2018 July ICCS_IICS_FUTH Summer School:

Toward Decolonizing Cold War Knowledge:

Facing Contemporary Border Politics
Hsinchu, Taiwan
July 9-13, 2018

2018 Summer School

Introduction

The International Institute for Cultural Studies (IICS), in collaboration with the Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH) – a consortium of Sogang University (South Korea), University of Pittsburgh (USA), Cornell University (USA), University of Tampere (Finland), University of Leipzig (Germany), National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan) – and supported by the International Program in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) of the University System of Taiwan (UST) invites paper proposals for presentation and participation at a summer school for graduate students and postdocs to be held July 9-13, 2018 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. We are happy to take this opportunity to initiate our collaboration with East Asian Economy and Society (EcoS), University of Vienna (Austria).

Each year beginning in 2010, the Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH) has gathered graduate students and postdocs in the humanities and social sciences across the globe for a summer school centering on presentations by leading scholars as well as by PhD students and Postdocs. As a truly transregional collaboration it profits from the willingness of participants to share the core argument of their current research project and to situate it in a global context.

The Taiwan based International Institute for Cultural Studies (IICS_NCTU& UST), together with the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies (SRCS_NCTU) and the International Program in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS_UST), will serve as the local organizer of this year’s joint conference / summer university. IICS_UST is itself an inter-school platform which connects National Central University (NCU), National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), National Yang Ming University (NYMU) and National Chiao Tung University (NCTU). IICS has its long history of holding bi-annual summer university since 2006, with the liaison of the Association Ici et Ailleurs pour une philosophie nomade, Philosophy Department, University Paris 8 St Denis, and the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies (SRCS), National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. The themes covered in the past decade include Bio-politics, Ethics and Subjectivation (2009 Hsinchu, Taiwan), Borders, Displacements and Creation: Questioning the Contemporary (2011 Porto, Portugal), Political Uses of the Body (2014 Tirana, Albania), Colonial Unconscious, Decolonizing Philosophy (2016 Agen & Toulouse, France). In recent years, IICS also has organized winter camps and workshops focusing on the critical studies in the context of inter-Asian societies, covering the themes of De-Coding the Cold War and Facing Contemporary Societies (2016), Conflict and Justice: Precarious Bodies in Inter-Asia Societies (2017). These events constitute parts of the general long-term project on “Conflict, Justice, Decolonization: Critical Research on Inter-Asian Societies.”

Basing on this rich network of cross-regional collaborations and the rewarding intellectual exchange from the past experience, we are happy to announce that the Summer School of 2018 will be held July 9-13, 2018 in Hsinchu, Taiwan on the theme Toward Decolonizing Cold War Knowledge: Facing Contemporary Border Politics.

Present day fields of knowledge worldwide are partitioned as humanities and social sciences and continue to produce, in ways at once invisible and indivisible, the nation-state as historical telos. Thus, most studies in these bipolar fields may foreground terms such as nation-state, gender, age, race, and class as object and method of research. Yet, underlying and sustaining a bipolar dynamic complementarity evinced in these shared research frame and analytic logic is a developmental time division and compartmentalization whereby globalization is understood as the end of the Cold War, the reordering of the international order, the weakening of nation-states, the end of ideology, and the realignment of cultures ,etc.

This teleology evinces at the levels of seemingly disparate disciplinary forms of knowledge, as well as divergent production of knowledge practices. These disciplinary forms of knowledge reveal and discover unfinished decolonization processes in thought, practices, and life on the ground. Mundane decolonization processes and il/liberal resources continue to struggle with cold war effects and affects in everyday life, academic thought and feeling. Cold war inflections of thought and affect include nation-state developmentalism in progressivist history and historiography, imaginaries of freedom and democracy, individualist pursuit of rights, legalist standards of social order, and competitive markets as economic freedom. The narrative of a post-Cold War “end of history” occludes unfinished processes of de-colonization that would challenge and transform the conditions wherein colonial, neo-colonial, capitalist and civilizational presuppositions facilitate hegemony of ongoing global knowledge industry.

At a moment when knowledge is touted as capital’s new value while knowledge workers are rendered increasingly superfluous, when wages are mediation of exploitation yet continue to sustain life’s need for most, when gender is mainstream yet at war with old sex and new sexualities, when planetary life is endangered in ways inextricable from competitive markets, when memories of past trauma become the technique of governmentality, when various forms of border politics are still operating in different corners of our societies, this is a time to congregate and learn from each other anew. The summer school is a quora for addressing what and how of decolonizing knowledge amongst and between different sites in the region (inter-Asia) and beyond (intra-oceanic and inter-continental).

We welcome contributions from all fields of the humanities and social sciences on the following themes, but not limited to:

Decolonizing Cold War Knowledgeli
Forgetting and Remembering WWII & Cold War Era
Subaltern Knowledge and Peaceful Activism
Zoning Politics, Insular Anarchy and the Tension in South China Sea
Neo-liberalism and the Many Faces of Leftist Melancholy
Border Politics, Migrations and Unequal Citizenship within Civil Societies

This Summer School will feature daily keynote lectures, plenary sessions, small group seminars led by leading thinkers, and a thematic fieldtrip.

Keynote lectures and plenary sessions are open to the public. Participants are also expected to join small group seminars led by our invited speakers, based on their priority of choice (please see page 8-9 "Seminars and Seminar Leaders"). In the seminar, the leader will address main aspect of their problematics, and each of the participants is expected to give a 15-minute paper on their work, critique the papers of their fellow seminar participants, and to contribute to the general dialogue of the theme.

To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by March 31, 2018.

Notifications of acceptance will be announced by May 18, 2018 at the IICS website. Full papers will be expected by June 20, 2018, so as to circulate your papers among your seminar group members.

Registration fee is USD $150. Accommodation and some meals are included.

Financial aid will be given to outstanding research proposals.

Seminar Topics

1. Political Economy of Life: Decolonization and the Humanitarian Government

Scholarship on decolonization and empire has brought to light different forms of resistance and independence (from peaceful transition to violent wars), but also the emergence of international human rights regime and its effect today. This seminar will explore the entangled history of decolonization and emergence of humanitarian order in Southeast Asia. Specifically, this seminar adapts Didier Fassin’s notion of “humanitarian government” to discuss the global system of aid as perpetuating domination and control, even when framed in terms of opportunity. Case studies will explore the political economy of life and the exploitation of racialized and gendered labor, with emphasis on the different forms of rhetoric and visual means that are employed to reproduce inequality. Some questions to consider are: How have international relations and colonial legacy in Southeast Asia shaped contemporary humanitarian intervention and aid? Why are some populations deemed worthy of humanitarian relief, and not others? How do people disentangle the effects of humanitarian violence when they are beneficiaries or recipients of charity? This seminar is interdisciplinary, drawing on theoretical scholarship and case studies from and across the social sciences and humanities.

2. Beyond the Binary of Resistance and Subordination

Beyond the binary of resistance and subordination, subalterns negotiate their relationship to the state in many different ways. This seminar will explore the different forms of strategies and negotiation employed by marginalized communities in asserting their rights. Some groups may mount outright protest or take legal action, others may strategically adapt, while others create alliances and negotiate in different forms. Strategies may vary and overlap at the same time. This seminar invites participants to examine these issues by drawing upon grounded empirical research and explicating the nuances of the different rights strategies. What are the different forms of strategies? Have they been successful? What are the consequences? How has it changed the relationship between the state and the subaltern? How do we as researchers locate ourselves within this relationship? The state-subaltern relationship does not emerge from a vacuum but is built upon layers of history. This seminar also invites participants to pay attention to the particularities and historical contingencies that shape contemporary rights struggles.

3. Twentieth Century as a Century of Refugees: Crossing Borders of East Asian People

Humanities such as history, literature and philosophy have long been confined by nation-centered motifs, but actually people, knowledge and technology have moved and expanded easily beyond the national borders. If humanities fail to overcome unilateralism, we will never be able to capture the real situation of these transnational movements. In our seminar we would like to take up various topics of crossing national borders in modern East Asia. The twentieth century has been described as a century of wars, which tells us that it is also a century of refugees. During and after World War II, large numbers of refugees were created and forced to move across national borders, and East Asian people were among those displaced. In addition, the issue of displaced people does not just take place in the twentieth century, but is a repeated theme throughout history. Our seminar is interested in discussions about what kind of transformation occurred on the cultural ground by the adaptations and/or conflicts through the migration of twentieth-century East Asian people, especially papers focusing on representations in literature, art and films from a historical perspective.

4. Leftist Mourning, Neo-Liberalism and De-Colonizing the Cold-War

In this seminar, we will inquire about the legacy of socialism in the current neoliberal moment after the Cold-War. Now, close to thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and about forty years after China’s market reforms, what does socialism mean to us? How should we think about the Cold-War and the post-Cold War from the point of view of socialism? We often speak of going beyond the Cold War, but such a gesture might end up affirming capitalism, and neo-liberalism, as the only option available to people. Participants in this seminar will question the above claim by discussing recent works concerning leftist politics during the Cold War and post-Cold War. Among the issues that we will cover in this seminar is Enzo Traverso’s concept of “leftist melancholy.” Traveso suggests that throughout the twentieth century, leftists have been engulfed in melancholy, but the situation has become extreme after the Cold War, since it appears that there are no alternatives to the present. The seminar invites participants to interrogate responses to leftist melancholy and attempts to conjure hope for the left. In the past few years, scholars have invoked various events of the past, such as history of markets and the Chinese revolution, to imagine futures beyond both the Cold War and capitalism. Through examining such responses, we hope in this seminar to enrich our ideas about our troubled present and the possibility of a better future.

Seminar Topics

Featured Speakers & Seminars Coordinators

Agnes S. Schick-Chen

Departments of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.

Dr. Agnes S. Schick-Chen is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. Her main fields of research and teaching are the developments of legal and political culture in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she lived for reasons of study, research and work respectively. She has published books and papers on related topics, e.g. the discourse on Chinese legal culture in the PRC and processes of coming to terms with the past in China and Taiwan. More recent research interests include law and film, law as identity and conceptualizations of justice in the Chinese-speaking world.

Alfred Gerstl

Departments of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.

Dr. Alfred Gerstl is an Austrian political scientist, specialized on International Relations in Southeast Asia with a focus on regional cooperation in and between Southeast and Northeast Asia, ASEAN, the South China Sea dispute, the effects of China´s One Belt, One Road Initiative on Southeast Asia and human security. He is researcher at the Department of East Asian Studies/East Asian Economy and Society (EcoS) at the University of Vienna and Fellow of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) in Vienna. Previously, he taught at Palacky University Olomouc (Czech Republic), Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) and University of Passau (Germany) and was the founding editor-in-chief of the Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies (ASEAS).

Chien-Ting Lin 林建廷

English Department of National Central University, Taiwan

Chien-Ting Lin teaches in the English Department of National Central University in Chungli, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. in literature and cultural studies from University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the topics of medicine and modernity, the transpacific U.S. Empire and Cold War biopolitics, and inter-Asia historical connections. He has published his research in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Review of International American Studies among others.

Davorn Sisavath

California State University, Fresno.

Davorn Sisavath is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fresno. She received her PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, and held a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages and Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. Her book project, Economy of Excess: Military Waste in Post-War Spaces, examines the aesthetics of the everyday and political economy of military waste materials that are specific to Laos, but also illuminates how US imperialism has proceeded in other postwar spaces.

Davorn Sisavath

Department of Chinese Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

DING Naifei 丁乃非

English Department of National Central University, Taiwan

DING Naifei teaches in the English Department at the National Central University, Zhongli, Taiwan. She is a member of the Center for the Study of Sexualities (1995) at NCU. Her writings include Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (in English, 2002), and, with LIU Jen-Peng and Amie PARRY, Penumbra Query Shadow: Queer Reading Tactics (in Chinese, 2007).

Frank Hadler

Department of Entanglements and Globalization, Leipzig University, Germary

Dr. Frank Hadler is head of the department “Entanglements and Globalization” at the Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO) in Leipzig and honorary professor for cultural history of East Central Europe at Leipzig University. His main fields of research and publication are the history of historiography and transnational history of East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Recent publications: 1989 in a Global Perspective (2015); Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts. Overlapping National Histories in Modern Europe (2015); Handbuch einer transnationalen Geschichte Ostmitteleuropas (2017).

Friedrich Edelmayer

Department of History., University of Vienna, Austria

Dr. Friedrich Edelmayer is Professor of Modern History at the Department of History, University of Vienna. His research interests include global history, insular studies, history of Spain, Latin America and Italy, history of the Hapsburg Empire and history of diplomacy. In addition to his professorship in Vienna, he has been visiting professor at various universities, e.g. Ljubljana (Slovenia), Alicante (Spain), Sassari (Italy), Alcalá de Henares (Spain), Macquarie University (Australia), Salamanca or Granada (both Spain). In 1999, he was awarded the order “Orden del mérito civil” by his Majesty Juan Carlos I, King of Spain.

Jie-Hyun Lim

Institute of Critical Global Studies. Sogang University, Korea

Jie Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University in Seoul. He wrote broadly on nationalism and Marxism in comparison, Polish history, transnational history and global memory. Among others he published five volumes of the Palgrave series of ‘mass dictatorship in the 20th century’ as the series editor. His present research topic is ‘mnemonic solidarity in the global memory space’. His forthcoming book of a transnational history of victimhood nationalism covering Post-WWII Korea, Japan, Poland, Israel and Germany reflects the problematics of mnemonic solidarity in the global memory space. He serves the boards of the CISH, NOGWHISTO and 'Toynbee Prize Foundation', and editorial board of Moving the Social, Global-e and Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia Politologica. He held visiting appointments at Warsaw University, Cracow Pedagogical University, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Nichibunken, EHESS, Paris II University, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Bielefeld University.

John Hutnyk

Faulty of Social Sciences and Humanities. Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam

John Hutnyk is the author of The Rumour of Calcutta (1996), Critique of Exotica (2000), Bad Marxism (2004), Pantomime Terror (2014), and most recently, Global South Asia on Screen (2018). He works at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Joyce C.H. Liu 劉紀蕙

Chair, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Director, University System of Taiwan, Taiwan

Dr. Joyce C.H. Liu is Professor of Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Visual Studies and Cultural Studies in the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. She is currently the director of the International Center for Cultural Studies of National Chiao Tung University, the International Institute for Cultural Studies of the University System of Taiwan, and the International MA Program in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies supported by UST. Her research covers the critique of East-Asian modernity, Chinese political thoughts in the 20th century, inter-art studies, Taiwan cultural studies, critical studies of inter-Asian societies, focusing on issues related to the questions of bio-politics, border politics, unequal citizenship, civic exclusion, and internal coloniality. She is the authors of The Topology of Psyche: The Post-1895 Reconfiguration of Ethics, The Perverted Heart: The Psychic Forms of Modernity, Orphan, Goddess, and the Writing of the Negative: The Performance of Our Symptoms in addition to about 100 journal articles and book chapters in English and Chinese.

P. Kerim Friedman 傅可恩

Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan

P. Kerim Friedman is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, 'Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!' about a street theater troupe from one of India's Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs). Kerim is also a co-founder of the anthropology blog anthro{dendum} (formerly Savage Minds), and the current programmer for the Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival (TIEFF).

Rusaslina Binti Idrus

Seniior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Gender Studies Programme. University of Malaya, Malaysia

Rusaslina Idrus is a Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Malaya. She received her PhD and MA in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and has a Master’s degree in Environmental Science from Yale University. Previous to joining University of Malaya, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS). She is a board member of Malaysia’s Pusat Sejarah Rakyat (People’s History Center) and is a trainer for their oral history initiative. Her research interests include indigenous rights, subaltern studies, women’s history and citizenship studies. She is currently working on a community engagement project using digital stories for Orang Asli youth empowerment and advocacy.

Salone Ishahavut 莎瓏‧伊斯哈罕布德

Department of Indigenous. National Chi Nan University, Taiwan

Salone Ishahavut is a documentary film maker of Taiwanese Bunun descent. She is assistant professor of Indigenous Development at National Chi Nan University. She received her M.F.A. degree in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation Program from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her film projects have been favored by Golden Harvest Awards, Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, WomenMakeWaves Film Festival. She has also received Excellent Screenplay award by Taiwan's Bureau of Information. She has worked as a documentary playwright-director at Tatokem Culture Workshop and DaAi TV, as well as journalist at Taiwan Public Television.

Major filmography

2011 - Alis's Dreams (Director) - Golden Harvest Awards - Excellence Award
2008 - Hunting Heart: Lekal Makor (Screenplay) - Bureau of Information Excellent Screenplay Award
2006 - The Bear (16mm short, Director) - WomenMakeWaves Film Festival
2003 - Tawtawazay: the Most Popular Family Name (Director) - Aboriginal Documentary Competition, First Prize
2003 - Wuhaliton: Tears of the Moon (Director) - Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival
2001 - Until the End of the World (Director) - Aboriginal Documentary Competition, First Prize

Tsuboi Hideto 坪井秀人

International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan

Hideto Tsuboi, Dr. (1959-) is a Japanese literary and cultural scholar, Professor of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto. Professor Tsuboi received his B. A. and M. A. in Japanese Literature from Nagoya University, and completed his Ph. D. in Japanese Literature at Nagoya University. He has written extensively on the theme of the other in modern Japanese literature. His publications include Koe no Shukusai: Nihon Kindaishi to Sensō (Fest of Voices: Modern Japanese Poetry and War), University of Nagoya Press, 1997; Kankaku no Kindai: Koe, Shintai, Hyōshō (Modernity of the Sensibilities: Voice, Body and Representation), University of Nagoya Press, 2006; and Sei ga kataru: 20 Seiki Nihon Bungaku no Sei to Shintai (Sexuality Speaks: Sex/Gender and Body in the Literature of Twentieth-Century Japan), University of Nagoya Press, 2012.

Shi-chi Mike Lan 藍適齊

Department of History. National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Shi-chi Mike Lan is Associate Professor at the Department of History, National Chengchi University, Taiwan. His research interests include Modern East Asian History, empire and nation, the Second World War, and historical memory. His recent publications include “’Crime’ of Interpreting: Taiwanese Interpreters as War Criminals of World War II”, in Kayoko Takeda and Jesús Baigorri, eds., New Insights in the History of Interpreting (2016), “(Re-)Writing History of the Second World War: Forgetting and Remembering the Taiwanese-native Japanese Soldiers in Postwar Taiwan”, Positions: Asia Critique, Vol.21, No.4 (Fall 2013).

Ute Wallenboeck

Department of East Asia Studies. Department of South Asian. University of Vienna, Austria.

Ute Wallenboeck is a sessional lecturer at the Department of East Asia Studies and at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. She received her Ph.D in Chinese Studies from the University of Vienna. Due to her additional academic background in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies and her long engagement with the local population in Amdo, she is a Sinologist focusing on the interface between Mongolian and Tibetan cultures at the Sino-Tibetan borderland. Her research interests cover studies on ethnic and cultural identity as well as inter-ethnic and state-society relations along the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. She is currently the co-editor of the second volume of Mapping Amdo.

Viren Murthy 慕唯仁

Department of History. University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History and researches Chinese and Japanese intellectual history in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011) and co-editor with Joyce Liu of Marxisms in East Asia (Routledge, 2017), co-editor with Fabian Schäfer and Max Ward, of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017) co-editor with Axel Schneider of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (Brill, 2013), and co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique and is currently working on a project tentatively entitled: Pan-Asianism and the Conundrums of Post-colonial Modernity.

Featured Speakers & Seminars Coordinators