What was “revolutionary” about Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement in 2019? This talk assesses the breakthroughs and limits of the historic uprising, against an entrenched colonial hegemony co-produced by British and Chinese rules. Specifically, we shall review four salient elements of this hegemony that have long defined the boundaries of the “political” in Hong Kong. To […]

Widespread civic duty has emerged as a last bastion against democratic backsliding. Why do some citizens feel a duty to vote, take up arms, and otherwise sacrifice for their democracies? Hur shows that the sense of obligation to be a good citizen is rooted in a force long thought to be detrimental to democracy's potential, […]

The post Korean War era observed the presence of numerous US military bases. Mixed race Korean children of these decades were often stigmatized as the children of military sex workers and straddled the legal and social borders of citizenship between an ethnic nationalist Korea and a rising superpower that was America. This talk explores mixed […]

What is the relationship between energy and power in the industrial age?In this talk, historian Victor Seow explores this question through his recently published book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago, 2021). This book uses the history of China’s onetime coal capital, Fushun, to examine how the Chinese and Japanese states that […]

Scholarship on racial politics in Japan has tended to take a dichotomous view of Japan as either a culturally homogenous, racially exceptional society where racism does not exist or a perniciously racist one. This talk examines how racism and antiracism have interactively shaped modern Japan’s political development, focusing on national and international coalitions, social movements, […]

Fixing the Huai River: Engineering Designs and Earthwork Methods Across the 1949 Divide. The Control of the Huai River System was the first massive hydraulic project after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. A close comparison of the 1932 and the 1950s Huai Control projects illuminates important differences in the hydraulic […]

Book Talk: Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. These “Chimerican media,” originating in America but circulating beyond national boundaries, co-create the figure of rising China and demonstrate the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics evenwhen the subject […]

Book Talk - Affective Spaces as Method: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China East Asia is saturated with complex emotions. Although emotions play an essential role in the sociopolitical formations of the region, their implications are poorly understood. Affective Spaces: The Cultural Politics of Emotion in China (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press) explains why and […]

Immobilization and Decolonization in Singapore, 1945-1953 Perhaps the greatest challenge in preparing Singapore for independence was defining and assigning citizenship to its highly heterogeneous populations, a challenge magnified by the entrepot's majority of ethnic Chinese residents and its uncertain political relationship to Malaya. Affixing citizenship rights would determine balances of power in these future, presumably […]

China: A Century of Family Revolutions A recent reproductive crisis has brought renewed interest in the century-old “family problem” (家庭问题) and “women’s problem” (妇女问题). Related issues have not only been debated in the discursive field, but also informed cross-border fields such as social policymaking and the law. Intrigued by questions such as why the state […]