Simpson Center for the Humanities at UW

Through the analysis of postwar Japanese popular culture, especially those of children’s culture with its heroes and adventures, Leo Ching argues that postwar Japan maintained a remarkable continuity in its orientalizing and imperializing of Southeast Asia. Looking specifically at the genre of early “TV movies” (terebi... eiga), Ching suggests that the impoverished condition of the immediate postwar Japan (re)produced the familiar figures of “Asian” heroes from the prewar and wartime era and redefined the notion of “justice” that enabled Japan to enjoy the trauma of its imperialist endeavors in Southeast Asia and articulate its reconfigured positionality within a U.S. dominant postwar postcolonial Asia.

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This two-day graduate conference for interdisciplinary will feature keynote speaker Nicholas Brown (English, University of Illinois, Chicago) as he examines "The Hermeneutics of Cultural Flows: Three Models and a Choice of Numbers". Panels will be held in CMU 202 as well as the Rey library, and end in an address by Pr...ofessor of Comparative History of Ideas Phillip Thurtle on "SUPER-Naturalisms: The Transformative Naturalism of Contemporary Media". Reception to follow (Simpson Center Lounge, COM 204).
See website for program and other details.
http://depts.washington.edu/uwclit/conference2009/Read More

Thomas Keenan will lead our consideration of current trends in the use of new media for human rights work. Among other projects, Keenan has served on the boards of WITNESS and the Soros Documentary Fund, and has archived the trial of Slobadan Milosevic using online video.
We will focus on questions such as: 1) under wh...at conditions can video and new media human rights projects reach their goals, and when do they fall short? 2) what might be the future of these tools? 3) when is the speed of new media helpful, and when a constraint? 4) when is the short text/compressed image format of web sites helpful, and when a constraint? 5) what are the best uses of web 2.0 participatory functionalities, and when might such features become instead a technology in search of a function? 6) how might an organization create a foundation upon which a wide range of groups and individuals collectively build a useful human rights new media resource?

Preparation for participants: Please visit the websites for WITNESS, http://www.witness.org/ and the Milosevic trial archive at http://hrp.bard.edu.

Human Rights Public Culture is a collaborative research, teaching, and public engagement project involving faculty, staff, and students at three campuses: UW Bothell, UW Seattle, and The Evergreen State College. HRPC aims to foster creative and critical engagements with human rights; connect scholarship, education, and activism on our campuses with public events.
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In the early 20th century, U. S. colonial officials in the Philippines confronted the problem of reconstructing a colonial society from the ashes of exterminist war. In doing so, they found themselves engaging in new ways with both Filipino elites and Spanish colonial history. This talk will examine how U.S. officials ...focused their attentions on the figure of the "cacique." This widely-used term for local elites alternatively imagined "caciquism" as the primordial expression of hierarchical, premodern indigenous society, and as the by-product of centuries of Spanish "feudalism." By exploring the emergence and evolution of this category, Kramer will track broader debates about what, for early 20th century Americans, were interconnected problems of colonial succession, indigenous agency, and the limits of imperial transformation.
Paul A. Kramer (Associate Professor of History, University of Iowa) is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), winner of the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Sponsored by the Department of History, the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Part of the Department of History's lecture series on the U.S. Empire in Comparative and Historical Perspectives.
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