Constructing a common and consensual multicultural civic discourse

Sean Golden was an invited keynote speaker at the IALIC 2016 annual conference - Bridging across languages and cultures in everyday lives. New roles for changing scenarios-- held in Barcelona on 25-27 November 2016.

Abstract

Curricula and theoretical frameworks for political science courses in the Euroamerican context are dominated by a limited number of paradigms that tend to become “paradogmas” that reflect an unquestioned or unproblematised Eurocentric or Euroamerican bias. They lack intellectual and theoretical diversity. A geopolitical power shift has occurred, but the paradigms that dominate Euroamerican political theory have not shifted.

In the West Jürgen Habermas has attempted to counter both instrumental rationalism and postmodernism by calling for the construction of a communicative rationality or civic discourse that would allow all parties to agree on certain basic principles and procedures in order to promote mutual understanding and mutual acceptance of agreements.

As the geopolitical tectonic plates shift, alternative discourses emerge, based on non-Euroamerican principles and procedures. In the new discourse of a resurgent China, references to ancient Confucian texts rub shoulders with Maoist slogans and slang from the Internet. Old established slogans and keywords are being given new meanings. Unless we learn and understand these new meanings we could misinterpret what is being said, and be misinterpreted.

In order to better understand the innovations under way we need to develop a better understanding of the issues, the policies, the paradigms and the discourse that are being constructed. This requires better knowledge of the Chinese language and

culture and first-hand knowledge of the policies being carried out. It also requires more collaborative efforts to promote and build better mutual and common knowledge and understanding, perhaps along the lines of the EUNIC’s Europe-China Cultural Compass or the Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin, 2014).

Mutual respect requires mutual knowledge in order to construct a common and consensual multicultural civic discourse that could lead to meaningful cooperation.

“W.B. Yeats: From Sligo to Nōh via Ernest Fenollosa”

Sean Golden has recently published “W.B. Yeats: From Sligo to Nōh via Ernest Fenollosa”, Moving Worlds. A Journal of Transcultural Writings, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2016, 37-50.

“Liu Xie ‘s Wenxin diaolong, Ernest Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character and the 20th century avant garde”

Sean Golden has recently published “Liu Xie ‘s Wenxin diaolong, Ernest Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character and the 20th century avant garde”, in Chen Yuehong, Tiziana Lippielo & Maddalena Barenghi (eds.), LinkingAncient and Contemporary: Continuities and Discontinuities in ChineseLiterature, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari Digital Publishing, 265-282.

Abstract

Ezra Pound’s edition of Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts for The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry was a landmark in modernist European poetry and the imagist movement at the beginning of the 20th century. Pound’s work has stood for Fenollosa’s vision since then and has been the subject of controversy among Sinologists for its emphasis on the graphic elements of Chinese written characters. A recent edition of the complete Fenollosa manuscripts by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein has made it possible to see the differences between Fenollosa’s interests and Pound’s interpretations and to restore Fenollosa’s original intentions. Even though Sinologists have questioned the Fenollosa-Pound emphasis on the graphic elements of Chinese writing as a component part of Chinese poetry, Ch. 39 of the classical Chinese text 文心雕龍 Wenxin diaolong by 劉勰 Liu Xie (ca. 466-520) refers specifically to this phenomenon as a mode in the composition of Chinese poetry. Case studies of work by John Cage and Jackson Mac Low show that Fenollosa’s impact on 20th century avant garde literature went far beyond the works of Ezra Pound.

Yeats & Asia

On behalf of the International Yeats Society the East Asian Studies & Research Centre (CERAO) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is organising the symposium

Yeats & Asia

Imagining Asia through Yeats, Imagining Yeats through Asia

in Barcelona, at Casa Convalescència, from 15-17 December 2016.

In preparation for the Symposium the CERAO is co-financing a documentary film of the Sligo-based Blue Raincoat Theatre Company's production of The Cat and the Moon, a play by the Irish Nobel Prize winner, W.B. Yeats, inspired by a manuscript translation by Ernest Fenollosa of of a traditional Japanese kyogen-style play.

The documentary will be premiered in Barcelona at the Symposium by the play's director, Niall Henry.

Commemorating the anonymous. British imperialist discourse in China and its backlash among the Irish

Sean Golden gave a talk on "Commemorating the anonymous. British imperialist discourse in China and its backlash among the Irish" at the  First Annual Conference of the  Irish Association for Asian Studies (IAAS) at Dublin City University (Ireland), 17-18/06/2016.

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Abstract

John Mitchel on his way to exile conversed with naval officers responsible for British conquests in China. In his translation of the 三字經 Sanzijing, Sir Herbert Giles, an English diplomat in China, glossed 家 jiā as ‘a pig beneath a roof’, and remarked to his intended British readership that ‘our’ Irish neighbours would certainly understand this. His discourse demonstrates the effects of attempting to master the colonised ‘abroad’ on his attitudes toward the colonised ‘at home’. Anonymous Irish soldiers and police helped colonise the British Empire. Some later turned against colonisation and fought to liberate Ireland and other colonies. The major source of information about the Taiping movement in Nanjing in the mid-nineteenth century was an anonymous Irishman who became a mercenary. Roger Casement went from being an agent of imperialism to an agent of the Easter Rising; his reports on colonisation in Africa and in Latin America inspired Joseph Conrad to write Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. W.G. Sebald, starting from the connection between Casement and Conrad, portrayed in The Rings of Saturn the decadence that British imperialism produced at home. Postcolonial studies tend to concentrate on the experience of the colonised, but not on the impact of imperialism on the colonisers themselves, or on the underclasses created in the metropole by colonialism. Commemoration of the anonymous agents and victims of British imperialism in Asia and its backlash among the Irish is a challenge for Asian Studies in Ireland.

Keywords: postcolonialism, discourse analysis, Chinese Studies, Irish Studies

La crisis i la reconfiguración de la geopolítica mundial

Sean Golden participó en el Curso de Verano La crisis i la reconfiguración de la geopolítica mundial organizado por la Universidad Complutense de Madrid en San Lorenzo de El Escorial los días 11-15 de julio en colaboración con la Fundación de Investigaciones Marxistas y el partido político Izquierda Europea con patrocinio del Banco Santander.

Impartió la ponencia China en el mundo: ¿el ascenso de una hegemonía? y participó en la mesa redonda El desafío de las periferias.

EastAsiaNet 10th Anniversary Research Workshop

Sean Golden recently spoke twice at the EastAsiaNet 10th Anniversary Research Workshop that was held at the University of Coimbra in Portuigal from 26-28 May 2016, dedicated to the New Silk Road in the Context of East Asian Relations and Wider International Implications.

Re-Imagining 'Asia' and 'Europe' along the New Silk Road

Abstract

Brussels continues to look more toward Boston than Beijing. As Frederick John Teggart demonstrated in 1939 in his book Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events, major developments in the history of the Roman Empire were preceded and provoked by major developments in the history of the Chinese Empire. As China repelled wave after wave of Central Asian tribes attacking the East, these tribes turned West and successively displaced still more tribes closer and closer to Europe. The Xiongnu lead to the Huns. Yet “European” history still ignores the implications of Teggart’s study and continues to take Europe to be the country in the middle of it all. This Eurocentrism affects countries that span Eurasia, like Russia, and countries that clearly belong to Central or even South Asia, like Iran. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the One Belt, One Road initiative will eventually have as great an impact on Europe’s future as developments in the Chinese Empire had on Europe’s past. What obsolete paradigms prevent analysts and planners from detecting or recognising the consequences of China’s mid-to-long term Eurasian development strategy? And what new paradigms might open their minds? What tools do we need to assess the New Silk Road strategy?

EAN, A Decade of Networking: reflecting on the past, prospects for the future

Pushing Hands with Martha Cheung

Sean Golden has recently published  "Pushing Hands with Martha Cheung: The Genealogy of a Translation Metaphor" in the collection The Pushing-Hands of Translation and its Theory. In memoriam Martha Cheung, 1953-2013 edited by Douglas Robinson and published by Routledge (2016, pp. 34-59).

Las Relaciones Exteriores de China: Nuevos retos e inestabilidad financiera

El CEI International Affairs en colaboración con el Instituto Confucio de Barcelona y la Obra Social "la Caixa", organizaron el 3 de diciembre de 2015 la Jornada “Las relaciones exteriores de China: Nuevos retos e inestabilidad financiera": 

Es un hecho aceptado universalmente que la inserción de China en la economía planetaria, ocurrida en los últimos treinta años está influyendo en los cambiantes vuelcos que acontecen en las relaciones económicas internacionales.

A la vez, todo sugiere que, al entrar el país en la sociedad globalizada, con éxitos evidentes está enfrentando los desafíos de absorber el acervo técnico-cultural-institucional mundial, sin perder la ancestral fisonomía de su muy especial cultura.

Un examen de la estrategia diplomática y de las relaciones internacionales de China reclama, antes de nada, una aclaración básica de la situación del país respondiendo a preguntas como ¿qué tipo de país es China ahora y cómo será en el futuro? o ¿cuál es la fortaleza económica, militar y política de China? La estrategia diplomática de China y su política exterior están basadas en las realidades del país.

Los miembros del grup de investigación Inter-Asia Artur Colom y Sean Golden hablaron sobre "La presencia de China en América Latina y África".

The Party and the World Dialogue 2015

Sean Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group took part as an invited guest in The Party and the World Dialogue 2015 organised by the China Center for Contemporary World Studies (CCCWS), a think tank of the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from 7-10/09/2015 and dedicated to the topic of:

To Discipline the Party: Responsibility of the Party

He participated as Rapporteur for Panel 3, dedicated to:

Governing the Party according to rules: state laws and Party Disciplines?

Inaugural Conference of the International Yeats Society

Sean Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group, spoke at the 1st annual conference of the International Yeats Society, A Writer Young and Old: Yeats at 150, at the University of Limerick Ireland, 15-18/10/2015, on the topic of:

The Ghost of Fenollosa in the Wings of the Abbey

 Abstract

Ernest Fenollosa’s unpublished manuscripts on Noh theatre influenced W.B. Yeats explicitly in 1913. Prior to that, Fenollosa’s publications on Chinese and Japanese art, and his theories of design, also influenced the works of Yeats. Correspondence among Yeats, Frank Fay, J.M. Synge and Lady Gregory in November 1904 regarding tree wings for the Abbey Theatre finds Yeats searching for an effect from Japanese prints he was researching at the British Museum and he confides in the taste of Pamela Colman Smith, in his own words, the only person who understood what he was seeking. In March 1909 Yeats is discussing Laurence Binyon’s Painting of the Far East, published in 1908, the year that Fenollosa died. Binyon wrote an obituary for Fenollosa in Littell's Living Age, and the Introduction to that book announces forthcoming studies on Chinese and Japanese art that Fenollosa’s widow would publish posthumously, prior to passing his papers on to Ezra Pound. Binyon’s studies draw heavily on Fenollosa’s published work. Pamela Colman Smith collaborated with Jack B. Yeats, and Lily Yeats, as well as W.B. Yeats. She studied design at the Pratt Institute in New York with Arthur Wesley Dow from 1893 to 1897, shortly before becoming involved with the Yeats circle and Edward Gordon Craig’s family. That was when Dow assisted Fenollosa in cataloguing East Asian art in Boston. Dow’s textbook on Composition draws heavily and explicitly on Fenollosa’s theories. The extent to which Fenollosa’s ghost inhabits the wings of the Abbey deserves greater scrutiny.

XV EastAsiaNet Workshop. Water in East Asia. Interfacing Environmental Risk

Sean Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group, took part in the  XV EastAsiaNet Workshop. Water in East Asia. Interfacing Environmental Risk, Culture & Society, held at the Università Ca'Foscari Venezia from 14-16/05/2015, on the topic of:

A discourse analysis of the communication of ecological risk and its subsequent management in China

Abstract

This paper will study three sources of discourse for the communication of ecological risk in China and its subsequent management: the discourse of informal, nongovernmental or emergent civil society communication of ecological risk (social movements, protest movements, critical analysis of risk and governmental policy); the discourse of formal or academic, nongovernmental communication of ecological risk (academics, advisers, opinion-makers); the official, governmental communication of ecological risk (official think tanks, ministry documents). The working hypothesis of this study is that even though awareness of ecological risk is high among the emergent civil society, the ministry advisers and the policy-makers, the management of ecological risk is hampered by contradictory priorities and criteria in the meritocratic evaluation of performance by government and Party officials, on the one hand, and the generation of wealth, on the other. This debate is analogous to the debate on efficiency (the generation of wealth) and equity (the redistribution of wealth) in the field of economic planning and performance.

White Rose East Asia Centre & Foreign and Commonwealth Office workshop

On 17-18 March 2015, Sean Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group, participated in the White Rose East Asia Centre and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office workshop on Cultural diplomacy and soft power in East Asia: China, Japan, South Korea organised by the White Rose East Asia Centre at Sheffield University (UK).

He spoke on the topic:

Hymn Sheets Versus Jam Sessions. Can Cultural Diplomacy Promote Plurality? Chinese perceptions of value diplomacy and their implications for policy-making

Abstract

An analysis of the Chinese policy papers on the EU reveals the importance of “culture” in diplomacy for the Chinese government. They always stress the fact that both China and Europe have millennial cultures. The corollary of this affirmation would be that other countries (the US in particular) do not have millennial cultures. This suggests a bemusement on the Chinese side that Europe should not automatically recognize that it has more in common with China than with the US. Presumably, for the Chinese side, were Europe to recognize this element it has in common with China, then Sino-European relations would be smoother. Five thousand years of Chinese culture should represent a powerful patrimony of values but the Chinese government may not be capable of turning this patrimony to its advantage in the form of value diplomacy. The creation of hundreds of Confucius Institutes around the world is a clear example of cultural diplomacy, but the CIs are experiencing teething problems that threaten to undermine their efficacy in terms of values-based diplomacy. To some extent these problems may be due to structural problems, to an erroneous vision of the role of the government in the running of the CIs. To some extent they may be due to an erroneous calculation of the proper relationship between an “official” cultural centre and a Higher Education Institution. To some extent they may due to incapacity on the part of the Chinese government to allow for autonomy or to its insistence on exercising government control, even censorship, over the activities of the CIs. This problem of interference is not limited to Chinese value diplomacy. The Japanese government has recently intervened to demand that the publishing house McGraw-Hill modify its history textbooks in the US because they refer to “comfort women” whose existence the Japanese government does not admit. Every year there is controversy because the contents of Japanese history textbooks offend the neighbouring countries in East and Southeast Asia that suffered Japanese imperial aggression. Recently the Spanish Instituto Cervantes has censored public events designed to launch books with a revisionist view of Spanish history. On another level of influence, the unwritten “Beijing Consensus” may have a more powerful effect in the developing world than the written “Washington Consensus”, and Chinese “no strings attached” foreign aid may be displacing the EU’s foreign aid restricted by conditionality. There is a debate about the extent to which the Chinese government understands the way in which soft power works, or whether it is capable of exercising soft power or even whether it even cares about soft power. The debate over “Asian Values” as opposed to Euroamerican “Universal Values” was dimmed by the 1997 Asian financial crisis but Chinese intellectuals and advisers have become increasingly more confident in China’s return to a preeminent role in world affairs, including the definition of “values” and the possibility of renovated Confucian values offering an attractive alternative to the values espoused by formerly imperialist metropoles. The most basic consideration could be the extent to which values emerge from sociocultural practice and the extent to which they can be instrumentalised; in other words, the extent to which officialdom can tolerate diversity, plurality and free-thinking and the extent to which it must promote a specific agenda.

Japan for Sligo via W.B. Yeats and Ernest Fenollosa

With the support of the Japan Foundation and the Embassy of Japan in Ireland, and in collaboration with Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, The Model, the Centre for East Asian Studies & Research of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, the Yeats Society of Sligo and Sligo Institute of Technology, Sean Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group, organised for the Yeats Foundation of Sligo from 10 to 13 November 2015 a four day festival dedicated to the influence of Japan on W.B. Yeats and on Sligo, past and future.

One hundred years ago Yeats learned about Japanese theatre through his contact with the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa’s work on Noh and through his meeting of the Japanese dancer and choreographer Michio Ito. The result was, as Yeats wrote at the time, that he “invented a form of drama”. The first example was his play At the Hawk’s Well. Yeats was already well-acquainted with Japanese art through his collaboration on set design with Edward Gordon Craig and Pamela Colman Smith. Fenollosa had been one of Smith’s teachers and she shared his esthetic with Jack B. Yeats and with Lily and Lolly Yeats.

It could be said that the Yeats family’s contact with Japan a century ago led to the globalisation of their work. A hundred years later we have an opportunity to consolidate Sligo’s contacts with Japan in order to renew the globalization of Sligo.

To this end the festival began with a contemporary performance inspired by a verse by W.B. Yeats. Composer and musician Trevor Knight, together with artist Alice Maher and the Japanese butoh choreographer and dancer Gyohei Zaitsu presented “A Skein Unwound …” on Tuesday, 10 November at The Model. This new work of art, especially created for the festival, demonstrated the continuing vitality of collaboration between Irish and Japanese artists.

Yeats was influenced by Japanese theatre but his own work has also influenced contemporary Japanese theatre. On Wednesday, 11 November, Masaru Sekine, theatre director and Yeats scholar, together with the producer Ms Noriko Kawahashi, presented his opera Hone-no-yume, based on Yeats’ play The Dreaming of the Bones at The Factory Performance Space.

On Thursday, 12 November, at The Factory Performance Space, under the heading of Japan for Sligo via Yeats and Fenollosa, Sean Golden made a multimedia presentation of the multiple links between the Yeats family, Sligo and Japan.

The festival culminated at Sligo Institute of Technology on Friday, 13 November, with a Brainstorming Workshop convened by Prof Vincent Cunnane, President of IT Sligo, for the purpose of outlining a strategic plan for increasing and consolidating relations between Sligo and Japan (by invitation).

Mr Chihiro Atsumi, Ambassador of Japan celebrated, “I am very happy that a series of events related to Yeats and Japan will be held this November to offer people the opportunity to learn more about the Japanese influence on Yeats”, and continued, “I hope that people all over Ireland will deepen their interest in Japan and its culture, and that the close connections between Japan and Ireland will go from strength to strength in the years ahead”.

Gray Pastoral: Critical Engagements with Idyllic Nature in Contemporary Photography from China

La revista TransAsia Photography Review ( Volume 5, Issue 2, Spring 2015) ha publicat un artícle del membre d'InterAsia Xavier Ortells-Nicolau titulat "Gray Pastoral: Critical Engagements with Idyllic Nature in Contemporary Photography from China".

Enllaç

«It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the arguments and reasons for contemporary views on “nature,” but they offer the context for an examination of vernacular notions of idyllic nature in the work of some of the most prominent contemporary photographers from China. What follows, then, is a discussion in which the photographers Wang Qingsong, Yang Yongliang, and Zhang Kechun, going beyond what Roetz terms the “cliché of ‘harmony’ between man and nature in China” (2010, 200), offer layered visualizations of landscapes and natural settings in dialogue with intellectual and aesthetic notions of the pastoral retreat. In so doing, these photographic works activate entry points for current discussions about contemporary visual culture from the standpoint of eco-aesthetics and ecocriticism.»

Guia d'estil per al tractament de mots xinesos en català

Demà dia 14 d'abril tindrà lloc la presentació de la Guia d'estil per al tractament de mots xinesos en català, una obra que neix amb la voluntat de convertir-se en la referència pels mitjans de comunicació catalans a l'hora de referir-se o fer ús de mots xinesos. A l'acte hi intervendran Helena Casas-Tost i Sara Rovira-Esteva, promotores de la iniciativa, autores del text i membres d'InterAsia.

Més informació

18:00 hores, Col·legi de Periodistes de Catalunya (Rambla de Catalunya, 10, Barcelona)
Confirmar assistència  a autoaprenentatge.cultura@gencat.cat o al telèfon 935 671 018.

El papel del PCCh en la reforma política y en la gobernanza a través de las leyes

V Simposio Electrónico Internacional sobre Política China

Sean Golden, miembro del grupo de investigación Inter-Asia, ha aportado la lección inaugural al V Simposio Electrónico Internacional sobre Política China organizado por el Observatorio de Política China en colaboración con AsiaRed que se celebró los días 1-21 de marzo de 2015, bajo el título "El papel del PCCh en la reforma política y en la gobernanza a través de las leyes".

Hong Kong: Supervised Meritocracy or Unhindered People Power?

The CIDOB Barcelona Centre for International Affairs think tank has published an Opinion on the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong by Seán Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group:

Hong Kong: Supervised Meritocracy or Unhindered People Power?, Opinión CIDOB, No. 278, November 2014.

The Party and the World Dialogue 2014

Sean Golden, member of the Inter-Asia research group, was one of more than 60 foreign experts invited to speak about and participate in the debate about the role of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in political and economic reform in the conference The Party and the World Dialogue 2014. China's New reforms: the Role of the Party, organised by the China Center for Contemporary World Studies (CCCWS), a think tank of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPC in Beijing from 2-8 September 2014.

He spoke on the subject of China's Reforms: Particularities vs. Commonalities and presided over one of the panel discussions on this subject.

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the CCCWS in order to promote joint research on the role of the CPC in political and economic reform and their consequences for the rest of the world through the UAB's East Asian Studies & Research Centre (Centre d'Estudis i Recerca sobre Àsia Oriental - CERAO).

Marinetti, Japó i el futurisme mundial: xerrada

Pierantonio Zanotti, professor de literatura japonesa a la Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, serà a la Facultat el proper dijous 4 de desembre. El tema de la seva xerrada serà: "F.T. Marinetti, Japan, and Le Futurisme mondial: The construction of Japan as a “Futurist” country".

Facultat de Traducció i Interpretació
4 de desembre, 2013

Aula 5

13: 00

Manifest del Moviment Futurista Japonès, 1921