Cities of Word and Image: Multi-media in East Asian Modernities

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Few questions have occupied scholars and thinkers of culture in Asian Studies as extensively as what constitutes modernity and what to do about it. Modernity has often been discussed 1) in moral, religious or political terms as the condition of a post-sacred world where all values are open to re-evaluation and thus to confrontation, 2) in epistemological terms as a condition wherein reason and rationality (and their limits) form the dominant frame by which to interact with the world, and 3) in socio-economic terms as the constellation of massive changes such as industrialization, urbanization, late capitalism, and Westernization. But what exactly does the experience of modernity in Asia feel like, how is it represented, how does it re-order one’s visual experiences and the ways one sees and reads? What are its defining texts and textures, and why?
This interdisciplinary panel brings together literary critical, sociological, anthropological, art historical and film studies approaches to examine subjective experiences of modernity in the urban environments of Tokyo, Shanghai and London. By examining various connections and tensions between word and image, visual and textual stimuli in works of literature, film and advertising, the papers highlight key issues in this complex interplay of linguistic, visual and social signs: What identities might be suggested, represented or foreclosed therein? What exactly does it mean to be “literate” (socially and literally) in modern Sinographic urban milieus? What might these image-texts reveal about shifting ideological, political and affective-economic contexts behind the experience of modernity in East Asia’s cities?

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Sayumi Takahashi Takahashi Harb, Independent Scholar

Chair

• Stephen Poland, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• “Modernity, Representation, and Imagetext in Natsume Sōseki” - Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago

• Soseki, Modernity as Hyperstimulus, and the Urban Gothic - Sayumi Takahashi Takahashi Harb, Independent Scholar

• Typography is an Attitude: Urban Nomads, Hybrid Identities and Chinese Characters - Karolina Pawlik, University of Silesia

• KY, or How To Live As If We Were Air Dolls - Christophe Thouny, The University of Tokyo

Discussant

• Stephen Poland, Yale University