Militarism in Asia Speaker Series
The Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program is excited to present our MILITARISM IN ASIA SPEAKER SERIES, a three-day event featuring several distinguished speakers.
MONDAY, APRIL 7th:
12-1:30pm, 691 Barrows
Professor Daryl Maeda – “Putting the Martial into Martial Arts: Bruce Lee and Cold War Militarism”
Bruce Lee is most often imagined as a Chinese kung fu artist who broke through to become a global superstar. This constrained understanding relies on untenable categorizations of the Orient and the West. Perhaps more importantly, it obscures the many ways that people, ideas, and cultures have crisscrossed the Pacific for centuries. This talk focuses on how militarism and neo-imperialism created the conditions under which Lee and others constructed hybridized forms of martial arts during the Cold War. There will be refreshments provided.
Daryl Joji Maeda is Chair and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published two books on Asian American activism during the 1960s and 70s, Reconsidering the Asian American Movement (Routledge, 2012) and Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
TUESDAY, APRIL 8th:
12:30-2pm, 554 Barrows
Professor Robyn Rodriguez, Melissa Roxas, & Jeanelle Abiola – “Witnessing: Poets, Academics, and Community Members Speak on Militarism in the Philippines”
This panel looks into the ways by which scholars, community members, and writers come together to investigate and articulate the Filipino people’s struggle against militarism in the Philippines – both in the homeland and in sites of migration. There will be refreshments provided.
Robyn Rodriguez is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, Melissa Roxas is a Poet/Abduction and Torture Survivor, and Rev. Jeanelle N. Abiola is Co-Chair of the Cal-Nev Philippine Solidarity Task Force. Each speaker will be sharing their work and activism in the Filipino community.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9th:
12-1:30pm, 554 Barrows
Professor Jodi Kim – “Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise”
This talk offers a conceptualization and analysis of post-World War II U.S. militarism in the Asia-Pacific. It interrogates how and why U.S. militarism is animated through a variety of literal and figurative debt regimes. It asks, moreover, how U.S. liberal military empire is linked to liberal settler colonialism and turns to Asian American cultural forms for critical imaginaries that gesture beyond militarism. There will be refreshments provided.
Jodi Kim is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Please see the flyer for additional details. We are looking forward to seeing everybody there!
