Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Jessie Zhang Juan, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

In this talk anthropologist and longtime researcher of gender and ethnopolitics Louisa Schein advances a contemporary “post-alteric” formulation of China’s social imaginary, one in which the state and the Han are less polarized against the rural ethnic remote. Schein adventurously juxtaposes interpretation of disparate instances – from popular culture to tourism production, and especially the 1990s film Postmen in the Mountains (Na Shan, Na Ren, Na Gou) – to consider whether recent Mainland envisionings of social landscape may be shifting away from the sharply vertical and the ethnically layered. Developing a sociospatial analysis that revises her earlier formulations of “internal orientalism,” she asks what social, economic, psychic and policy factors might precipitate images of state and masses, minorities and Han, urban and rural as increasingly co-imbricated.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Louisa Schein teaches Cultural Anthropology as well as Women’s and Gender Studies, Asian American Studies and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers. She has done fieldwork with Miao/Hmong for three decades, and is author of Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics (Duke University Press 2000) about gender and ethnic politics in postsocialist China. She is co-editor with Tim Oakes of Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Reimagining of Space (Routledge 2006) and with Purnima Mankekar of Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia (Duke University Press 2012). Her articles have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, American Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, positions, etc. She has written about celebrity, Chinese cultural politics and the Miao popular singer A You Duo and is co-director of two documentary films on Hmong Americans, Better Places (2011) with Peter O’Neill and Shamans, Herbs and MDs in-progress with Va-Megn Thoj.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. Do register early as seats are available on a first come, first served basis. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Jonathan at jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg indicating your name, email, designation, organisation/affiliation and contact number.