Nicole Roldan

Update on COVID-19

The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is closely monitoring the novel coronavirus outbreak originating from Wuhan, China. We take concerns about the virus seriously and are following Columbia’s guidelines and federal restrictions regarding international travel.

For more information about steps being taken to address the situation, please read the University’s COVID-19 Guidance for the Columbia Community. You can also watch the The Coronavirus Epidemic in China and Beyond, where a panel discussion and extended Q&A was held at the Institute on February 24, 2020.

We will continue to monitor the situation and stand by for any further instructions from the university.

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International Symposium/Workshop in Japanese Literary & Visual Studies

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We welcome those who have pre-registered to attend the International Symposium and Workshop in Japanese Literary and Visual Studies. Please click here for the detailed program and schedule. Seating is first-come, first-served.

If you have received a ticket and can no longer attend, please click on “Manage Tickets” button in the email confirmation to cancel. This will allow us to release seats for others who are still on the Waiting List.

Friday-Saturday, February 28-29, 2020, Kent Hall, Room 403, Columbia University

International Symposium/Workshop in Japanese Literary and Visual Studies

February 28 (Friday), 2020, 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM

February 29 (Saturday), 2020, 9:30 AM – 5:10 PM

Registration for this symposium is now closed. For those still on the Waiting List, we appreciate your patience. Due to the large number of presenters and workshop participants, we cannot guarantee seating.

Co-Organizers: Haruo Shirane (Columbia), Tomi Suzuki (Columbia), Hirokazu Toeda (Waseda), Satomi Yamamoto (Waseda); Co-sponsored by Ryusaku Tsunoda Center for Japanese Culture, Global Japanese Studies Model Unit, Waseda University Top Global University Project, supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan; Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art, Columbia University

 

Symposium: Authorship, Collectivity, Community

February 28, 9:30 AM – 12:00 PM

The age of new media (with its incessant borrowing, remixing, and trans-medial cross-overs) has led to a world in which cultural production often emerges out of groups and multiple meditators, raising the question of authorship and ownership. These issues are particularly relevant to East Asian culture, where copying, deliberate imitation, extensive borrowing, and collective creation have traditionally been central as pedagogical tools and as key modes of literary and cultural production. This is the fourth and final in a series of symposiums on the issues on authorship, following up on the earlier symposiums “Rethinking Authorship in Japan and the World” (March 2017) and “Japanese Theater, Publishing Culture, and Authorship” (March 2018).

 

Workshop: New Currents in Japanese Literary and Visual Studies I

February 28, 1:30 PM – 5:00 PM

 

Symposium: Mapping in Japanese Literary and Visual Culture

February 29, 9:30 AM – 1:00 PM

Maps represent geographical and three-dimensional space as flat surfaces. This transferal is deeply interrelated to the production and reception of literary and visual cultures. This session relates mapping to media, words, and representational figures with a view to exploring the relationship between this world and other worlds, city landscape, and the awareness of the broader spaces of regions and states.

 

Workshop: New Currents in Japanese Literary and Visual Studies II

February 29, 2:30 PM – 5:00 PM

 

Free and open to the public. www.keenecenter.org

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Faculty Publication


Vernacular Industrialism in China: Local Innovation…

Vernacular Industrialism in China

Local Innovation and Translated Technologies in the Making of a Cosmetics Empire, 1900–1940

Eugenia Lean

(Columbia University Press, 2020)

Vernacular Industrialism in China

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation.

Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eugenia Lean is a professor of history and East Asian languages and cultures and current director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. She is the author of Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (2007).

For additional information and to purchase, please visit Columbia University Press.

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