Asia in Depth Series
Please mark your calendars for this series of talks in which scholars approaching China from various fields will introduce their new work to the Georgetown campus and community. The series is offered by the Georgetown Initiative for Global History and the Asian Studies Program at Georgetown, with support from the Offices of the Provost and the Vice President for Global Engagement.
All talks (unless otherwise advertised) held on Thursdays from 5:00-7:00 p.m. in Intercultural Center (ICC) room 662 on the Georgetown University campus.
Please contact Prof. James Millward for more information. If you wish to be added to the seminar’s email list, please email guhistory@georgetown.edu.
Upcoming Events in 2023-2024
February 22 – Joan Kee (University of Michigan in Ann Arbor) | On the Maoist Origins of an Un-American Art History
Often described through what its namesake Mao Zedong described as the “revolutionary struggle of the vast majority of people against the exploiting classes and their state structures,” Maoism retains a force whose magnitude we are only beginning to apprehend. Its impact on visual culture is especially profound: not only have depictions of Mao infiltrated nearly every corner of the globe, Maoist alignments course through many artworks made in an America that regards Maoism only through its worst excesses or as a blanket pejorative for any anti-capitalist position. Through, and beside, the works of Ed Bereal, Jim Dong, Nancy Hom, May Sun and Hung Liu, I consider Maoism as an angle of incidence through which to consider an un-American art history divorced from narratives of citizenship-based inclusion.
Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her books include Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (2019) and The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity (2023). A contributing editor at Artforum and an editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail, she has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, including articles on the impact of legal jurisdiction on contemporary Chinese art and on how photography problematizes the concept of “peacetime.” Her work has been supported by the Clark Art Institute, the Kresge Foundation, the National Gallery of Art, the Hyundai Tate Research Center, and MoMA.
March 21 – Soojung Han (Southwestern University) | The Rise of the Shatuo Turks: Identity Formation in Medieval China
The Shatuo Turks, a nomadic people from Inner Asia, migrated to China during the Tang Dynasty in the eighth century. Rising from migrants to mercenaries to generals to court officials, the Turkic migrants overcame societal hurdles as a minority group and rose to become a significant political force in the Tang court. Following the collapse of the Tang in 907, this group of migrants came to wield power in North China, founding three dynasties of the Five Dynasties and one of the Ten Kingdoms. However, much of their success is diminished by a dichotomic representation which hounds their legacy: traditional histories brand them as “barbarians,” yet consider them as their predecessors, while modern scholars argue that they were Sinicized, thus “Chinese.” My project challenges these narratives and instead navigates the development of the Shatuo identity. Crucial to the rise and resilience of the Shatuo as a minority group was their observation of kinship and nomadic traditions as well as their creation of an “elite” identity which cemented their legacy as rulers over “China” for over fifty years.
Soojung Han is an assistant professor of History at Southwestern University. She is a historian of medieval China and Inner Asia whose main field of research is the relations between China and Inner Asia during the Middle Period, with particular emphasis on gender, ethnicity, and identity. Her current book project proposes that the diplomatic relations and identity formation of the 10th century marked a watershed in Chinese history which reshaped the Sino-Inner Asian world. She received her PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 2022. This coming year, her works will be published in Ethnic Terminologies in Eurasian Perspective in the Visions of Community (VISCOM) series.