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Inter-area/Border Crossing
Jingsheng Zhang
University of South Carolina, United States
Xianmin Shen
Shanghai University of Economics and Finance, United States
Jingsheng Zhang
University of South Carolina, United States
Miyabi Goto
University of Kentucky, United States
Eunike Setiadarma
Northwestern University, United States
Alden Marte-Wood
Rice University, United States
Jingsheng Zhang
University of South Carolina, United States
Michael Robinson
Indiana University, United States
Session Abstract: The four papers in this panel form interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues on national transformations through print cultures. Upon encountering the Western world, the Asian experiences complicated Benedict Anderson’s conception of nation and nationalism. In a comparative way, this panel shows that print capitalism in Asian countries was always already involved in the process of globalization.Goto examines how modern criticism in the ever-growing number of journals and papers toward the end of the 19thcentury led to the transformation from a traditional Japan to a modern nation. Setiadarma scrutinizes how the Chinese Indonesian journalist, Kwee Thiam Tjing, used newspaper to criticize the Dutch colonial government, and to enable a Chinese diaspora in East Java in the 1920s and 30s to identify with an imagined “Chinese nation,” a world alternative to the West. Zhang explores how the commercialization of state-owned literary journals, as a result of the PRC’s incorporation in the global market in the late 1980s, led to a new literary form, New Realism, which negotiated a more democratic notion of high literature. Marte-Wood specifies how a particular literary genre, Philippine martial law novels in the 1990s and 2000s, became a form of export-oriented print culture unique to globalized capitalism. This panel contributes in opening the layers of global print capitalism through the study of different forms of venues (newspapers, magazines, and literary journals). In particular, it shows how these venues became a site where the consciousness of modern nation was shaped (Japan), renegotiated (Indonesia), or weakened (China and Philippine).
Paper Presenter: Miyabi Goto – University of Kentucky
Paper Presenter: Eunike Setiadarma – Northwestern University
Paper Presenter: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood – Rice University
Paper Presenter: Jingsheng Zhang – University of South Carolina