Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Papering Over Colonial Legacies: Chinoiserie, Chinese Wallpaper, And Exotic Obfuscation At Harewood House, Carolyn J. Bishop

Theses and Dissertations

Harewood House is an estate emblematic of eighteenth-century evolutions in aesthetic philosophy, capital flows and social dynamics in the British empire. Built by the Lascelles family, it embraces an eclectic neoclassical decorative style that includes chinoiserie. This thesis argues that this exoticizing decorative strategy, and particularly its Chinese wallpaper – as both fine art and consumer good – translated the Lascelles' fortune, amassed through colonial exploits in the Caribbean, into advancement through domestic British hierarchies.

Future Trash, Xinan Ran

Theses and Dissertations

Xinan Ran explores the politically different, yet similar cultural habits that China and the US share under the influence of late-stage capitalism. Through her handmade, speculative products inspired by novelty gadgets, or “Unitaskers,” she examines the heightened prevalence of the contemporary wellness market. The project “Future Trash” encompasses soft sculptures, printed materials, performance, and installation.

Friendship In The Confucian Tradition, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

An overview of how friendship has been represented and assessed in the Confucian tradition, and particularly in classical Confucian texts such as the Analects and the Mencius. Themes covered include the relationship between the family and friendship, the ambivalence towards friendship in imperial China, and the connection between friendship and the Confucian ideal of personal cultivation. The chapter finishes by exploring novel conceptions of friendship and human relatedness suggested by the Confucian tradition.

The Influence Of China/Asia On The West, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

This chapter provides a description of cultural communication between China and Europe before 20th century. It discusses the influence of Chinese materials to Western libraries, archives and museums.

Confucian Thought And Contemporary Western Philosophy, Andrew Lambert

Publications and Research

This chapter explores the encounter between the traditional Confucian thought and contemporary Anglophone philosophy. It explores the evolution in philosophical methods and heuristics employed by Anglophone thinkers in the past fifty or so years, often with the aim of extracting Confucian thought from its specific social and historical roots. Unlike the disciplines of intellectual or literary history, these philosophers have articulated dimensions of Confucian philosophy not explicit in traditional texts, developed critiques of Western modernity, derived solutions to problems in Western philosophy, and sought to reimagine Confucian thought for an East Asian modernity. Analyzing how contemporary philosophers have engaged the …

Privileges For Being Slaves: Christian Missionaries In The Early Qing Court, Litian Swen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation works to elucidate the long-term confusion over the identity of the Christian fathers in the early Qing court. The identity for which this dissertation argues is straightforward: Christian fathers were identified by the Kangxi emperor as his family slaves. The master-slave relationship has long been overlooked because it was overshadowed by an overwhelming focus on the Jesuit Adam Schall, who entered the Manchu court as a Chinese-style minister.

Shifting the focus from Schall, this dissertation starts by showing two seldom mentioned Jesuits, Ludovico Buglio and Gabriel de Magalhaens, who entered into Manchu service as slaves. It was, this …

Orientalism In Hispanic Literatures, Araceli Tinajero

Open Educational Resources

This course will examine Hispanic (including Brazilian) literary and cultural representations pertaining to China, India, Korea, and Japan. Students will read novels, short stories, poems, essays, and chronicles of prominent writers of the Hispanic world in order to have a deeper understanding of the “East/West” divide conceptualized as Orientalism. Students will be exposed to films, music, and visual representations so they can have a better understanding of the historical, geographic, and transnational connections between the Hispanic world and the Far East.

Re-Constructing “China” In A Transnational Context, Zheng Zhu

Publications and Research

This study critically examines two Chinese newspapers’ representation of China as a “nation” and “culture.” Prior studies have deeply and broadly explored various ways through which China, Chinese culture, and nationalism were constructed in popular media forums. What has been missing is a continued exploration of these constructions offered by the Chinese media sources that are published outside the dominant Chinese cultural, national, and political contexts. Using World Journal and Sing Tao Daily, two major Chinese immigrant newspapers, as the texts for analysis, this study produces important findings that demonstrate how China is constructed as a contested, multi-layered, powerful, …

Pass Away, Jessica Li

Theses and Dissertations

This project is about a familial history and takes the form of a sculptural installation. How do you pack to go to a place you know nothing about? Bags enable mobility by providing a sense of home in unfamiliar terrain. What is carried on a trip to the grocery store? To California? To the other side of the world? To the moon? Into the afterlife? What choices are made out of necessity versus what is carried out of desire or fear?

Public Blockchains As A Means To Resist Information Censorship, Gregory Rocco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research is to demonstrate how public blockchains offer a greater degree of censorship resistance over traditional web-based information broadcasting mechanisms, and a comparison of existing options. Public blockchains present a means to mitigate censorship from nation states through both a broadcasting and data storage mechanism. They are costly to attack and difficult to remove from the public due to their distributed and accessible nature. A recent incident in China proved the worth of public blockchains by forcing the distribution of a censored letter describing harassment by Peking University into an Ethereum transaction by an anonymous individual …

Long Vacation In Bk, Doll Chao

Theses and Dissertations

The diary of a transcontinental search for self and place, a journey through obtuse politics, cultural oppression, and loneliness - this film is the document of a lost generation of Taiwanese youth and its conflict with China, swirling in a transpacific gyre of sound, image, and text.

The Expansion Of The Mandarin Mind, Tyler Okney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will examine and contrast two periods of xenophobia and stagnation, late Qing dynasty China, and the PRC under Mao, with a genuine market place of ideas, Shanghai and the other foreign treaty ports in the period 1849 to 1949, and explain how this period of cosmopolitan ferment has had beneficial effects on China today. Countries that have shut themselves off from the outside world have frequently suffered first stagnation, and then decay. While this might appear a commonplace in the abstract, the application of this insight in the development of particular nations has been neither as thorough or …

Silent Protest And The Art Of Paper Folding: The Golden Venture Paper Sculptures At The Museum Of Chinese In America, Sandra Cheng

Publications and Research

Housed in the Museum of Chinese in America is the Fly to Freedom collection of paper art, which were produced by a traditional folk method of Chinese paper folding. The 123 paper works were created by detainees of the Golden Venture, a freighter used to smuggle undocumented immigrants into the U.S. On the evening of June 6, 1993, the ship ran aground off the Rockaways in New York City and nearly 300 migrants, gaunt from the four-month ordeal at sea, poured out of the cramped windowless hold of the vessel. Several drowned that night, a few escaped, but the majority …

Young Activists, New Movements: Contemporary Chinese Queer Feminism And Transnational Genealogies, Wen Liu, Ana Huang, Jingchao Ma

Graduate Student Publications and Research

As young, diasporic feminist activist–scholars involved in queer feminist move- ments across China, Taiwan, and New York City, we reflect on the emergent ‘‘new’’ queer feminism in China today, with its amorphous cohesion and dramatic impact, as highlighted by the subway protest. Drawing on transnational feminism, we are part of this latest ‘‘new’’ response to growing global inequalities and neo-colonial feminist discourses that calls for a critical re-engagement with global politics (Grewal & Kaplan, 2001). However, as activists who center our political involvement in Asia, ‘‘transnationalism’’ is not only a vision, but an already exist- ing state, as we see …

Was The Black Death In India And China?, George D. Sussman

Publications and Research

Firsthand accounts of the Black Death in Europe and the Middle East and many subsequent historians have assumed that the pandemic originated in Asia and ravaged China and India before reaching the West. One reason for this conviction among modern historians is that the plague in the nineteenth century originated and did its worst damage in these countries. But a close examination of the sources on the Delhi Sultanate and the Yuan Dynasty provides no evidence of any serious epidemic in fourteenth-century India and no specific evidence of plague among the many troubles that afflicted fourteenth-century China.

Defying De-Stalinization: Albania’S 1956, Elidor Mehilli

Publications and Research

Drawing on recently declassified Albanian, Soviet, East German, and Western archival sources, as well as a rich historiography on Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech and the Hungarian revolution of 1956, this article investigates the little-known events of 1956 in Albania. Rejecting de-Stalinization, the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha was able to vindicate his position against Yugoslavia's brand of socialism abroad, fortify his rule at home, and claim more aid from Moscow, Beijing, and the Soviet bloc. This article discusses the Tirana Party Conference of April 1956, treating the Albanian Party of Labor (the Communist party) as an “information society.” The article …

Some Thoughts On China's Sexual Revolution: Sexuality And Social Change In Contemporary China, Sun Zhongxin

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The last two years saw several changes in the public discourse around sex and sexuality in China. So what are some of the most controversial sex-related topics to be raised in China recently?