THE GLOBAL ASIA COLLOQUIUM
- Unless otherwise indicated below, meetings are Fridays 4-7pm; and in-person (hybrid) meetings are in the King Juan Carlos Center, 53 Washington Square South, room 701. (The NYU Covid protocol makes open public in-person meetings impossible in Fall Term 2022)
- Zoom meeting timings vary to accommodate people in distant time zones.
- Times listed below are East Coast Time.
- Meetings are designed to develop Global Asia projects that combine individual research with collaborative production of online resource platforms for courses and public education.
- The colloquium is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
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2022 FALL – 2023 Spring
Sept 30. 9am [Zoom Meeting] Heather Lee (NYU-Shanghai). Gastrodiplomacy: Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York, 1870-1949 (forthcoming). This pathbreaking book shows that a handful of Chinese immigrant men in New York changed the way a white majoritarian society ate. At a moment of intense anti-Chinese racism, the Chinese protagonists channeled their political activism through the Chinese restaurant. They presented ideas of China in the décor, restaurant ephemera, and food to renegotiate Chinese and white interracial relations and the status of Chinese people in the United States. For Chinese immigrants, the most important dividends were the financial windfall from the popularity of Chinese food, as well as the more lenient application of Chinese Exclusion to Chinese restaurant owners. Their efforts to stay connected to China produced a transpacific circuit of people, capital, and ideas, making New York into the North American terminus of a transpacific corridor. (New York Migrant City — stay tuned for projects on Queens and Chinatown featuring student projects.) Discussants: Jeffrey Pilcher, Madeline Hsu, and Tyler Anbinder Co-sponsored by the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. RECORDING: Partial Gallery View, Speaker View.
Oct 21. 12pm. [Zoom Meeting] Dilip Menon, Renisa Mawani, and Isabel Hoffmeyr. “Oceanic Methodologies: A Conversation.” Based on the recent anthology, Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime, edited by Dilip Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra, and Saarah Jappie (Routledge, India, April 2022) — here are page proofs — this panel will focus on Chapter One, Dilip Menon, “Oceanic Histories: from the Terrestrial to the Maritime,” to explore its argument that the ocean presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and social sciences in our fraught era of global warming and climate uncertainty. The panel will consider how such an ocean-centric approach might offer new perspectives and engagements challenging long-standing paradigms of world history and environmental studies. Dilip will open the conversation; Renisa and Isabel will respond; and Sudipta Sen and May Joseph will moderate. (This meeting launches our project on Port City Environments, Anthropocene Ecologies, and Climate Futures) RECORDING: Speaker View. Gallery View.
SPECIAL EVENT. on ZOOM. 9 Nov. 4:00-5:30 p.m. A/P/A Panel Discussion. “Imperial Aftermaths: Refugees, Reckonings, and Resurgences.” The panel will consider three books on the lasting impact of 20th U.S. warfare in Asia on transpacific cultural memory and political life. It will bring together authors of recently published monographs about U.S. military and economic imperialism in Asia and the Pacific during the Cold War and its afterlives. Panelists: Jodi Kim (UC Riverside), Settler Garrison; Daniel Kim (Brown University), The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War; and
Amanda C. Demmer (Virginia Tech), After Saigon’s Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975-2000. NYU professor Jini Kim Watson will moderate and we’ll host the conversation on Zoom. RECORDING is here
Dec 2. 10:00-12:00. A discussion of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia, featuring essays by Devika Shankar, Naveeda Khan, Rohan D’Souza, May Joseph and Sudipta Sen. This book is a part of a new Routledge series,
Ocean and Island Studies. It is a collection of essays focused on coasts, islands, and shorelines, written by historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists. It advances our understanding of the lesser-studied lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Invoking a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water―deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats―Terra Aqua aims at a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. It explores threatened lives, endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against the backdrop of rising seas and the climatic upheavals, with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines. It examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the erosion of littoral lives, livelihoods and habitats. This is a book for all students and scholars of the environment who are interested in the changing coastal ecologies and environments of Asia. A discussion with May Joseph, Sudipta Sen, Devika Shankar, Rohan D’Souza, and Naveeda Khan. RECORDING
Dec 9. 4-7pm. Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding, Yale University Press, 2022. [Hybrid Zoom plus in-person site King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC) auditorium. WE WILL OBSERVE NYU COVID ENTRY RULES, which are here. ] A pioneering history of inter-Asian understanding that shows the cultural constraints on the call for Asian unity. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s empires built vast Asian transport networks to maximize the profits of trade, while Christian missionaries spread printing to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications revolution: a new public sphere that stretched from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the continent, inquisitive individuals tried to study each other’s cultures, turning the infrastructures of empire to their own exploratory ends. Whether in Japanese or Persian, Bengali or Arabic, they wrote travelogues, histories, and phrasebooks to chart the widely different regions that Europe’s geographers labeled “Asia.” But comprehension does not always keep pace with connection. Far from flowing smoothly, inter‑Asian understanding faced obstacles of many kinds, especially on a landmass with so many scripts and languages. Here is the dramatic story of cross-cultural knowledge on the world’s largest continent, showing the historical constraints on the call for Asian unity. Discussants: Tansen Sen, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, and Tatiana Linkhoeva. RECORDING: 30-minute Book Talk, Hour-length Book Talk