Daiwa Foundation Small Grants

Deadline: 30 September
Website: www.dajf.org.uk

The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation offers grants from £1,000- £5,000 to individuals, societies, associations or other bodies in the UK or Japan to promote and support interaction between the two countries. Grants can cover all fields of activity, including educational and grassroots exchanges, research travel, exhibitions, and other projects and events that fulfill this broad objective. There are two application deadlines each year, 31 March and 30 September.

Call for Korean artists and designers working in the UK

Deadline: 28 August

Ground Floor, Grand Buildings, 1-3 Strand, London WC2N 5BW
Tel: 0207 004 2600
Email: info@kccuk.org.uk
Website: london.korean-culture.org

The Korean Cultural Centre and British Council are looking for artists and designers of Korean origin working in the UK. The selected artists' work will be exhibited at the Korean Cultural Centre in December 2009. The Centre will be responsible for insuring the works during exhibition and transit, organizing pick-up and redelivery of the work within the UK, installation and dismantling. A small catalogue will be produced on occasion of the exhibition.

Photography in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Book Launch
Tuesday 30 June 2009, 6.00pm-8.00pm
Daiwa Foundation Japan House
13/14 Cornwall Terrace, London NW1 4QP

http://www.dajf.org.uk/event_page.asp?Section=Eventssec&ID=422

Luke Gartlan - Lecturer in the School of Art History, University of St Andrews.
Sebastian Dobson - Independent scholar of the history of Japanese photography.
Toshio Watanabe (Chair) - Professor of History of Art and Design at the University of the Arts London Chelsea

From the earliest accounts of its arrival in Japan the camera has played a key role in the visual culture of Japanese society. In this provocative collection of essays, six renowned scholars have highlighted the historical diversity and significance of photography as a medium par excellence of Japanese visual modernity. This is a Special Issue of History of Photography (Summer 2009, Taylor & Francis), guest edited by Luke Gartlan.

Book a place
http://www.dajf.org.uk/event_tickets.asp?Section=Eventssec

Dawn by Naoko Miyazaki

July 9 - August 7, 2009
Atrium Gallery
PricewaterhouseCoopers
1 Embankment Place
London WC2N 6NN

Private view: Wednesday, July 8m 6-8pm
Curated by Dickson Russell Art Management

Dawn showcases the work of Naoko Miyazaki, a London-based Japanese artist and graduate of Chelsea College of Art/University of the Arts, in the atrium space at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The principle work is a 10m high suspended cut paper installation at one end of the atrium, as well as more recent wall-mounted works on paper and a floor-based installation.

Spring Break!

We'll be resuming ASA meetings and readings after the break- although there was talk of doing Adorno, Benjamin, Gramsci, and Negri during the vacation. Any thoughts?

March 18 meeting- Self-Orientalism in Music

We will be reading Tony Mitchell's chapter "Self-Orientalism, Reverse Orientalism and Pan-Asian Pop Cultural Flows in Dick Lee's Transit Lounge" from Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic, ed. Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephan Muecke, Mandy Thomas (Hong Kong University Press, 2004) (Goldsmith Library: 306.4095 ROG)

Suggestions:
Listening to samples of Dick Lee, a Singaporean Chinese pop singer/composer
website
1. Dick Lee, Asia Major



2. Dick Lee, Flower Drum Song



3.Dick Lee, FantAsia



And, producer Dave Liang's The Shanghai Restoration Project, traditional Chinese instruments meet hip-hop and electronica
website
myspace
1. The Shanghai Restoration Project, Miss Shanghai



Taiwanese-American singer/actor, Alexander Wang Lee Hom, who calls his music 'chink-ed out', and is heavily influenced by traditional Chinese music.
website

UCLA Asia Pacific Arts article on Wang (here)

1. Lee Wang Hom, Beside the Plum Blossom

Notes & Minutes from March 11

-We watched Lily Mariye's short film, Shangri-la Café, about a Japanese-American family running a Chinese restaurant in 1950s Las Vegas.

Plot synopsis from Mariye's website:
Las Vegas, Nevada, 1959, is a tumultuous time for everyone. Blacks are not allowed to eat in "White Only" restaurants. It's easier for Japanese-Americans to pretend to be Chinese-Americans in order to escape post-WWII racism. Emiko and Tad Takashi own the restaurant where the Reverend Charles Osteen would like to have his family dine with the white customers. The ultimate choice Emiko must make, and the effect it has on their daughter, Annie, will change their lives forever.

(I've got a copy of the film, let me know if you want to borrow it!)

-discussion on Iwabuchi's "Lost in TransNation: Tokyo and the urban imaginary in the era of globalization" (link) and Sophia Coppola's film, Lost in Translation
-topics that came up:
-loneliness in Asian society, and alienation
-roots- why do we feel the need to search for our roots? pilgrimage, tourist industry
-cultural hybridity since ancient times, as a natural process; hybridity of culture vs. hybridity of blood
-to do: filling out Student Union form for ASA to register as a student society
-new reading for future meeting, David Palumbo-Liu "Assumed Identities" from New Literary History, 2000, 31: 765:780 (link)

Next Meeting: March 4

We'll be holding our next meeting from 3-5pm (after the Stiegler seminar). John won't be able to join us. Instead of readings, we'll be watching two films (if we can squeeze them in): "Perhaps Love" and "Lost in Translation" or "Memoirs of a Geisha". The readings next week will be a quick review of the Stephen Teo & Chris Berry texts (which reference "Perhaps Love"), as well as Koichi Iwabuchi's "Lost in TransNation: Tokyo and the urban imaginary in the era of globalization."

Readings for Feb. 25 and March 4

The readings for Feb. 25 and March 4 have been switched, as John Hutnyk will be able to join us on March 4.

Feb. 25 Chinese Film
Readings:
1) Stephen Teo "Promise and perhaps love: Pan-Asian production and the Hong Kong-China interrelationship" Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2008, p.341-358
2) Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar "The National in the Transnational" from China On Screen: Cinema and Nation, NY: Columbia University, 2006, p.195-222 (Goldsmith Library: 791.430951 BER)
-inviting Chris Berry to speak to us (or at a later date?)
Film Screening: Peter Chan's "Perhaps Love" (2005) 107 min.

March 4
Readings:
1) Re-visit John Hutnyk's "Culture" + another Hutnyk text. John will (hopefully) be joining us for questions
2) Allen Chun "The Postcolonial Alien in Us All: Identity in the Global Division of Intellectual Labor" positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 16, No. 3, Winter 2008, p.689-710 (link)

Hall "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms"

Hall, Stuart (1980). Cultural Studies: two paradigms

- there is no absolute beginnings

1. “Culturalism”

- Richard Hoggart

o “Uses of Literacy’

o ‘culture debate’ : high/low culture distinction

o Leavis “Scrutiny, Culture and Society”

o Practical criticism : to “read” working class culture as if it is a ‘text’

o Rejection of high/low cultural divide

o Culture and Society as one and the same (unity) movement

- Raymond Williams

o “Culture and Society”

o “The Long Revolution”

§ Against empirical, particularist thought

§ The experiential ‘thickness’

- E.P. Thompson

o “Making of the English Working Class”

o English Marxist historiography

o Economic and ‘Labour’ history

§ Took culture seriously: culture as the site of politics

§ Culture : Changes in industry, democracy, and class (Williams)

§ New Left

- ‘Culture’

o IDEAS

§ R. Williams: “the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences

§ Culture = Society (community of common meanings)

§ No longer the best, highest values but all conventions, common meanings,

§ “The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics, the raising of families” (59)

o PRACTICES

§ One must study ‘the relationship between these patterns’

§ Patterns are lived and experienced as a whole (structure of feeling)

o Against

§ “Idealist” tradition of culture, elitism

§ Vulgar materialism, economic determinism

· Base/superstructure

· => R.Will : radical interactionism (interactions between all practices in and with one other)

· => no distinctions between practices, because they are all variant forms of praxis, of general human activity and energy

- Revisions

o Lucien Goldmann (Lukacs)

§ ‘Genetic structuralism’

o E.P. Thompson’s ‘Base and Superstructure’ ( critique of “The Long Revolution” )

§ There are different ‘dimensions’ of struggle and confrontation between opposed ‘ways’ of life

2. “Structuralism”

- Ideology, as opposed to ‘culture’

- Levi-Strauss’s culture

o Culture as the categories and frameworks in thought and language through which different societies classified out their conditions of existence, especially human and natural worlds

o Ideology: unconscious categories through which conditions are represented and lived

- Experience:

o Culturalist: experience as the ground where consciousness and conditions intersected

o Strucuralist : experience as mere effect of categories, classifications, and frameworks of the culture (unconscious structures)

o Althusser: ideology is a system of representations, but it has nothing to do with consciousness. imaginary relations (For Marx)

- Structuralist advantages

o 1. Difference, rather than of unity

o 2.

o 3. decentering of experience (ideology): not a central idea for the culturalist

- Culturalist advantages

o 1. affirmative moment of the development of conscious struggle and organization as a necessary element in the analysis of history (agency)

§ Gramsci

3. the Alternatives

- Lacanian psychoanalysis

o Filling the empty spot of the “subject”

o (Weakness) Subject= transhistorical, universal character

- Return to the Political Economy of culture

o Restoring base/superstructure

- Foucault