the members of a group by providing boundaries of behaviour, as well as access to sacred realms of enlightenment. While the idealisation of Indigenous cultures has been condemned, embracing them in art practice has generated not only fasciation (e.g. Hayao Miyazaki & Haruki Murakami) but also effective preservation of nature.

Can ikebana, as an art form with its origin in ancient Japan, provide any insights for contemporary environmental artists in their efforts to transform values and aesthetic sensibility?

In the 16th century, ikebana was defined as the symbolic representation of nature. It developed into an art form encompassing spiritual training in the pursuit of the harmonious coexistence of human beings and nature, regarding humans as part of nature.

However, the ikebana reform movement in 1930’s under the influence of the Western modernism declared ikebana to be only a form of art. Contemporary ikebana is still under the influence of that reformation, but a re-examination of the traditional values of ikebana might bring it into line with the aims of environmental art.

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Geopolitics of Literature in Cold War Asia

Featured Panel Presentation: Dr Yukari Yoshihara (Panel Chair), Professor Hiromi Ochi, Professor Hajime Saito and Dr Jiyoung Kim

Literary studies, Asian studies and Area Studies in Asia as we understand now were invented and created in ruins after the World War II and in Japan’s accelerated reindustrialization after the Korean War, when Japan was a vanguard of Communist vs. Capitalist cultural Cold War front line. There are substantial examinations in the ways how creative writing, institutionalized academic study in literature and literary / creative writing education in the U.S. were heavily under the influence of the Cold War politics. There are some noteworthy works on American cultural diplomacy with Asia during the Cold War (such as Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils), yet, as of now, literature and related fields have not received due attention they deserve. To list, there were seven Japanese novelists and three Japanese critics were invited to the U.S. on the Rockefeller Foundation fund between 1953 and 62, with the purpose of making them understand “American way of life” and democratic values. Wallace Stegner, Stanford, initiated the Asian-American Literary Exchange (1949-54), and one of its achievements was English translation of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, which won the Nobel Prize in 1967. Such cases indicate that it is vitally important to examine the geopolitical functions literary creation, literary studies and translation had in transpacific Cultural Cold War.

Featured Panel Presentations

Panel Chair: Dr Yukari Yoshihara

Seminar in the Ruins: The Saltzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy
Professor Hiromi Ochi

Stephen Spender and Japanese Genbaku (Atomic) Poems in 1950s
Professor Hajime Saito

Hino Ashihei’s Amerika Tankenki and the U.S. Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War Period
Dr Jiyoung Kim

Seminar in the Ruins: The Salzburg Seminar and Its Significance in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy

Featured Panel Presentation: Dr Hiromi Ochi

In 1947 the School for American Studies in Salzburg, Austria, was held. It later acquired ample funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to be continued many years to come. Originally planned by Harvard University students who were concerned about the intellectual life of European people, the goal of the seminar was to promote “a free communication in ideas between Americans and Europeans,” which catered to the policy of Cold War cultural diplomacy that aimed to promote understanding between the U.S. and other countries. Prominent scholars from the United States, including F.O. Mathiessen, Alfred Kazin, Henry Nash Smith, Margaret Mead, and Talcot Parsons, taught and introduced “American Studies” to young scholars in the war-torn countries. The two Harvard scholars who participated in the first year, F.O. Matthiessen and Alfred Kazin, published their experiences the following year, with Kazin writing an article, “Seminar in the Ruins,” in the anti-Stalinist Commentary magazine, and Matthiessen a book, From the Heart of Europe, echoing the policy of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

The Seminar, which attracted students from various European countries, functioned as a model vehicle for the dissemination of American Studies, and generated similar seminars and lectures by prominent American scholars, such as the Stanford-Tokyo American Studies Seminar. This paper explores how these seminars functioned in the “ruined” countries, how they in turn contributed to developing American Studies and determining what should be taught, and how they were instrumental in nurturing a certain state of mind, through an analysis of reports by the attendants and essays by the “teachers” including Kazin and Matthiessen.

Image caption | Fellows of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies (1947). Courtesy of Salzburg Global Seminar (Flickr).

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Stephen Spender and Japanese Genbaku (Atomic) Poems in 1950s

Featured Panel Presentation: Dr Hajime Saito

An English poet, critic and editor of the “liberal” magazine Encounter, Stephen Spender was involved in the debate over Poems of Deadly Ashes (Shi No Hai Shishu). This was a 1954 anthology of Japanese poems written after the Lucky Dragon incident (1954) in which many Japanese fishermen were exposed to radiation due to USA’s Castle Bravo (H-Bomb) operation in Bikini Atoll and one of them subsequently died. Interestingly, one of Spender’s Japanese friends told about the publication of the anthology, and he wrote an article entitled “War, Peace and Poetry” in which he expressed his sympathy for the Japanese contributors who created poems in response to the victim of the incident but asked them to control their desire to speak publicly about the incident. As Akio Nosaka (2017) points out, Spender’s essay was quickly translated into Japanese and the translation was published in several Japanese poetry magazines to be read widely among Japanese readers who were interested in the debate over Poems of Deadly Ashes. Nosaka’s article is indispensable in order to understand the clandestine relationships between Spender and those who welcomed his essay among Japanese society in 1950’s, but it is not sufficient particularly in terms of what Spender did think and write about poetry and politics in his longer essays and books. My presentation mainly focuses on his important post-war literary criticism The Creative Element (1953), translated into Japanese in 1956 and 1957, so as to clarify his ideas about (Japanese genbaku) poems and politics in the atomic age.

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Hino Ashihei’s Amerika Tankenki and the U.S. Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War Period

Featured Panel Presentation: Dr Jiyoung Kim

Hino Ashihei (1907-1960), one of the most popular Japanese writers during the wartime, is known for a series of ‘soldier novels’. After receiving the Akutagawa Prize in 1937, he was relocated to the information corps to accompany the Japanese army to the battle fronts of China and South Asia, and portray soldiers on battle field. His best-selling book, Mugi to Heitai (Soldier and Wheat, 1938) sold over a million copies and was translated into several languages. Hino’s reputation, however, dramatically reversed when the war ended with Japan’s defeat. During the Allied Occupation period, Hino was accused of war effort and was purged by GHQ.

Although little attention has been paid to Hino’s postwar writings, his literary career in the 1950’s is quite intriguing. He had traveled to India and China as a representative of Japanese literary circle to participate in international interchanges among writers. And in 1958, he traveled across America for two months. What he did and saw in America is well described in his travel essay Amerika Tankenki (1959). Strikingly, Hino in this essay clarifies that this visit was on the invitation from the U.S. Department of State. What does it imply and what had it bring about in Hino’s literature? In the 1950s, the U.S. government, in cooperation with private foundations, was promoting cultural interchanges between the U.S. and Japan to counter communist influence. My presentation attempts to analyse Hino’s visit to the U.S. together with Amerika Tankenki in the context of the U.S. cultural diplomacy during the cold war period.

Photo | Hino Ashihei

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Recentering English and the Humanities in the Asian University in the 21st Century

Featured Panel Presentation: Professor Steve Clark (Panel Chair), Professor Myles Chilton, Dr L. Ashley Squires, Professor Michael O’Sullivan and Professor John W P Phillips

The panel yesterday organised by Professor Yoshihara sought to situate the practice of English-learning and by extension the institutional model of Asian university in the broader context of Cold War politics. We hope to continue this discussion by examining how in the post-Cold War period (1990- ), English has increasingly established itself as a global (and therefore Asian) language, and considering ways in which the humanities may be regarded not as an obsolete importation from the Western academy but as a continually relevant site of disciplinary contestation and opportunity.

Featured Panel Presentations

Panel Chair: Professor Steve Clark

Global English’s Centers of Conversation
Professor Myles Chilton

The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Worlding of American Literature
Dr L. Ashley Squires

Identifying and Re-defining Conceptual Frames in the Intercultural Humanities
Professor Michael O’Sullivan

Literature in the Age of Technological Disruption
Professor John W P Phillips

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Global English’s Centers of Consecration

Featured Panel Presentation: Professor Myles Chilton

If you studied English in the Anglophone center, you probably learned the following: That postcolonial studies gave the first sustained arguments for seeing English literary studies against the legacies of Anglo-American canonical, critical, theoretical and ideological. They revealed how English literary studies produced a cultural formation detached from material reality and other modes of determination, while also seeking to overcome a Manichean view of the inheritance of empire through understanding the specific contexts where colonial economies and power relations shaped a middle class that sought an education in English as part of its autonomous self-definition. You might also have learned how world literature then took up the challenge, imagining a multi-centered discipline circulating in a web of collusion, collision and comparative aesthetics. Global English responded to this polycentrism by further complicating the colonial-postcolonial dynamic and challenging the assumption of Anglophone dominance over the whole diverse world of English-speakers. But out here beyond the center, learning how to recenter the discipline means learning anew the political dimensions of aesthetic response. Anglo-American identities cloak both ‘native’ faculty and the discipline itself, rendering calls for political consciousness, agency and responsibility – even those contained in the oblique, supposedly neutral act of textual criticism – calls for a radical re-thinking of the priorities of the humanities in an Asian context.

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The Canon Zoomed Out: Big Data and the Worlding of American Literature

Featured Panel Presentation: Dr L. Ashley Squires

Reconfiguring our understanding of a literary canon around patterns and histories of reception rather than production, runs almost immediately into immense problems of scale and specificity. Scholars around the world may possess a keen understanding of how the canon is understood and taught in their particular locale, but scholarly gestures toward a shared global canon have always been necessarily speculative and provisional. I would suggest that big data analytics can help with this problem under the aegis of a reception-oriented turn by offering a view of his literature travels.

This presentation will feature my analysis of Google Trends data – a tool that allows us to compare patterns of search engine enquiries across regions and languages –on texts and authors represented in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. The main scholarly project of the field of American literature for much of the twenty-first century has, after all been to transcend national boundaries and situate itself more squarely in world literature, but these efforts have been mostly production focused and have rarely acknowledged that American literature as it is taught in the academy in the United States may not be what is recognised as the core of the American canon elsewhere. This data-driven approach allows me to examine what this looks like from elsewhere, to find localized canons of American literature outside of the United States that have been shaped by local and regional concerns about aesthetics, culture and politics. Some American texts are truly ‘worldly’ in that they are popular across a broad span of the globe, and texts that are truly migratory but they are not the ones that we might expect or wish. Furthermore, some American texts are essentially migratory in that the center of interest in that text or its author has genuinely moved beyond the national borders of the United States.

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Identifying and Re-defining Conceptual Frames in the Intercultural Humanities

Featured Panel Presentation: Professor Michael O’Sullivan

How are we to understand the humanities – a field that more than any other must be mindful of differences – within global university strategies and systems of evaluation that rank universities according to criteria that lead to ever greater homogeneity? The process requires an openness to the difference of Asian humanities, a field that for Leo Ou-Fan Lee must have “Asian humanistic scholars” and “all humanistic scholars interested in Asia” re-examining and redefining Western philosophical theory (2010). Jana S. Rosker (2016) argues that intercultural research that includes Chinese philosophy must involve the ‘intercultural relativisation of the contents based on specific requirements of research in the Chinese philosophical tradition. With these arguments in mind, this paper explores how forty years after Said’s Orientalism, recentering English and the humanities can only take place through a glass darkly, or through an Asian-centered prism where a degree of ‘westernism’ is par for the course where scholars must begin to more readily reach for their Dao over their Derrida and their Fung Yu-Lan over their Foucault. Any re-centering if such a move is ever still imaginable can explore new conceptual frames of the intercultural humanities such notions as weakness, individualism and loneliness. One might also argue that the recognised increased economic and political power of China has not been matched by redefinition of Asian academic discourses, schools and practices in terms of intellectual and pedagogic traditions of the historically dominant culture of these regions.

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Literature in the Age of Technological Disruption

Featured Panel Presentation: Professor John W P Phillips

A recent calculation suggests that it will take no more than three years to train workers, including professionals, managers, executives, and technicians (PMETs) in preparation for vertiginous career shifts, when their skills are displaced by the demands of the future, as forecasters assure us will happen. One new field, indeed, involves compiling and computing data on company investments, to predict the jobs that these investments will create. Various departments of future skills and training have begun to work with universities in creating modules designed to prepare workers for this critically uncertain future job market.

At the same time, independent agencies are employed by the universities to provide modules that prepare students for future readiness, and which supplement the turn, already underway in the arts and humanities, towards applied learning, skills based education, and the instrumental and vocational training that ministries of education prefer in face of the challenge of the future.

While available funding for humanities doctoral programmes shrinks a little more each year, funds are awarded instead to innovative projects that rethink the classical MA programme in future ready mode, or that explore existing pedagogic resources on the internet for the possibilities of fruitful parasitism within a department programme.

One might think that under these changing conditions the disciplines of the arts and humanities are once again under fire, in danger of dissolution, the humanities in Asia mutating beyond sustainable development. But the theme of lifelong learning, the introduction all over Asia (certainly in Singapore and China) of liberal arts based programmes, the continuing progress and growth of performance studies, fine art, and literature, offer a different picture. Literary theory, whose pyrrhic victory in the global university rendered it almost worthless as a critical force for many years, is currently revealed as a powerful analytic vehicle for dealing with the current situation.

I will begin by identifying two connected trends: defensive strategies against the threat of future technical disruption; and relocation of funding within the humanities. Beyond the so called digital humanities, a critical media theory marked by its historical understanding of languages and algorithms, and with roots in classical critical theory, can take up the challenge typically assigned to the university, especially when called upon to recenter itself in an Asian context to an age uniquely dominated by disruptive technologies and unsettling economic exigencies.

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IAFOR Silk Road Initiative

Information Session

As an organization, IAFOR’s mission is to promote international exchange, facilitate intercultural awareness, encourage interdisciplinary discussion, and generate and share new knowledge. In 2018, we are excited to launch a major new and ambitious international, intercultural and interdisciplinary research initiative which uses the silk road trade routes as a lens through which to study some of the world’s largest historical and contemporary geopolitical trends, shifts and exchanges.

IAFOR is headquartered in Japan, and the 2018 inauguration of this project aligns with the 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan opened its doors to the trade and ideas that would precipitate its rapid modernisation and its emergence as a global power. At a time when global trends can seem unpredictable, and futures fearful, the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative gives the opportunity to revisit the question of the impact of international relations from a long-term perspective.

This ambitious initiative will encourage individuals and institutions working across the world to support and undertake research centring on the contact between countries and regions in Europe and Asia – from Gibraltar to Japan – and the maritime routes that went beyond, into the South-East Continent and the Philippines, and later out into the Pacific Islands and the United States. The IAFOR Silk Road Initiative will be concerned with all aspects of this contact, and will examine both material and intellectual traces, as well as consequences.

For more information about the IAFOR Silk Road Initiative, click here.

IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017

Award Winners Screening

The IAFOR Documentary Photography Award was launched by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) in 2015 as an international photography award that seeks to promote and assist in the professional development of emerging documentary photographers and photojournalists. The award has benefitted since the outset from the expertise of an outstanding panel of internationally renowned photographers, including Dr Paul Lowe as the Founding Judge, and Ed Kashi, Monica Allende, Simon Roberts, Jocelyn Bain Hogg, Simon Norfolk and Emma Bowkett as Guest Judges. Now in its third year, the award has already been widely recognised by those in the industry and has been supported by World Press Photo, Metro Imaging, MediaStorm, Think Tank Photo, University of the Arts London, RMIT University, British Journal of Photography, The Centre for Documentary Practice, and the Medill School of Journalism.

As an organisation, IAFOR’s mission is to promote international exchange, facilitate intercultural awareness, encourage interdisciplinary discussion, and generate and share new knowledge. In keeping with this mission, in appreciation of the great value of photography as a medium that can be shared across borders of language, culture and nation, and to influence and inform our academic work and programmes, the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award was launched as a competition that would help underline the importance of the organisation’s aims, and would promote and recognise best practice and excellence.

Winners of the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017 were announced at The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2017 (EuroMedia2017) in Brighton, UK. The award follows the theme of the EuroMedia conference, with 2017’s theme being “History, Story, Narrative”. In support of up-and-coming talent, the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award is free to enter.

Access to the Award Winners Screening is included in the conference registration fee. For more information about the award, click here.

Image | From the project Single Mothers of Afghanistan by IAFOR Documentary Photography Award 2017 Grand Prize Winner, Kiana Hayeri.

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Featured Panel Presentations

Panel Chair: Dr Yukari Yoshihara

Featured Panel Presentations

Panel Chair: Professor Steve Clark