Shanghai, long considered Mainland China’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, has today reemerged as a global center with a booming culture industry and flourishing contemporary art scene. This panel brings together leading scholars and practitioners of Chinese art, theater, and film to discuss the rapidly developing cultural climate of China’s largest city and chief financial capital. Fudan University professor, photographer and curator, Gu Zheng, independent Shanghai-based curator, Wang Jun, Fellow in Chinese Media at Rice University, Aynne Kokas, UNC assistant professor of performance studies and playwright, Zhuang Jiayun, and UO assistant professor of contemporary Asian art, Jenny Lin, offer insight into the exciting and fraught terrain of Shanghai’s contemporary visual culture, and its relationship to globalization.
 

Portland author Nicole Mones will read from her new forthcoming book about the golden years of Shanghai. She is best known for her acclaimed novels Lost in Translation, A Cup of Light, and The Last Chinese Chef, which have been translated into seventeen foreign languages. For many years she wrote about Chinese cuisine for Gourmet Magazine. Her nonfiction writing on China has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.

Folk songs are short stories from the souls of common people. Some, like Mexican corridos or Scottish ballads, reworked in the Appalachias, are stories of tragic or heroic episodes. Others, like the African American blues, reach from a difficult present back into slavery and forward into a troubled future. Japanese workers in Hawaii's plantations created their own versions, in form more akin to their traditional tanka or haiku poetry. These holehole bushi describe the experiences of one particular group caught in the global movements of capital, empire, and labor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Voices from the Canefields author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred of these songs, in translation, in a hitherto largely unexplored historical context.

 

This event is presented by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and is cosponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs, the Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Clark Honors College, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Asian Studies Program, and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

"Christianity's Dialogue with Buddhism in Japan"

James Hesig, Faculty of Arts and Letters, Nanzan University

Knight Library Browsing Room

4:00 pm

 

 

Thursday, November 7, 2013

"Postcolonial Literature as World Literature: World Heritage Preservation and the Unworlding of the Subaltern World in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide"

Pheng Cheah, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley

 

 

Thursday, November 7, 2013

"FDI Networks in Production and Innovation in China: Beyond New Regionalism, Beyond Global Production Networks"

Yehua Dennis Wei, Department of Geography, University of Utah

Condon Hall, Room 103

4:00 pm


Thursday, November 14, 2013
Chinese Language Competition: Sing a Song in Chinese
(Registration deadline: October 30; Competition: November 14)
Global Scholars Hall 123
6:00 pm