Gendering Premodern Asian Relations. A Discussion with Global History

Back

D Multivocality in Global History

Gendering Premodern Asian Relations: A Discussion with Global History

Event Details

Date

II. Thursday, 11th September, 08:30-10:30
Location
M1052
Theme
D Multivocality in Global History

Convenor

Lisa Hellman (Lund University)

Chair

Lisa Hellman (Lund University)

Panelists

Lisa Phongsavath (University of Bonn)
Lisa Hellman (Lund University)
Monica Gines Blasi (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)
Jing Hu (Berlin State Library)

Papers

Lisa Phongsavath

Gendered Education and Child Mobility in Early-Modern Siam

Gendered Education and Child Mobility in Early-Modern Siam

This paper explores strategies of displacement and gendered learning in educational institutions of 17th and 18th century Siam. In this context, Christian missionaries and foreign merchant communities vied with local Buddhist authorities to mold children following their own likeness and virtues in proto-schools, religious establishments, and networks of training and apprenticeship. Their various institutions premised on the gendered segregation of men-and-women-to-be, taken out of their state of childhood, from their family homes, and into new, and sometimes distant, sites of homosocial initiation. Dutiful women rescued girls into orphanages and dedicated homes set up to instruct proper chastity and devotion; monks and missionaries recruited boys from near and far to train a native clergy for sustaining their religious dominion; other boys were sent to remote courts and establishments to learn serviceable trades. Although often pitched as ‘ordinary’ modes of socialization, bringing together these entangled practices of homosocial education can show how child mobility was coupled with the construction and transmission of gendered regimes. Educational displacement in early-modern Asia, anchored in the intermediary space of Siam, offers a new lens to global circulation that considers ‘minor’ actors like children, their coerced movement and gendered formation, as well as the collusions between various parties and sites beyond the local and colonial.
Lisa Hellman

Moved Apart: Communicated Experiences of Separation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Moved Apart: Communicated Experiences of Separation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

As global history has become more prominent, debates about lingering Eurocentrism and shortcomings in gender analysis have intensified both within the field and beyond. The goal of global history to reexamine historiography and write more entangled and diverse histories is at the center of the project Moved Apart: Communicated Experiences of Separation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. The project shifts the focus of global history on connections and contact zones to the concept of separation, offering a nuanced perspective on the history of global mobility. Globalization, social and technological changes in this period gave rise to different communicated experiences of separation than before. What did it feel like to be apart?

This innovative study highlights a diverse and vast corpus of sources, namely sixteenth and seventeenth century letters from Japan and Korea. To gain understanding of this era of increased mobility, this paper proposes new directions for global history: the perspectives of gender and emotions. In doing so, the project addresses the gap in gender analysis within global history and amplifies the voices of under-utilized sources relevant to the history of premodern East Asia. Moved Apart moves beyond a European blueprint of global history with this focus on experiences of separation, and thereby contributes to the writing of critical global histories.
Monica Gines Blasi

Gendering Chinese Indentured Migration and Human Trafficking to Latin America and Southeast Asia (1830s-1930s)

Gendering Chinese Indentured Migration and Human Trafficking to Latin America and Southeast Asia (1830s-1930s)

The current discourse on nineteenth-century Chinese indentured migration still lacks female and juvenile perspectives, excluding many women and children from the history of human mobility, thus maintaining Eurocentric male migration models. International female mobility is inaccurately considered barely inexistent before the 1870s, despite the clues pointing to their trafficking from Xiamen as early as the 1830s. Similarly, the young age of victims of indentured labour is rarely mentioned in the historiography of Chinese contract labour. This paper highlights limitations in the way the trafficking of Chinese women and children fit into current conceptualizations of the trade in Chinese labour migrants, as trafficked minors and adult women are rarely counted in studies on Chinese international mobility. This paper aims at addressing the variables of gender and age as analytical lenses of Chinese indenture.
Jing Hu

Echoes of War: The Afterlife of Two Korean Women in the East Asian War (1592–1598)

Echoes of War: The Afterlife of Two Korean Women in the East Asian War (1592–1598)

This paper examines the lives and legacies of two Korean kisaeng妓生(“female entertainers”) who sacrificed themselves for their country during the Imjin War (1592–1598). Non’gae 論介(1574–1593), a kisaeng from Chinju (in present-day southern South Korea), was renowned for her act of patriotism in 1593, when Japanese forces invaded and captured the city. During a victory celebration where she was ordered to entertain Japanese officers, Non’gae killed a Japanese general by pulling him into the Nam River, sacrificing her own life in the process. Similarly, Kyewŏrhyang 桂月香(?-1592) is often referred to as the “Pyŏngyang counterpart” of Non’gae. As a kisaeng in Pyŏngyang during the Japanese invasion in 1592, Kyewŏrhyang played a heroic role by assisting the Chosŏn general Kim Ŭngsŏ 金應瑞(1564–1624) in assassinating a Japanese general. To ensure Kim’s safety, she later sacrificed herself. Despite their low status within the rigid social hierarchy of Chosŏn Korea, both Non’gae and Kyewŏrhyang have been memorialized as ŭigi義妓(“righteous courtesans”) throughout Korean history. This paper explores their actions during the war and traces the “afterlife” of these two figures, analyzing how Non’gae and Kyewŏrhyang have been commemorated in literature, art, film, and other cultural expressions in both North and South Korea. In this way, the paper highlights how pre-modern women were portrayed in the public memory of East Asian history, and particularly explores how women'simages were shaped by the context of warfare.

Abstract

A recurring criticism against global history is its weakness as regards gender, as well as the analysis of power relations. In addition, there are still debates about to what degree the field has managed to provincialise Europe.This panel aims to address the three themes, all of them critical for propelling global history forward. We do so by proposing four papers grounded in various processes of gendering, of men and women, in South and Southeast Asia (Namely Japan, Korea, China and the Greater Siam), rather than in European contacts with these regions.Crucial to our discussion of processes of gendering is what that implies for power relations, and what it thereby can contribute to larger debates such as those on colonialism, state building and household structures. Therefore, the papers share a focus on actors on various levels of precarity, whether through age (such as children), practices (such as sex work) archival silence (in terms of emotions) or forced mobility (such as trafficking). That allows fora natural cross-fertilization of current debates on intersectional gender analyses and on forced mobility –and we hope that it might show ways to integrate both power analyses and examples from Asian history in the nuancing of future global history.The time frame is primarily early modern, but we consciously include a 19th century example not to presume that practices of precarity and coercion differed dramatically before and after that shift.Thus, we hope to expand the type of archives placed front andcentre, as well as the type of questions we pose to them. The aim is thus to provide both a regionally and temporally fresh approach to the task of gendering global history.