Schedule

Friday, January 25th

5:00 PM     Keynote Address: Dr. Thomas Lamarre, McGill University

“The Media Region: Transnational Adaptation as Subjective Technology”

In the course of adaptation across media forms and platforms, a series that initially appears ‘excessively obvious’ (Bordwell) may transform into something ‘excessively enigmatic’ (Elsaesser). Tracking the serialization of Hana yori dango or Hanadan across manga, music, animation, and cinema in the 1990s, I propose to explore how a relatively straightforward manga series turns into something like a puzzle or a mind game. While the study of production (creative industries) and narration (patterns of storytelling) sheds some light on the formal features of this transformation, I will argue that transmedial serialization is best seen in terms of the formation of a social technology or subjective technology. It transforms interpretative practices into game-like procedures, or rules of the game. Looking at transmedial serialization as subjective technology also allows for a better understanding of the power formations that coalesce around it in the context of transnational serialization. This is especially important in the case of Hanadan in the 2000s. Hanadan has been touted as the most remade series in the East Asia region, with Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean, Philippine, and Indian versions.  As such, this series offers insight in the emergence of new way of understanding “Asia,” as a media region.

Saturday, January 26th

8:30 AM     Breakfast

9:00 AM     Opening Remarks

9:15 AM      Panel 1: Filming the Fringes

    • Shiqi Lin, University of California, Irvine, “Documenting Blandness: Building Care and Relatedness beyond National Scripts”
    • Xuesong Shao, University of California, Davis, “Between Documenting and Performing: The Drifters in Contemporary Chinese Documentaries
    • Peng Hai, Harvard University, “Producing Indigeneity: Impoverished Media and the Natural Fertility of Organic Sounds in Knife in the Clear Water
    • Discussant: Dr. Mayfair Yang, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies and Department of Religious Studies

10:45 AM     Coffee Break

11:00 AM     Panel 2: Massively Mixed Media

  • Keita Moore, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Warped Reflections: Postmodern Anxiety in FINAL FANTASY VII
  • Shixing Lin, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Ghostly Acquaintance: A Taiwanese Horror Game and the Imagined Terror in Mainland China
  • Thiam Huat Kam, Rutgers University, “Image Incompatibility, Atmospheric Incompatibility: Media Fans, The Comic Market, and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
  • Discussant: Kaitlyn Ugoretz, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies

12:30 PM     Lunch

1:30 PM       Panel 3: Picturing Space

  • Dingding Wang, Duke University, “Cyberpunk Asia: The Articulation and Representation of Spatiality
  • Wenfei Wang, University of Colorado Boulder, “Staging Observers: Liminal Spaces in the Dianshizhai Pictorial (1884-1898)
  • Discussant: Colin Raymond, Department of History of Art & Architecture

2:45 PM     Coffee Break

3:15 PM      Panel 4: Modern Materialities

  • Keiko Nishimura, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Country of Surplus Sociality? Visualizing the Semiotic Surplus in Uniforms for Communication Robots in Japan”
  • Suhyun Choi, University of British Columbia, “Chima Jeogori and Its Representations in Japan: Gender/ed Imaginations and Artistic Intervention”
  • Chloe Yan, Harvard University, “Electrifying Ginza: Re-visualizing the Rise of an Urban Place in Interwar Japan”
  • Discussant: Dr. Swati Chattopadhyay, Department of History of Art & Architecture

4:45 PM     Closing Remarks