Academia/Books and Articles/Cultural/Film/General/Korea

Cinema, nationalism, and nostalgia

Posted on by Remco Breuker / 4 Comments

I have just finished reading a new book on Korean cinema (New Korean Cinema, New York: NYU Press, 2005, edited by Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Springer). It was a satisfactory read, most of the essays in it are good, some excellent. It has left me with some questions, though, and I am curious how other academics working on Korea think about these questions. Reading this book (and others as well), I have come across repeated statements on nationalism with which I find it hard to agree. The first one is the generally shared assumption that South Korea is an intensely nationalist country and that art (cinema) has to overcome nationalism (and nationalism alone) to become ‘real’ art. While superficially this may seem to be the case (especially from the outside), I have often found that, with the exception of the radical nationalists, nationalism is often a matter of rhetorics, not entirely perhaps, but to a significant extent at the least. Cultural studies in particular seem to take the all-pervasive influence of nationalism as a given, without problematizing what kind of nationalism is being discussed, in what context and from whom it emerges and for whom it is intended. The rhetorics of nationalism, as those of any influential ideology, must perhaps not be taken at face value, but be seen as a distinctive and for its users familiar way of communication.

Related to this is the also popular notion (present in several essays in this book) that due to the disappearance of the oppressively propagated nationalism of the 70’s and ’80s South Korea now is more fragmented, more anxiety-ridden and more diverse than it was during the 70’s and 80’s.Continue reading →

General

Market economy and exchange in ancient Korea

Posted on by noja / 9 Comments

Dear all, one topic that might be interesting to discuss is the degree of the development of market relations, exchange economy and internal trade in early traditional Korea. I myself fell in love with this sort of things while reading the materials on the discussion on the so-called “Asiatic mode of production” in (still Marxist-Leninist) Soviet historiography of the 1960-70s. My older colleague, Prof. S.V.Volkov, was, in fact, a champion of this theory, which was also carefully backed by my dissertational adviser, M. N. Pak – also the latter chose not to irritate the mighty orthodox opponents of the “Asiatic mode” thesis and speak very carefully about “early feudalism”, with an “extremely low degree of the development of market relations”. Of course, now I understand more or less that the over-generalisations about “Asian” history as a whole smack too heavily of Orientalism to be taken seriously; China and India after 15-16th C. had the degree of the “proto-capitalist” development Europe could be envious of at that point, and some archaic “European” societies (Spartan, for example), also seemed to have highly centralized exploitation/redistribution systems. So, if we want to continue developing this thesis, we probably should speak of early statehood in a more general context, taking references to “Asian” out; we may also speak, I guess, about agrarian bureaucracies, which manage to preserve and develop to a fantastic degree of complexity the centralized redistribution mechanisms rooted in the “state exploitation” technologies of the early antiquity. But, with all these reservations and precautions duly taken, I still suppose that the earlier Marxist insights about centralized redistribution and its historical trajectory in the agrarian monarchies continue to be valid – and wonder what the others think about it.

For one thing in Korea particularly, a fact Korean historical textbooks seem to studiously avoid mentioning is that Korea began minting metallic coins only in the late 10th C. (and on very small scale) – compared with Japan’s 7-8th C. coins production and China, which had coins already for almost a millenium to that point. In fact, various Chinese coins seem to have been used by the proto-Korean state already in the ancient Chosŏn time – but mostly for external exchange and/or prestige purposes. The media of the internal exchange in Unified Silla seems to have been either rice or textiles: the markets in the capital were managed by the state (kwansi) and most of the high-level artisanship in the capital was concentrated in state workshops. State was the biggest actor in these commercial transactions, which still took place – buying, for example, lots of paper for the sutra-copying at the state-run temples (we have mokkan materials on these transactions). Private external trade started to flourish when central controls weakened in the late 8th – early 9th C. – but powerful merchants like Chang Pogo were more interested in acquiring state power than in the development of the purely commercial side of their enterprises. So, shouldn’t we conclude that “early feudal” (to use M. N. Pak’s term) Korea really largely lagged behind in the terms of market economy development, compared to its neighbours – the state both controlling the existing (internal) market operations and largely substituting the market with its own production/distribution network?

China/Gender/General/Qing

Why didn’t Manchu women bind their feet?

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 20 Comments

It is well-known that even after the conquest of China Manchu women did not bind their feet. The Qing emperors took clothing and hair very seriously as ways of defining groups under the empire. Thus after 1644 all Han men were expected to wear the Manchu hairstyle of shaving their foreheads and growing a queue in back as a way of symbolizing their submission to the dynasty. At the same time the state was Manchuizing Han men via their hair it was ordering Manchu women to keep their feet natural (天足). This was one of many things that were done to preserve a specific Manchu identity.

In the seventh month of 1638 the Manchu emperor Hong Taiji (Abahai) decreed that the Chinese custom of footbinding was not to be adopted. “Those who imitate the clothes of another country or order their women to bind their feet, [they] have their bodies in our dynasty but their hearts in another country.”1 There were at least some who defied this order. In 1804 the Jiaqing emperor was furious to find that women of the Chinese Bordered Yellow Banner (ethnically Han, but politically “Manchu”) were binding their feet. (Elliot p.470) Still, in general Manchu women did not bind their feet. In 1911 when the banner population at Nanjing and Hankou were slaughtered women’s feet were the one marker of ethnic difference that could not be disguised.
manchu Feet
This illustration is from 1911 and is one of a series on Manchu women adopting Han dress. (Rhoades Manchus & Han)On the woman’s left foot she is wearing a typical Manchu “horse-hoof” shoe that makes it appear the wearer has tiny feet. The other foot is, maybe, being bound, even though she is far too old for it at this point. Although some Manchu women may have tried to sinify themselves in the last years of the dynasty, for 200 years before that they were quite willing to keep their natural feet

The question I have is: Why footbinding? Why was this custom chosen as alone of the “evil habits of the Han” (Elliot p.470) as the one that would be unambiguously rejected by the Qing state? More importantly, why did the Manchus accept this imperial order? They were more than willing to smoke tobacco and later opium, to quit learning Manchu and do all sorts of other things that the Emperors did not want them to do. Perhaps most interestingly, how can this be connected to the current scholarship on footbinding?

I think we can safely dismiss Hong Taiji’s apparent assumption that footbinding was something done to women on the orders of men. Dorothy Ko suggests looking at footbinding as “a device inscribing the Confucian ideal of a centripetal woman and as a central event in the development of a women’s culture in the boudoir [and] as a means women employed to cater to the erotic fantasies of men” (Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers p.263) Footbinding was, among other things, a way for Han women to demonstrate (mostly to other women) their self-cultivation and self-discipline. It was the feet of Chinese women that separated the Han from the non-Han.2

Pamela Crossley suggests that natural feet symbolized the active economic and political lives of Manchu women, and thus a rejection of women’s passive role in Chinese society. (The Manchus p. 27) There is probably a great deal of truth to this, but at the same time Manchu women seem to have embraced their own foot customs as coeval to and superior to those of the Chinese. Zhou Hong presents this Liaoning folksong as an example of Manchu women’s attitudes towards feet. (满族妇女生活与民俗文化研究p. 96, My apologies for the translation)

找个木匠锛鞋底
找个木匠做鞋帮
绒线用了一板半
细布用了八皮箱
一共做了三年整
一双绣鞋做妥当
叫来姑娘把鞋试
还是短来还是长
姑娘伸脚试绣鞋
鞋小脚大箍得慌
趔趔歪歪倒后墻
左脚踩死八只虎
右脚踩死九只狼

Get a carpenter’s adze to make the shoe-bottoms
Get a carpenter to make the outside of the shoes
Use a card of yarn
Eight lengths of fine cloth
Altogether it will take three years
To make a pair of embroidered shoes
Call a girl to try the shoes
Whether short or long
The girl stretches her foot
to fit the embroidered shoes
The shoe small the foot large
Constrained and uncomfortable
Awkwardly and crookedly to the back wall
The left foot crushing eight tigers
The right foot crushing nine wolves

This poem shows, I think, how Manchu women tried to appropriate the meaning of footbinding despite their big feet. Right from the beginning the comparison to Chinese customs is implicit but never stated. Manchu shoes involve violent re-shaping, but it is of wood rather than the body. The girl stretches her foot to meet the shoe, rather than shrinking the foot to meet it. The process of making the shoes is said to take three years, which seems a little long no matter how elaborate the embroidery is, but it matches the time and dedication that go into binding feet. The girl, once mounted on the shoes, moves just as awkwardly as a Chinese women, and like them her feet become the center of her potency. Being a Manchu she crushes tigers and wolves rather than attracting poets, but the idea seems the same.

I suppose, then, that part of the reason Manchu women did not bind their feet was in part because it they were ordered not to by the Emperor and other men, who saw their feet as a marker (the marker) of ethnic difference. They were also able to gain all the benefits of footbinding, a visible symbol of their refinement and culture, without having to bind their feet.

1 “若有仿效他国衣帽及令妇女束发裹足者，等于身在本朝，心在他国.” I’m not sure how valid this quote is. 周虹 “满族妇女生活与民俗文化研究” 北京：中国社会科学出版社， 2005，p. 95, takes the quote from the 光绪朝东華錄. On the other hand, Elliot The Manchu Way p.470n61 says that he has been unable to locate the original edict, which makes me think their may be something wrong.

2 Dorothy Ko’s new book on footbinding is probably the best of the new scholarship, although I have not seen it yet. Wang Ping synthesizes some of the new scholarship in Aching for Beauty.

Academia/Economic/English/General/Japan/幕末/明治

A Welcome Find

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 6 Comments

One of the very interesting things I discovered doing my dissertation was the relatively meager state of scholarship on Meiji era financial institutions, particularly on the ways in which Japanese used (and avoided) new systems of savings, transfers/remittances, loans, etc. I ended up being quite impressed by the financial sophistication of supposedly unsophisticated peasant migrant laborers, and considerably more sympathetic to the assumptions of economic history as a result.

My advisor even tried to steer me in that direction: I had to do some background reading on the Yokohama Specie Bank, which played a role in early Hawai’i-Japan remittances (by establishing one of Japan’s first overseas bank branches!), and he was disappointed that the bank itself did not sufficiently fire my historical curiousity that I might take it up as a topic in itself. It is true, though, that there remain questions which I can’t answer to my own satisfaction because I don’t know enough about Meiji banking.

Well, Sharon Howard forwarded me a link to Michael Schlitz’s Histor¥ which is described both as a “weblog about Meiji financial reforms” and (quite tantalizingly) an “opensource project on Japanese financial history 1850-1917.” I’m thrilled to see this topic getting the attention it deserves and available on-line, to boot! Now, I just need time to read through his archives and make notes….

China/English/Events/General/Post-Mao/Taiwan

Taiwanization?

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 0 Comment

When President Bush cited Taiwan as a model for mainland China, though he wasn’t quite as aggressive as the headlines suggest, he raised some interesting historical specters: what if the Nationalists hadn’t lost China? Does the success of Taiwan validate the socialist Republicanism (and stages of political development) of Sun Yat-sen? And, of course, is Taiwan’s model of transition from single-party developmental state to multi-party (if still somewhat immature) democracy with flourishing high-value economy something that China could draw on?

Andrew Meyer, who’s been studying Taiwan and China for two decades or so has some thoughts on the plausibility of the president’s model.

This analysis, though [via Simon World] suggests that the Taiwanisation argument is in no small part wishful thinking to cover up the fact that we don’t like to admit the developmental success of (some) unfree societies.

English/General

Self-introduction: Vladimir (Pak Noja)

Posted on by noja / 4 Comments

I am working with Oslo University (Norway) currently teaching a strange combination of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, which include East Asian religions and philosophies on one extreme (?) and something called “East Asia: Capital and Labour”, and mostly dealing with the relationship between corporate capital and unions in South Korea and Japan, and the rising current of labour militancy in China, on the other. I used to teach Korean language as well, having proudly produced around 6 graduates in 5 years. I have thought before that the University of Oslo must be the only place in the world where three teachers (me and two colleagues working part-time) teaching two students a language no business around might demand, would be tolerated and left in peace. Well, it was a naive illusion – Oslo University is following the same “party line” as elsewhere, and the teaching of Korean is going to be terminated next year, at least for the time being.

My academic trajectory (?) is odd enough to doubt its seriousness. I began with Kaya studies, when I was MA student and then PhD candidate – for those sane enough not to jump into the abyss of the ancient history, I can just explain that Kaya proto-states (they stood somewhere between a well-developed chiefdom and an early state) controlled a large part of the Naktong River valley and the southern coast of what is KyOngsang Province now, until being eaten up by Silla in 562 (http://www.gayasa.net/). I wrote a PhD thesis on this, mostly using Nihon shoki (720) as my source material. I guess that is the only monograph written on Kaya in Russian – and it is likely to maintain its monopoly (?) for the time being, given the sad situation in the Russian academia. Then, I started to dabble in Korean Buddhism – after having been greatly surprised at sight of a reserve corps military uniform at one temple I frequented, and having understood how much practice might differ from theory. The last “side jump” was my love (or rather hate?) affair with Korea’s (and, by extension, China’s and Japan’s) Social Darwinism, which began around 5 years ago, and still fails to end. I am still struggling to understand in which ways and to which degree Social Darwinist consciousness contributed to the making of Korea’s nationalism in the 1880s-1900s, and what was the logic behind the Social Darwinist conversion (?) of many intellectuals who might have espoused different dreams as well – reformist Confucians, Christian converts, and some younger Buddhists.

Academia/bibliography/Books and Articles/General/Korea

Finding Korean journal articles online

Posted on by Remco Breuker / 2 Comments

Following up on Owen’s very useful posts, I’ll write a few words on finding Korean journals online. I have used the RISS site a lot and they do have an option for foreigner users now, but there is a snag if you want to download articles for which you have to pay. This used to be possible by using a credit card and the prices were reasonable, between 2ooo to 4000 won per article, depending on length, journal and newness. About a year ago, however, when the site became more friendly towards those unfortunate souls without a Korean ID number, it also became impossible to pay with foreign credit cards. I don’t think the site itself has any control over this, because they use a widely used plug-in from a large electronic banking company. Anyway, it has become impossible to charge non-Korean credit cards. The last time I tried was about four months ago. As for obtaining articles for which you should pay, the best way is still to ask someone on a Korean campus. As most Korean universities are subscribers of journal article databases, anybody with a campus ID address can download any article they require. This is probably also the best way to get hold of unpublished MA and Ph.D. theses, although for those you need to have an ID address of the university where the particular thesis you want was submitted. Complicated, but often worth it.

Books and Articles/English/Korea/Late Chosŏn

Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part V – The Korean Mind and other Characteristics

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 4 Comments

Before diving into some descriptions of the Korean mind and personality in the readings considered in this series of postings (Part I begins here), let me make a few observations.

In the postings I have written so far, the various generalizations made about Koreans tend to fall under two categories: 1) unqualified claims about the inherent features of Korean people and culture 2) Generalizations about Koreans which are more explicitly placed in the context of a narrative of contingent backwardness, oppression, and a “not yet caught up” state of barbarity.

A surprisingly large number of descriptions that I have discussed so far involve claims about the inherent character of the Korean people, with few or no qualifications. Koreans are said to have some feature by virtue of their distinctive culture, or, for lack of any explanation, as some kind of other racial or ethnically inherent characteristic.

To be fair, the most derogatory and frustrating claims about Koreans are often made in passing and, except when directly justifying Japanese intervention in Korea, do not form a central argument in that segment of the narrative. Thus it may be too much to expect the writer to carefully make qualifications for every claim in such writings, especially when they have emphasized the “future potential” for the development of Koreans elsewhere.

This does not mean, however, that the second category, which emphasizes that the various vices and deficiencies of the Koreans are contingent features of a barbaric and as-yet unenlightened people are any less objectionable. As more than one generation of philosophers and historians have pointed out, there are many problems with a universal progressivism which happily divides the world between barbarity and civilization. It forms the very foundations of imperialism, the justification for countless forms of state aggression, and many claim that civilization has made a mockery of itself in the great and tragic wars of our century.

Let us not get distracted by such issues here, however, despite their central importance in any discussion of imperialism in Korea. For now, it will suffice to note the tension, in many of these writers, between expressions of sympathy or pity for an as-yet uncivilized or oppressed people who have not reached their “potential,” and the more dismissive and bitter claims about an essentially irredeemable Korean race.
Continue reading →

Books and Articles/Korea/Libraries/Web Sites

Finding Korean journal articles online

Posted on by Owen / 2 Comments

One of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of studying Korean history while outside of Korea must be getting hold of the most up to date research in Korean. For quite a while I thought that it was impossible to get hold of Korean journal articles online if my university library didn’t hold them. Of course there are e-journal sites which libraries can subscribe to, but getting your library to sign up to access non-English language journals online is easier said than done in my experience.

That said, I have recently discovered that it is possible to get hold of quite a large proportion of Korean journal articles online in PDF form and completely free. Here is, hopefully, a failsafe guide to getting hold of the Korean journal article you need in four stages:

Stage One: Look for Korean journal articles on your subject. I would recommend using the history bibliography run by Hongik University called Korean Historical Connection. Alternatively, you can go directly to stage two.

Stage Two: Go to the RISS site (Research Information Service Something-or-other / 학술연구정보서비스) and register – they have a special option for foreigners or other people unfortunate enough not to have a Korean ID number (주민등록번호).

Stage Three: Now you can search for the articles you require at RISS. Many articles are free to download as PDF files, while others you have to pay for (I haven’t tried this option yet so I’m not sure how expensive it is). However, if the article you need is unavailable, don’t despair.

Stage four: If you couldn’t get the article you needed at RISS then there is another option. If you return to the KHC site you will find that they provide a special service to historians of Korea residing overseas whereby they will find and photocopy any article you require and send it to you, only charging for the copying and postage. Again, I haven’t ever needed to try this out, but it sounds like a good service and I’d be interested to know if anyone else has tried it.

Cultural/English/Food/General/Japan

Israeli Sushi

Posted on by Jonathan Dresner / 1 Comment

Japanese food is, as I’ve said before, one of the great contributions to world food culture. But nothing remains “pure,” even if it was in some sense pure to begin with. Our favorite sushi place here in Hilo features lots of avocado-filled futomaki, poké (marinated sashimi, basically, available in a wide variety of styles and flavors, and destined to become Hawai’i’s most distinctive contribution to world food) as a side dish and in sushi (the rice-side-out poké sushi rolled in crushed macadamia nuts is my wife’s top pick) and one of my personal favorites is the Green Bay roll, with smoked salmon, cream cheese and asparagus.

Nothing brings out creativity like food. And nothing drives creativity in food like the restaraunt market, in which responding to local tastes frequently trumps purity of spirit or style (though “purity” is often a valuable market niche as well). So it was with little surprise that I learned that Israeli sushi [gracious half-bow to Jonathan Edelstein] is moving in its own directions.

Books and Articles/English/Korea/Late Chosŏn

Western Perceptions of Koreans: Part IV – Women

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 6 Comments

Underwood p49 Method of IroningAs one might expect, descriptions of Korean women in the writings by Western visitors that I have looked at tend to be completely dominated by the theme of pity. This goes both for the male writers and the two female missionary writings by Underwood and Bishop. Very rarely are women seen as having any power nor do they emerge in the writings as concrete individuals to whom the authors dedicate more than a few lines notice. I’ll mention a few of the important exceptions below.
Continue reading →

China/Databases/English/Gender/Republican

Ling Long: Digital Women's Magazine Project Relaunched

Posted on by K. M. Lawson / 1 Comment

001002.24
I just found out that Columbia University has relaunched its project putting the Chinese women’s magazine Ling long (玲瓏, “elegant and fine”）online.

You can visit the newly updated site here:
The Ling Long Women’s Magazine

I have linked and blogged about the project before, even using the project as an example of a relatively easy way libraries can contribute to resources online in a way immediately useful to other historians, but there have been some great improvements in presentation this time. As before, you can view images from most pages of the magazine from 1931 to 1937. However, the site is now much more pleasant and sports a new interface for finding pages and viewing multiple pages while scanning through articles.

Also new is an article by my friend Elizabeth LaCouture, a PhD student at Columbia University about the magazine which is also available in PDF format, along with a bit more about the project and the collection.

The project is well worth visiting, and I can only hope that many more of these great sources make their way online.

bibliography/General/Korea/Late Chosŏn/Libraries/Web Sites

Online resources for Chosŏn history: Government annals

Posted on by Owen / 3 Comments

Following the lead of Konrad I thought I might start off my posts with something about finding Korean history resources online. It is now actually possible to do quite a bit of research, even on pre-twentieth century primary sources without getting up from your computer (whether this is as interesting as searching stuff out a library or archive is quite another question). Of course the biggest advantage of these sources being online must be for people who are physically a long way away from a library that holds, say, a copy of the massive Sŭngjŏngwon Ilgi 承政院日記 (Daily Records of the Royal Secretariat). Thus, with a decent internet connection it should now be possible to live in Zanzibar and research 18th century Korean political history.

A second advantage is the ability to search for keywords within these massive texts. Some of the physical editions of the Chosŏn government annals do have indexes, but searching a text online is much quicker and more precise (bearing in mind that these books run into hundreds of volumes and looking things up from an index means continually pulling different volumes off the shelf).

So far, the site I’ve made most use of when searching pre-twentieth century sources is probably Seoul University’s Kyujanggak Library website. Here you can do a simultaneous search for keywords in a number of different categories of sources, including kodosŏ, komunsŏ, modern government records and two different Chosŏn government annals: the Ilsŏngnok 日省錄 (Records of Daily Reflection) and the Naegak Illyŏk (Daily Records of the Kyujanggak). The Kyujanggak site also has two further annals online in scanned form: Sŭngjŏngwon Ilgi and Pibyŏnsa Tŭngnok 備邊司謄錄 (Records of the Border Defence Command), through which you can browse but not search.

The National History Compilation Committee (국사편찬위원회) website does have a searchable digitised version of the Sŭngjŏngwon Ilgi online, which I’ve found to be quite easy to use. And the Korean Classics Research Institute (민족문화추진회) appears to be gradually uploading some sections of the modern Korean translations of the Ilsŏngnok and Sŭngjŏngwon Ilgi that have been coming out in book form over the last few decades. So far they have a few years of Chŏngjo’s reign for the Ilsŏngnok and years 1-35 of Kojong’s reign for the Sŭngjŏngwon Ilgi.

The Korean History Data Integration System (한국역사정보통합시스템) is supposed to be a way of bringing all these different online sources together in a single searchable database. I found it quite hard to use for a while, but it seems to have been improved quite a bit recently. Basically it allows you to search all the sources on the sites mentioned above and quite a few more sites besides.

One word of warning on all these sites: they don’t seem to be very Firefox-friendly and like some other Korean websites they can be messy to navigate and require you to download some piece of viewing software or other. Oh, and they seem to love pop-ups too.

China/General

Hero and Mao

Posted on by Alan Baumler / 8 Comments

I’m a little late to the Hero bashing party, but this post (Bourdieu Boy via Notes of a former native speaker) got me to thinking. I agree that Hero was a somewhat disappointing movie for me because despite being visually impressive and having some great fight scenes it was fundamentally about finding an accommodation with authoritarianism. I was very surprised how many of my American acquaintances missed this, which seemed obvious to me. I mean, it’s the story of Jing Ke. He’s supposed to try and kill Qin Shihuang and fail. Everybody knows that. When he agrees not to kill him its like the Crying Game. That’s what sort of made the growing tension work for me, even though I had heard what was going to happen in the movie before I even saw it.

I actually kind of like the movie because of this, and, as Bourdieu Boy points out, it is a much more Chinese movie than Crouching Tiger. You may not like Zhang Yimou’s answer, but the question of how one lives with authoritarianism is an interesting one for Chinese people. I always find teaching 20th century China to American students tricky because it is often hard to get them to understand the dilemmas Chinese faced. If you had to choose between national power and individual freedom what would you pick? What sacrifices would you, personally, be willing to make to bring political freedom or food to your fellow citizens? The usual answer, of course, is that as Americans we want power, political freedom, wealth, personal liberty and cheap gas and we expect to get them all for nothing. I like the American option too, of course, but it is not really a relevant choice when talking about Chinese history.

The other difference in how someone from China might view the film is that it has a whole different resonance if you know the original story. This is one of the things that usually messes up these Chinese history movies for foreigners. I remember watching, I think it was The Emperor and the Assassin and when Lao Ai Li Ao [thanks to JR for the correction] came on stage I was impressed with his general creepiness. In a Chinese movie for western consumption he would need a scene of vileness to establish his character, just like the bad guy in an action movie needs to do something violent at the beginning to establish what they are. Of course for a Chinese audience all he has to do is step on stage and say “Hi, I’m Lao Ai.” In Hero the “try to kill the Emperor” option is always there even if the movie never states it. You can sort of feel the tension of the debate between the two options throughout the movie even if it is not there for those who don’t know that history. In the same way a non-traditional performance of Shakespeare is always happening in the context of Elizabethan drama no matter what you do with it.

China/General

Self introduction

Posted on by motoe

Dear 井底之蛙 members

My name is Motoe Sasaki-Gayle. I am a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Johns Hopkins University. Although my major is American history since my dissertation involves China, Konrad kindly let me join the group.

Currently I am writing a dissertation on American professional women who went to China and attempted to create the so-called ‘New Woman’ in China from the 1900s to the 1930s. I am looking the initial success and the decline of their projects, including the changing gender relations and national identities in both America and China, as well as interactions betwen New Women on both sides.

During the past several years I have lived in Canberra, Australia. Now I am living in Leiden and feel very fortunate to have the chance to be a part of the intellectual exchange in this blog.

Sincerely yours,
Motoe Sasaki-Gayle

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