D002: Comparative Print Capitalism in Times of Transformation in Japan, Indonesia, China, and Philippine

Organizer(s)

• 

  Jingsheng Zhang

  University of South Carolina, United States
• XS

  Xianmin Shen

  Shanghai University of Economics and Finance, United States

Chair(s)

• 

  Jingsheng Zhang

  University of South Carolina, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• MG

  Miyabi Goto

  University of Kentucky, United States
• ES

  Eunike Setiadarma

  Northwestern University, United States
• 

  Alden Marte-Wood

  Rice University, United States
• 

  Jingsheng Zhang

  University of South Carolina, United States

Discussant(s)

• MR

  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 19^thcentury 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).

Presentations:

• Institutionalizing Criticism, Building a Nation: Genre, Media, Japan
  

  Paper Presenter: Miyabi Goto – University of Kentucky
• Nation at Home: Women, Family, and Bangsa Tionghoa in the Writings of Kwee Thiam Tjing
  

  Paper Presenter: Eunike Setiadarma – Northwestern University
• Philippine Martial Law Novels: Export-Oriented Print Culture and the World-Literary System
  

  Paper Presenter: Alden Sajor Marte-Wood – Rice University
• From the State to the Market: Magazine Reform and A New Literary Form
  

  Paper Presenter: Jingsheng Zhang – University of South Carolina