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February 2021
From “The Sea Bastards” to “Solidarity Beyond Ocean”: Japanese Dockworkers, the Bandung Moment, and the Politics of Scale. A lecture by David Ambaras, Professor of History, NCSU
This presentation is an entry point into my current research project on how maritime transport and travel contributed to the making of Japan’s modern world. To date, studies of this topic have tended to focus on Japanese shipping, highlighting business strategies and state-led geopolitical initiatives, without really examining shipping as a series of social processes that not only conveyed millions of people, massive amounts of things, and countless ideas from one location to another but also transformed them, generating…
Find out more »March 2021
Art and Gender in an Age of Revolution. A lecture by Simon Partner, Professor of History, Duke University
The talk will be based on the life of Kawai Koume, an artist and housewife in a bushi family in Kishūdomain who kept a diary from the 1830s till the 1880s. Koume’s diary offers a window into life in a scholarly middle-class family before and after the Meiji Restoration. The talk will focus on the social economy of Koume’s artistic production – who she painted for, what rewards she got, and how the transformations of Japan’s society and economy following the Meiji Restoration…
Find out more »April 2021
From Victim to Artist: Maiko Stories in Movies and Manga. A lecture by Jan Bardsley, Professor Emerita, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
This talk is based on a chapter from Dr. Bardsley's book, Maiko Masquerade: Crafting Geisha Girlhood in Japan <https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520296442/maiko-masquerade> (forthcoming March 2021, UC Press). Maiko Masquerade explores Japanese representations of the maiko, or apprentice geisha, in films, manga, and other popular media as an icon of exemplary girlhood. Jan Bardsley traces how the maiko, long stigmatized as a victim of sexual exploitation, emerges in the 2000s as the chaste keeper of Kyoto’s classical artistic traditions. Insider accounts by maiko…
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