Friday, March 30, 2007
12:00-1:30 PM
CK Choi Building, Seminar Room #129
CENTRE FOR INDIA AND SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH

In his recent novel, The Hungry Tide (2005), Amitav Ghosh confronts the issue of caste and class by addressing the predicaments of an Indian subaltern community, displaced by the 1947 partition and victimized in the subsequent redistribution of political power. Ghosh’s subalterns are part of a displaced Bengali refugee Dalit community, whose struggle for post-partition recognition has been excluded from official discourse, and their predicament is linked to the failed promises of Independence. Because the limited agency of the subaltern cannot overcome the sedimented material strength of the nation-state, Ghosh calls upon the figure of the cosmopolitan to assume moral responsibility. But this is no normal cosmopolitanism, no detached bourgeois intellectual appropriation, no Spivakian speaking for the subaltern. Rather Ghosh describes something I call “affective cosmopolitanism,” a political commitment made possible from a proximity to subaltern space and the subaltern’s traumatic experiences; only these can leave an affective imprint of alienation and disorientation which compel Ghosh’s bourgeois protagonists into new feelings of attachment. In this way, affective cosmopolitanism seeks to redress the structural inadequacies of the postcolonial nation-state. In my analysis of The Hungry Tide I will argue that, as with India’s pre-Independence movements, affective cosmopolitanism emerges in a time of political instability. Only in such turbulent conditions can unorthodox solidarities and coalitions cohere. Moreover, in recuperating repressed subaltern histories and advancing their unsettling and traumatic experiences, The Hungry Tide challenges its readers to position themselves ethically in relation to today’s geopolitical inequalities in spaces that are both conceptually and geographically distant.

Terri Tomsky is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at UBC. Her work focuses on literary representations of the 1947 Indian partition and the 1991 break-up of Yugoslavia. Her work engages with theories of trauma, and affect as well as postcolonial literary studies. Other research and teaching interests include feminist and Marxist theories, contemporary British literature, and South Asian diasporic writing and film.

A World in Four Lines, The Nusantara Pantun and Its Traditional and Contemporary Uses

Friday, March 30, 2007
12:30-2:00 PM
CK Choi Building, Conference Room #120
CENTRE FOR SOUTHEAST ASIA RESEARCH

Muhammad Haji Salleh, Professor Emeritus, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and Visiting Professor, Harvard University

The pantun is perhaps the most important literary form that is used in almost all stages and fields of human experience in the Archipelago. This lecture attempts to trace its many functions, from the lullaby to the love song, proverbs, speeches and wakes.

Muhammad Haji Salleh is a Visiting Professor at Harvard University, 2006-2007. He is a poet, critic, editor and translator in Malay and English. He has published ten collections of poems and thirty-odd books of criticism and translation, including Beyond the Archipelago and Romance and Laughter in the Archipelago. He has been awarded the Malaysian Literary Award, Anugerah Sastera Negara, for his contribution to Malaysia Literature, and the Southeast Asian Literary Prize.

Industry Clusters and the Revitalization of Regional Economies in Japan:
Insights from the Kobe Medical Industry Development Project

Friday, March 30, 2007
5:00 - 6:30 PM
C.K. Choi Building, Seminar Room #129
CENTRE FOR JAPANESE RESEARCH

Steven W. Collins, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington - Bothell

On a cold January morning in 1995, a powerful earthquake rocked Kobe, Japan, killing thousands and shattering the economy of one of Japan’s most vibrant cities. Even a decade later, economic output remained 20 percent below its pre-earthquake level. Realizing that much of the lost industrial output would never return, a small group of local leaders in 1998 hatched a plan to develop the city as an international hub for biomedical research and innovation. Out of this was born the Kobe Medical Industry Development Project. Housed on part of a man-made island, the project integrates basic, applied, clinical, and translational research in regenerative medicine and biomedical equipment, providing a comprehensive platform for research, development, and commercialization of new medical therapies and technologies. Since 2001, roughly 100 life science firms have established operations in Kobe, halfway toward the goal of 200 firms by 2010, transforming the region, once a center of heavy industry, into one of the country’s premier locations for advanced biomedical research and innovation. This presentation will review the formation and development of the Kobe medical industry project in the context of the broader effort by central and regional governments to harness localized knowledge and resources as catalysts of sustainable economic development. Data from interviews and a survey of firms that have moved into Kobe will shed light on the benefits, potential, and problems of this intense and focused effort to use public-private partnerships to create a science-based industrial cluster almost from scratch. Comparison will be made to the life sciences industry cluster in the region surrounding Seattle, sister-city to Kobe, whose clustering dynamics was evaluated using an identical survey instrument.

Steven W. Collins is Associate Professor in the Program in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where he has been a faculty member since 1993. A political scientist specializing in political economy and East Asian Studies, he teaches courses on comparative political economy, traditional and modern East Asia, comparative history of science and technology, and science and technology policy. Current research interests include science and technology in Japan since the end of the bubble era and the role of technological innovation and entrepreneurship as a component of sustainable development. Collins' research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He is currently an international fellow at Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, whose generous support has made possible this comparative study of the life science clusters in Kobe and Seattle. He is author of The Race to Commercialize Biotechnology, published by Routledge Press in 2004. Collins earned the Ph.D. in Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia in 1994. He made the shift to academia after a previous career at Philip Morris USA as a chemical engineer, having earned the B.S. (with Honors) from the University of Virginia's Department of Chemical Engineering in 1983. As both an engineer and social scientist, he is committed to increasing scientific and technical literacy among non-scientists, both among his own students and the general public.