News/ Events
"Film Screening by Shui-Bo Wang"
Tuesday, March 1, 2011, 7:00 p.m.
Shui-Bo Wang will screen two films, Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square (1998) and They Chose China (2006). Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square is an autobiographical documentary that tells the story of Wang’s life and the history of the PRC until 1989. They Chose China is a documentary about the 21 Americans who refused to be repatriated after the Korean War. The event is sponsored by the Harn Museum, the Asian Studies Program, and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
From more information, click here to see the Harn Museum calendar site.
"Japan's Erotic-Grotesque: Commodity Atrocities Becoming War Atrocities"
Friday, February 11, 2011, 4:00 p.m.
CSE-E119
A lecture presented by Dr. Mark W. Driscoll, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapell Hill. Japan became a leading imperial power by 1920 thanks to both its expanding colonial empire and to the revenues earned from selling light industrial goods and pharmaceuticals to Europeans during the slaughter of WW I. One of the most important effects following from this was the sudden appearance of a consumer mass culture in Japan’s metro poles. Driscoll’s talk will examine the avant-garde tendency in consumer culture referred to in Japanese by 1928 as “ero-guro,” or “erotic, grotesque”. Not merely an expression of aesthetic modernism, the erotic-grotesque was understood by its practitioners and critics alike as a process whereby the invasion of commodities into the very nervous systems of Japanese consumers inverted the anthropocentric desires of consumers and inculcated desires for annihilation, suicide and death. This talk will argue that this shift from the bio-logics of use to the necro-logics of exchange (what Marx called the “monstrous inversion of the living and the dead”) in Japan’s commodity capitalism needs to be seen as one of the causal elements for wartime atrocities in Asia.
This program is free and open to the public.
To download poster announcement click here
"DV China and Social Change"
Wednesday, February 2 to 4, 2011
With the rise of digital technology and the rapid and large-scale change of Chinese society, filmmaking has never been as portable, dynamic, and pervasive as it is today. More than ever, camera is so closely integrated with everyday life that it becomes an important tool not only to document the social reality, but also to investigate various issues from migrant workers, to environmental problems, to urbanization, and furthermore to promote a new concept of “media activism.” DV China and Social Change presents a sampling of outstanding contemporary Chinese documentaries and explores a conceptual framework to understand this fast-emerging and pivotal phenomenon in conjunction with a Q&A session with the filmmaker and a roundtable discussion with a panel of our distinguished UF faculty and film scholars.
Events are free and open to the public
For information and questions, please contact Ying Xiao, or call at (352) 392-6539.
"The Tale of Heike”
Wednesday, December 1, 5:30 p.m.- 7:30- p.m.
170 Pugh Hall
Please join us on December 1, 2010 at 5:30 p.m. in Pugh 170. Yoko Hiraoka will play the five string biwa, a lute like instrument that dates back to medieval times, and perform “Tales of the Heike. ”
This is a famous epic tale, chanted-sung, of power struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans of Japan at the end of the 12th century.
The theme is of impermanence and decline of the mighty, set against the steadfast factors of karma and the need for appeasement of deceased souls. This event is sponsored by Asian Studies, the Japan Foundation and Gainesville Violins, Inc. There is no charge for admission.
Spring 2011 means Minzu U will be on campus
President Bernie Machen, Dean David J. Sammons, UF Int'l Center (UFIC), Susanne Hill, UFIC; Richard Stepp, UF Anthropology, and Chonghua Zhang, director of UF's China Program have cemented the deal with Minzi U. Representatives will be on campus during Spring 2011 term, and we're setting up a brown bag lunch so faculty and students can actually talk to them. If time permits, there will be a teacher workshop so teachers from this area will have a chance to learn more about cooperative ventures with Minzu.
