03/29/2024 Jianqing Chen PhD

Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis

Play, Rewind, and Swipe Forward: The Emergence of Horizontal Flow in the Age of Streaming Media

Time: 11am-12:30pm, Friday, March 29

Location: Cobb 311

Please note the unusual time and place for APEA!

★Co-hosted by the Digital Media Workshop★

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the United States Department of Education.

Abstract: Known alternatively by various names such as the seek bar, the progress bar, or jindu tiao in Chinese, the playback bar is a standard graphical control element in the (haptic) graphic user interface of streaming media today. It is the major tool for video streaming and simultaneously the key metaphor for the progression of time and life in our media-saturated societies. The playback bar is pervasively presented in our streaming experiences – so pervasive that its techno-cultural connotations are often unnoticed. This paper focuses on the often-ignored playback bar with the aim of exploring the streaming interfaces and serial narratives in contemporary China. It traces the replacement of media control buttons with the progress bar in the virtualization and computerization of the audio/video playback process. The paper further examines the emergent design of seek-able playback bars controlled by swipe gestures with the advent of the touch-based streaming interface. I argue that the playback bar that stretches itself horizontally from left to right solidifies a visual representation of the hitherto abstract concept of progress. It subtly transforms the time spent or consumed watching videos into time used or invested in accumulating information, knowledge, and capital. Through a comparative study of the playback bar and interface design strategies of American streaming services providers (YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu) with their Chinese counterparts (iQiyi, Tencent video, and Mango TV), I show how Chinese streaming platforms develop a distinct (tactile) interface design – swiping left and right across the touchscreen to rewind and fast-forward videos. This design bifurcates from the default designs that American media players stipulate: the quick 10-second rewind and fast-forward icons. This distinction underscores a divergence in interface design philosophies: unlike American interface design’s desire to retain older media experience hinging on control buttons, the Chinese approach creates a new perception of “streaming,” which envisages streaming as a continuous, horizontal flow of moving images across the screen. This perception reimagines how users interact with and engage in streaming videos and reshapes the contemporary experience of streaming time.

Presenter: Jianqing Chen (PhD in Film and Media, the University of California, Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St Louis. Her fields of research and teaching cover cinema and media culture in China, Hongkong, and Taiwan, new media technologies and aesthetics, surveillance, global techno-capitalism, post-socialist culture and critique, and feminist media theory. Combining a global perspective with a critical race and gender approach, her research explores popular emergent media and their roles in creating new modes of subjectivity and subjectivization in post-socialist China. She is completing a book manuscript titled Touch Screen: Everyday Media in Contemporary China.

Discussant: Thomas Lamarre (PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago) is a scholar of media, cinema and animation, intellectual history and material culture, with projects ranging from the communication networks of 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, 2000), to silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, 2005), animation technologies (The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009) and on television infrastructures and media ecology (The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, 2018). Current projects include research on animation that addresses the use of animals in the formation of media networks associated with colonialism and extraterritorial empire, and the consequent politics of animism and speciesism.

SPRING 2024 SCHEDULE

The Arts and Politics of East Asia Workshop (APEA) is pleased to announce our schedule for the Spring 2024 Quarter. All events will meet from 3:00 to 5:00pm at the Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St.). As usual, we will send reminder emails with information for the exact time and location prior to every workshop session, along with the link to the pre-circulation materials. For meetings via Zoom, we will send the registration link prior to the workshop session.

SPRING 2024 SCHEDULE

March 29th (in-person)

Jianqing Chen Ph. D., Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis

“Play, Rewind, and Swipe Forward: The Emergence of Horizontal Flow in the Age of Streaming Media”

Discussant: Thomas Lamarre Ph. D., Gordon J Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College

Time: 11am-12:30pm

Location: Cobb 311

★This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S Department of Education; this event is also co-sponsored by the Digital Media Workshop★

 

April 5th (in-person)

Jue Hou, Ph. D. Candidate, Committee on Social Thought & Comparative Literature

“Criticism’s Body”

Discussant: Hang Wu, Ph. D. Student, EALC & CMS

 

April 19th (in-person)

Dissertation Prospectus Workshop 1

Presenters TBA

 

April 26th (in-person)

Sound and Writing in East Asia Conference

Time & Location TBA

 

May 3rd (in-person)

Dissertation Prospectus Workshop 2

Presenters TBA

 

Coordinators: James Kennerly and Danlin Zhang, EALC

Faculty Sponsors: Professor Paola Iovene and Professor Melissa Van Wyk

Please do not hesitate to contact Danlin (danlinz@uchicago.edu) or James (kennerly@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you at APEA in the new quarter!

03/01/2024 Rina Sugawara

PhD Candidate, Music

Samurai to Composer: Sōkichi Ozaki ca. 1937

Time: Friday, March 1, 3-5pm CT

Location: Center for East Asian Studies 319 (1155 E. 60th St)

Abstract: The 1937 manifesto Kokutai no Hongi dictated the modern national mission: “to build up a new Japanese culture by adopting and sublimating Western cultures with our national entity as the basis” (Hall, ed. 1949, 183). Encapsulating the paradoxical joint projects of Japanism and Westernization, the text critiques “abstract thought” as the peril of “Western liberalism” and extols instead, “concrete creation” as a Japanese artistic practice—a distinction also found in musical discourse, which claimed composition in the realm of “creation” [創造/sōzō] rather than the homonymic “imagination” [想像/sōzō]. Curious, then, that a significant fraction of contemporary compositions were fantasy pieces, and that fantasy was theorized as one of three compositional types. Fantasy, to be clear, indexes a European art music category purporting a freedom of expression and fancifulness of thought that seems antithetical to the warring nation’s increasing regulations over the imagination and its expressions. How was fantasy conceived as an appropriately “Japanese” musical form?
In this paper, I discuss Sōkichi Ozaki’s Phantasie und Fuge (1936) and the theories on fantasy penned by his teacher Saburō Moroi. Examined relative to the Kokutai and Alan Tansman’s theory of “the rhetoric of unspoken fascism,” I argue that musical fantasy upholds an imperial philosophy of form that similarly distinguishes abstract from concrete form. As I demonstrate, Ozaki signals a formal topography using trite tonal conventions, deploying what he calls a “model form.” Form here functions as a fungible organizational and rhetorical device rather than an abstracted order of events, just as the Kokutai emphasizes “formal qualities” like repetition over “such matters as premises, transitions, or conclusions” (Tansman 2009, 152). Given Moroi’s claim that the “fantasy type” lacks formal expectations, I conclude that musical fantasy becomes justified as concrete creation by appropriating, or sublimating, Germanic Formenlehre. Ultimately, I propose that musical fantasy is both a fantasy of music and of the nation.

Presenter: Rina Sugawara is a PhD Candidate in Music Theory and History. Her dissertation project is titled, “Politics of Musical Fantasy in Twentieth-Century England, Japan, and the US,” in which she theorizes the sociopolitical work of fantasy as it informs compositional practices and defines the art music category of musical fantasy. Her scholarly commitments include musical form, aesthetic theory, issues on migrant identities and nationalism, as well as abolitionist university studies and active practices of anticolonialism.

Discussant: Hoyt Long PhD is Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Chicago. He teaches in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department and also co-directs the Textual Optics Lab. He has published extensively in the fields of modern Japanese literature, media history, and digital humanities. His current research interests include machine translation, computational approaches to world literature, and cultural production in the age of social media platforms.

02/23/2024 Nick Ogonek

PhD Student, EALC

Staying Awhile on BL Planet: Genre, Fantasy, and Role-Play in Asahara Naoto’s Kanojo ga suki na mono wa homo de atte boku de wa nai 

Time: Friday, February 23, 3-5pm CT

Location: Room 319, Center for East Asian Studies (1155 E. 60th St)

Abstract: This dissertation chapter draft is about the discursive function of Boys’ Love with and in other forms of queer fiction. Over the past decade, BL has been ascending from marginalized, subcultural form to a dominant mass cultural genre of LGBT media. One product of this ongoing transformation is that the generic norms of BL, such as character types and narrative tropes, appear alongside other fictions of queerness, creating friction and presenting alternative ways of representing “queer.” My presentation will take up this issue through a discussion of Asahara Naoto’s coming-of-age novel Kanojo ga suki na mono wa homo de atte boku de wa nai [She Likes Homos, Not Me] (2018). The novel concerns the relationship between two high school classmates, the closeted gay boy who narrates the novel (and whose prickly self-loathing is signaled by slur in its title) and a sensitive BL fangirl, as they move from friendship to ill-advised romance and back to friendship rebuilt on a foundation of mutual recognition. By charting the growing recognition between a gay character and a BL fan character – the sense that they share some experience of marginalization, and the solidarity which is subsequently established – the novel stages an encounter between BL and other forms of queer fiction and identification, remediating previous debates about the social implications of BL’s representations of gay men as a narrative of reconciliation. In this way, I argue that the novel performs an intervention into the problematics posed by BL as mass cultural genre to emergent queer-feminist solidarities by speculating about what reconciliation would feel like for the people involved.

Presenter: Nick Ogonek is a PhD Student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His in-progress dissertation takes up contemporary literature from Japan to explore the relation between queer literary and cultural production and queer political meaning-making, with particular attention to form and genre.

Discussant: Jiarui Sun is a PhD student from the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Working at the intersection of media theories and anthropology, her research is concerned with how media and mediation figure into the everyday experiences of sociality and creativity on digital platforms.

02/09/2024 Susanna Sun

PhD Student, EALC & TAPS

“Neither Horse Nor Donkey”: Nationalization of Voice at Shanghai Music Conservatory in 1958

Time: Friday, February 9, 3:00-5:00pm CT

Location: Room 319, Center for East Asian Studies (1155 E. 60th St)

★This workshop is co-hosted by the Music and Sound workshop★

Abstract: Responding to the “indigenous versus foreign throat debate” (土洋嗓之争) in early PRC, overseen by Premier Zhou Enlai, an experiment that sought to “nationalize the voice” (声乐民族化) was carried out at the Shanghai Music Conservatory in 1958. Working with rare first-hand accounts, my article shows that the voice nationalization consists of two simultaneous processes: to make voice “scientific” (incorporating the Italian bel canto system), and to capture the “flavor” of the Chinese language in singing (such as vowel shapes and tune-intonation relationship). The voice experiment undertaken represents a radical case in which the ontological boundaries of Western opera and Chinese opera were transcended through a dynamic two-way dialectical experiment. While the concept of “nationalization” often evokes notions of cultural protectionism that prioritizes indigenous culture, this voice experimentation is not a one-way prioritization of a national voice culture, but one that fundamentally seeks to incorporate the Western vocal system and techniques. While the resulting newly created opera is nowadays prevalently perceived as a “hybridization” of Western and Chinese opera, the conceptual framework of “hybridization” does not fully capture the process and vision of the voice reform in its historical and political context, especially in view of Mao’s “Talk to Music Workers” in 1956. This paper examines the interpreted “scientific” connotations of Italian bel canto in its perceived association with anatomical terminology, modernity, vocal sustainability, as well as the experiment’s paradoxes regarding appropriation, creativity in cultural hegemony, and whether the voice is intrinsically apolitical. This paper also reveals the comparable weight between the technical details and their ideological and cultural significance in this artistic transformation process.

Presenter: Susanna Sun is a current second-year PhD student in the joint program of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Theatre and Performance Studies at The University of Chicago. Her main research focus is Chinese opera through approaches across disciplines and media forms, particularly the process of transmediation. She is interested in the specific topics of opera films, opera reforms, cross-dressing performance, and the Ming–Qing drama tradition, and in broader topics such as philosophy, gender, and cross-cultural exchange. She draws upon a variety of methodological approaches and strives to bring attention to the perspectives of the opera performers. She is deeply passionate about Chinese opera and has experience performing Yue opera, an all-female genre, from a young age.

Discussant: Jacob Reed is a PhD candidate in music theory and history at the University of Chicago. His dissertation project, “Negotiating Grammars: Encounters Between Music and Text” examines domains where language and music supplement, replace, and fight with one another, drawing on examples and tools from sources including hip-hop, pop music, and Kunqu theory. He also performs widely on keyboard instruments, playing organ recitals, collaborative piano, and basso continuo throughout the Chicagoland area.