Asia Colloquia Papers

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YCAR’s Asia Colloquia Papers Series aims to make available to wider audiences the content of selected lectures, seminars and other talks presented at YCAR.

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Open Access
The Intermediary Trap: International Labour Recruitment, Transnational Governance and State-Citizen Relations in China
(01-01-2013) Xiang, Biao
Delivering the 2012 York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) Asia Lecture on the occasion of YCAR’s 10th anniversary, Dr. XIANG Biao explores the high cost of legal transnational labour migration for unskilled Chinese labourers. Although legal labour migration from China has become more effective, efficient and streamlined, the costs of finding and securing work overseas have been on the rise. In his exploration of the reasons why, Xiang points to intermediaries—commercial labour recruiters— as the key. He argues that intermediaries’ dominant position in cultivating, facilitating and controlling legal migration allow them to charge high fees to potential migrants. This results in the “intermediary trap”, where both the state and the migrants depend on intermediaries to manage and facilitate labour migration overseas. In this text based on his lecture, Xiang examines China’s hierarchical chains of migration intermediaries, from Beijing to rural villages, arguing that they constitute a transnational labour disciplinary system and point to new state-citizen relations.
Open Access
Denouncing Party Politics: Indignation and Domestic Confinement in Karachi
(01-01-2013) Ahmad, Tania
Delivering her lecture as part of the 2012 York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) Urban Asia Series, Dr. Tania Ahmad examines the events surrounding the 12 May 2007 Karachi riots, the discourse of self-described “ordinary residents” who were compelled to stay indoors during the conflict, and their sense of indignation towards party politics and the political violence. Ahmad suggests that the shared experience of non-participation during the incident was not an instance of depoliticization for these residents, but rather a mode of political engagement. The sociality formed around discourses of non-involvement through domestic confinement was shaped by the denunciation of events occurring in the streets.
Open Access
Asian Futures, Old and New
(01-01-2014) Li, Tania
In this keynote address to the York Centre for Asian Research’s (YCAR) 2013 international graduate student conference, Tania Murray Li tackled a number of entrenched ideas about “Asia” as the shining future, which underpin the “new” discourses motivating and shaping many contemporary engagements with and analyses of the region. Her reflections on the implications for Asian studies of this “old” often orientalist discourse in the guise of the “new,” contributed to the conference’s theme, (Re) Constructions: Researching and Rethinking Asia. It also sparked the kind of critical, multidisciplinary discussion envisioned by the organizers, which aimed to rethink what it means to study Asia and Asian diaspora, especially by reconstructing existing conceptual frameworks.
Open Access
Waste Matters: Informal Economies and Commodity Detritus in Delhi, India
(01-01-2014) Gidwani, Vinay
In the 2013 Asia Lecture, Vinay Gidwani examined through stories, images and both conceptual and empirical analysis the spatial histories and evolving political economy of waste in Delhi, India. Dr. Gidwani focused particularly on the marginalized people whose livelihoods depend on gathering, sorting, transporting and selling garbage in India’s huge informal economy, livelihoods now challenged as the municipal government contracts the recycling of waste to corporations. For Dr. Gidwani, the evolving, bumpy geography of the waste economy creates permanent border areas of primitive accumulation and both devalorized and valorized people and places, linking the impoverished garbage pickers of Delhi’s largest landfills with the city’s glitzy real-estate developments. The lecture was drawn from Dr. Gidwani’s project called Afterlives of Waste and his chapter in Ecologies of Urbanism in India, edited by Anne Rademacher and K. Sivaramakrishnan.
Open Access
The Naxalite Movement and the Indian State, 1967-1969
(01-01-2015) Islam, Nabila
Despite the recent characterizations of the Naxalite movement as India’s “bloody class war” in the New York Times or as the country’s “greatest internal security threat,” the history of the struggle defies simple categorization. Although the movement began as a peasants’ rebellion in Naxalbari in 1967 and was supported by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), its social origins cannot be reduced to class conflict alone. This difficulty is due to the complexity and variability of its social bases over the last four decades, as well as the changing nature of the state. This paper calls for a new interpretation of the movement and its relationship to the state: situating the struggle within the context of the development of Indian state from “a reluctant pro-capitalist state that flirted with socialism” after 1947 to “an enthusiastic pro-capitalist state with a neo-liberal ideology” in the 1980s. Through interviews, archival research and secondary sources, this paper hopes to demonstrate that while national and state-level policies of security and development have structured strategies of resistance taken up by the Naxals, these strategies have in turn shaped the Indian state from below. This paper uses a synthetic mode of analysis, paying special attention to gender, caste and religion as well as the mediating influences of postcoloniality and neoliberal globalization.
Open Access
Methodological Approaches to Unpacking Testimonies made to Sri Lanka’s Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission
(01-01-2015) Chandrasekar, Jessica
In this paper, I analyze Tamil women’s testimonies that were made to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) in 2010-2011, an inquiry commission set up by the Sri Lankan government to investigate the final stages of the war and initiated in a context of protracted genocide, increasing international scrutiny and calls for war crimes investigations. As my doctoral work and other human rights groups have argued, the LLRC is not methodologically sound or a credible form of transitional justice. Yet, Tamil people testified in large numbers despite a lack of witness protection, threats by the army and paramilitaries; despite having little faith in the LLRC or the government. My paper analyses the content of the testimonies made in the Northern Province within an intersectional analysis of nationalism, and asks: what did people testify about, what were their silences? What kinds of power dynamics are revealed in the testimonies? How did the LLRC – appointed by the Sri Lankan President, who is also accused of committing genocide – respond to and attempt to control Tamil testimonies? I ultimately argue that the LLRC is a form of Sri Lankan nationalism that was used to ‘wipe clean’ the nation after the most horrific phase of the genocide.
Open Access
Bollywood’s Queer Dostana: Articulating a Transnational Queer Indian Identity and Family in 2008’s Dostana
(01-01-2015) George, Aaron
Mainstream ‘masala’ Bollywood films have played a key role in producing and reiterating a nationalist Indian identity centered on the monolithic notion of the Hindu, wealthy and patriarchal India. The result of such attenuated discourses has been a great limitation on who gets included in the signifier ‘Indian’. Though, as I posit in this paper, these very mainstream ‘masala’ Bollywood films have at times also offered the opportunity to contest this culturally conflated Indian identity by acting as a heterotopic space – a subversive space for not only the reiteration of the hegemonic social reality but also a space where it can be contested. Particularly relevant here is the role of these films in shaping conceptions of queer desire and sexuality. This paper is an analysis of the 2008 Bollywood film, Dostana, and its role as a heterotropic space for the creation of a new queer transnational Indian identity and family. I posit that Dostana presented a new queer Indian identity, independent of the historicized, right wing, sociocultural conceptions of queer desire and bodies prevailing in India. In doing so, I will argue that the film creates a nascent queer gaze through its representation of queered desire, bodies and the Indian family unity – moving the queer Indian identity out of its heteorpatriarchal closet and into the centre of transnational, mainstream Indian culture.
Open Access
Producing the Islamist Subject: Liberalism and the Postcolonial State
(01-01-2015) Sayeed, Saad
This paper examines how Islamist publications represent the history of Pakistan as a story of betrayal by the country’s leaders. These publications emphasize that the very ideology which forms the basis of Pakistan has been sidelined. I contend that this imagining of an Islamic state is not inconsistent with liberal ideology. Through an examination of critical histories of Pakistan, I show how these organizations are formed within the politics of the postcolonial state. Adapting Homi Bhabha’s (1994) theorization of ambivalence, I argue that Islamist organizations are actually the ‘slippage’ of liberalism in Pakistan. While Islamists call for an Islamic system, they imagine change within a legal framework and operate within the parameters of the state. In fact, Islamists position themselves as intermediaries between liberals and militants, attempting to reform the former and integrate the latter. Islamists construct an interesting dualism within the political arena: on one side, they position the United States and subservient Pakistani leaders, and on the other, they place militant organizations such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Tehrik-e-Nafaz-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM). In the process, religious organizations become the spokespersons for Islamic politics in Pakistan, and the protectors of Islamic identity, taking over the role historically occupied by the liberal leadership.
Open Access
Failing State or Fragmented Hegemony: The Political Economy of Change in Pakistan
(01-01-2016) Akhtar, Aasim Sajjad
The relationship between the Pakistani state and society is a complex and evolving one. It continues to be shaped by class, national oppression, patriarchy, caste-ism and the myriad legacies of colonialism. In his talk, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar argues that a classically dichotomized historical materialism is insufficient to capture the Pakistani condition. While the class structure has evolved considerably between the colonial and contemporary periods, the structure of power in Pakistan is still centred around patronage ties, even while the underlying bases of patron-client relations have been transformed. While patronage was based on the control over natural resources such as land and water under British colonialism, later regimes found themselves patronizing an intermediate class emerging out of the subordinate classes. In explaining these shifts, Akhtar uses a Gramscian framework of analysis to explore the shifting institutional dynamics of the state, the role of capital and the evolving bases of patronage within the political economy of Pakistan.
Open Access
Vietnam, the Philippines, Guam and California: Connecting the Dots of U.S. Military Empire
(01-01-2016) Espiritu, Yen Le
In the 2015 Asia Lecture at the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR), Dr. Yen Le Espiritu views the Vietnamese refugee flight— from Vietnam to the Philippines to Guam and then to California, all of which routed the refugees through United States (U.S.) military bases—as a critical lens through which to map, both discursively and materially, the legacy of U.S. military expansion into the Asia Pacific region and the military’s heavy hand in the purportedly benevolent resettlement process. She makes two related arguments: the first about military colonialism, which contends that it was (neo)colonial dependence on the U.S. that turned the Philippines and Guam into the “logical” receiving centers of the Vietnamese refugees; and the second about militarized refuge, which emphasizes the mutually constitutive nature of the concepts “refugees” and “refuge” and shows how both emerge out of and in turn bolster U.S. militarism.
Open Access
Poverty and the Imagination of a Future: The Story of Urban Slums in Delhi, India
(04-01-2012) Das, Veena
How do the poor see themselves? In their daily struggles, how do they use creative imaginings to withstand various stresses and their seemingly never- ending effort at subsistence? In this paper, Veena Das explores the many revealed ways the poor exercise creativity, boldness and enterprise in their attempts to cope and transcend, even for brief moments, daunting states of deprivation and the destitute roles that both experts and society seemed to have consigned them to. In this lecture, delivered as part of York University’s 50th anniversary celebration, Dr. Das shares with her audience insights from her ongoing multi-year research on the residents of New Delhi slums including the not often assumed ability of the poor to think, feel and act in ways that are all-too-human – both spontaneous and rational. Equally insightful responses are provided by Vanessa Rosa and Mark Ayyash, PhD Candidates in the Graduate Program in Sociology at York University.
Open Access
“Other Diplomacies” and the Making of Canada-Asian Relations: An Interdisciplinary Conversation
(08-01-2012) Henders, Susan J.; Young, Mary M.
How have societal interactions constituted Canada-Asia relations historically and up to the present? What understandings of Canada-Asia relations emerge if we focus on the diverse connections between Asian and Canadian societies at multiple levels rather than solely on state-to-state interactions? These questions were the starting point for a March 15, 2012 workshop organized by the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) with support from the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. The workshop brought together scholars as well as practitioners from a range of disciplines (see Appendix 1). Discussions centered on preliminary case studies of Canada-Asia societal interactions in the realms of business, education, culture, migration and diaspora, labour markets, scholarly and technical experts, and NGOs and across local, national and transnational spaces, and the everyday realm. The goal was to begin to identify important research questions and empirical evidence that could illuminate the contemporary character of Canada-Asia societal connections and their wider implications. The workshop also explored the concept of “other diplomacies”, which workshop organizers Susan Henders and Mary Young (Forthcoming, 2012) offered as an analytical tool for framing the study of Canada-Asia societal interactions. This paper offers selected highlights from the day-long workshop conversation.
Open Access
What does the Ethnic Costume Represent?
(09-01-2011) Oh, Haji
Clothes are inseparably related to our daily life. They not only protect the body, but also enable expression of one’s identity through design, color, and so on. In particular, an ethnic costume is a strong statement of individual circumstances. It is unique and has a cultural background. It has symbolic value because it stands for ethnicity, gender, religion and emphasizes social belonging. Thus, ethnic costumes have two features—one as a private “second skin” and the other as a “symbol” of social belonging.
Open Access
Canada and China at 40
(09-01-2011) Frolic, Bernie Michael
"In the 2010 Asia Lecture, Professor Frolic shared unique insights into the evolution of Canada-China relations focusing on the complex negotiations and diplomatic coup by which Canada established diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic in autumn 1970. One of Canada’s foremost China scholars, Frolic first visited China as a graduate student in 1965 and went on to become a Canadian diplomatic representative to the Communist state in the mid-1970s. Using first-hand experience, expert knowledge, and rare interview material, Frolic provided glimpses of how Canada’s diplomatic ties with China came about despite Cold War tensions. As he explained with candour and simplicity, although the decision to formalize ties with China brought a chill to Canada’s own relations with the United States for a time, it marked a coming of age for Canadian foreign policy: what became known as the Canadian Solution to the diplomatic quandary of the “One China” policy was eventually adopted by other countries. Frolic places the evolution of formal Canada-China relations in the context of milestones, from Norman Bethune to the controversial Canadian grain sales to China during its Great Famine, from the “missionary kids” who became Canada’s first crop of diplomats to China to the deft handling of the “One China"" issue that brought Canada to diplomatic centre stage. Prominent Canadian China scholar, Prof. Ruth Hayhoe, offered an equally insightful response."
Open Access
Floating Points: From Diasporic Spaces to Multicultural Places
(09-01-2011) Pao, Angela C.
In the study of Asian immigrant communities and culture in North America, particularly in arts and literature, two intellectual approaches have emerged: the transnational which focuses on country and culture of origin regardless of the location of the diaspora community; and, the national which de-emphasizes diaspora in favour of a racial character distinct to the new generations of Asians born and residing in the U.S. and Canada today. In her talk, Angela Pao engages both approaches by presenting the benefits and drawbacks of examining social and cultural institutions, artistic products, and processes through a transnational and consequently de-territorialized perspective, as opposed to a domestic one that continues to emphasize Asian histories specific to a destination country or territory. Race and the context of uneven social and power relations between immigrant and local communities, more specifically, are the primary bases on which Pao examines the development of Asian immigrant culture, in particular, Chinese literature in North America, and its usefulness in helping interpret the local and global Asian immigrant experiences.
Open Access
Should the Chinese Language be Taught in Putonghua? Contested Identities in Post-1997 Hong Kong
(2017-12-30) Choi, Po King Dora
This talk by Po King Choi was the inaugural Bernard H. K. Luk Memorial Lecture organized by the York Centre for Asian Research on 27 April 2017. Bernard H. K. Luk (1946-2016) was a Professor of History at York University, Toronto and an internationally recognized authority on the history of Hong Kong. Dr Choi’s lecture explores the nationalist politics and debates around the medium of instruction of the Chinese language in Hong Kong. She analyzes the surprising levels of uptake of state policies that were implemented to promote the standardized national language, Putonghua (PTH) and maps out pedagogical perspectives about the efficacy of teaching and learning PTH. The talk also examines emergent forms of resistance to PTH standardization and the concomitant mobilization of a “Hong Kong identity” against fears of encroaching mainland ideological dominance. Drawing on interviews with teachers and student activists, her talk provides a sense of the experiences, sentiments and strategies of resistance on the ground. Choi’s lecture makes pertinent connections between the politics of language education, post-Umbrella Movement forms of resistance and broader democratization movements in Hong Kong.
Open Access
Taiwan and Changing Global Order: Perspectives from the 2012 Young Leaders Delegation
Beaulne-Stuebing, Rebecca; Walter, Robyn; Prouse, Victoria; Weiner, Joshua; Atri, Sima; Byun, David J.; Guo, Lydia Bihui; McIntyre, Ashley; Kezwer, Trevor
This special issue of the Asia Colloquia Papers examines some of the diverse issues that confront Taiwan in the context of changing global and Asia-Pacific regional order. The papers, written by senior students who participated in a May 2012 study trip to Taiwan, look at such topics as the role of education in indigenous peoples’ self-determination in Taiwan and Canada; evolving China-Taiwan relations and their multiple implications; changing migration patterns in Taiwan in the context of contemporary globalization; and new developments in Taiwan’s role as an aid donor in Africa. The students presented their papers to Taiwan audiences during a study tour as part of the Young Leaders Delegation programme sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan, the Republic of China. The Young Leaders Delegation programme aims to introduce senior university students from abroad to contemporary Taiwan and its complex challenges.

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