Carol Gluck, the George Sansom Professor of History and Chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, took part in the international conference “Order and Disorder: Critical Reflections on Japanese Studies,” which was held at Cornell University on October 27 and October 28, 2017.
A gathering of former students and colleagues of Cornell University professor J. Victor Koschmann, “Order and Disorder: Critical Reflections on Japanese Studies” took stock of the modes of critical reflexivity that have (or have not) informed the study of Japanese modernity in both North America and Japan. Conference participants included Kristin Roebuck, an Assistant Professor of Japanese History at Cornell who earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2015.
The conference program is available below:
“Order and Disorder: Critical Reflections on Japanese Studies”
Friday, October 27, 2017
Opening remarks, 9:30-10:00
Panel One, 10:00-12:00, Critique of the Social Sciences
• Akiko Ishii (National University of Singapore), “Plastic Nature: A Discursive History of Population in Japan”
• Sookyeong Hong (National University of Singapore), “Overcoming Modern Medicine: Sakurazawa Yukikazu’s `Natural Medicine’ (1929-1945)”
• Noriaki Hoshino (Hong Kong Baptist University), “On Transpacific Racial Contacts Between Two Empires”
• Kristin Roebuck (Cornell University), “Blood Ties: Enemies and Kin in the Aftermath of WW II”
Discussant: Suman Seth (Cornell University)
Panel Two, 1:30-3:30, Continuity and Discontinuity in History
• Sujin Lee (UCLA), “Totalizing Population: Total War Population Policy (1937-1945)”
• Aaron Moore (Arizona State University), “Re-engineering Asia—Japanese Technical Aid and Post-Colonial Power in Cold War Asia”
• Seok-won Lee (Rhodes College), “Asianism After Asianism: Postwar Social Science and the Question of Asia in 1950s Japan”
Discussant: Robert Culp (Bard College)
Panel Three, 4:00-6:00, Community, Border, Affect
• Toba Koji (Waseda University), “Past, Self, and Community: Repetition and Renewal in Abe Kōbō”
• Richard Calichman (City University of New York), “Critical Japan Studies: The Place of Theory”
• Gavin Walker (McGill University), “Community, or the Writing of the Supplement”
Discussant: Pedro Erber (Cornell University)
Saturday, October 28, 2017
Panel Four, 9:30-11:00, Theorizing Subjectivity
• Takeshi Kimoto (Chukyo University), “Subject As Nothingness: Tanabe Hajime’s Interpretation of Hegel”
• Trent Maxey (Amherst College), “Mobility and Subjectivity in Japan’s Automotive Age”
• Wes Sasaki-Uemura (University of Utah), “In Praise of Disorder: Photography, Subjectivity, and ‘Chaos’”
Discussant: Naoki Sakai (Cornell University)
Panel Five, 11:15-1:00, Occluded Histories, Critical Historiographies
• Watanabe Naoki (Musashi University), “Korean Soldier Internee in Siberia and the Problem of (Un)Redressability”
• Yukiko Hanawa (New York University), “Fraying the Edges of Boundaries: The One-eyed One”
• Katsuya Hirano (UCLA), “Living Social Death: Race, Capital, and Reification of the Ainu”
Discussant: Brett de Bary (Cornell University)
Panel Six, 2:00-3:30, Contemporary Histories, Contemporary Disorders
• Iwasaki Minoru (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) “The Vicissitudes of Japan’s Reception of Hegel and the Shock of Hegel and Haiti”
• Kasai Hirotaka (Tsuda College), “Democratic Meltdown and the Contemporary Forms of Political Apathy”
• Tsuboi Hideto (International Research Center for Japanese Studies), “Living With the Living: Discourse on the Dead after 3.11”
Discussant: Carol Gluck (Columbia University)
Concluding Roundtable, 4:00-5:30, “Critical Reflections on Japanese Studies”
• Narita Ryuichi (Japan Women’s University), “Japan’s Japan, America’s Japan”
Followed by Comments from Brett de Bary (Cornell), Carol Gluck (Columbia University), Kojima Kiyoshi (formerly Iwanami Shoten Publishers), Victor Koschmann (Cornell), Naoki Sakai (Cornell)
