This dissertation tells the story of what happened to Jungar refugees on the Qing empire's Kazakh frontier in the years immediately following the collapse of the Jungar confederation, 1759-1773. Narratives of violence have dominated the historiography on the fall of the Jungars. Nearly every history of the Jungars' demise highlights the Qing's violent massacres against the Jungar people, with several works even asserting these massacres were tantamount to "genocide." Based on a large corpus of previously unstudied Manchu documents, this dissertation moves beyond historical narratives that view the Jungar collapse solely through the lens of Qing violence by highlighting the important historical role that Jungar refugees played in the years following the disintegration of the Jungar state. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Carbon Technocracy argues for the centrality of fossil fuel energy to the making of global industrial modernity and to the emergence of East Asian technocratic imaginaries in the first half of the twentieth century. It advances the premise that coal and later oil enabled not only the transformation of human society’s material foundations, but also allowed for new kinds of publics and politics. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation situates debates over food procurement, provision, and hunger as the key economic and social contestations structuring the late colonial and postcolonial Indian state. It juxtaposes the visions of national statesmen against those advanced by party organizers, scientists, housewives, journalists, and international development workers and diplomats. Examining their promises and plans - and the global contexts in which they were made - this project demonstrates how India's "food question" mediated fundamental arguments over citizenship, governance, and the proper relationship between individuals, groups, and the state. / History

This thesis focuses on the modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) and his diverse range of graphic production, from illustrations in socialist newspapers and magazines with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women, referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" (Yumeji-shiki bijin) in newspaper illustrations, coterie magazines, postcards, frontispieces, posters, and advertisements. Such works circulated widely and within the context of a growing female readership and the emergence of a new media environment that transformed the print medium from its "floating world" profile of the previous century into a technically diverse medium of modern visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. Yumeji's graphic works participated in the generation of new kinds of modern identity. An extensive consideration of Yumeji's life and works reveals his role in the cultivation of a new demography of viewers and readers. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation is a study of ordinary North Korean people who have persevered in the face of tremendous social, political, and economic trials throughout their country's modern history and a tribute to their unflagging ingenuity and good humor that allowed them to hold onto their humanity. Focusing on the question of agency within the realm of everyday living, my inquiry examines the emergence of a laughing subject during the post-Korean War period and the state's efforts to discipline him through cinema in the succeeding decade. A product of the new Soviet-sponsored cultural policy of the 1950s that promoted social and political satire across the socialist world, the jester became an identity tactically adopted by various individuals, which was responsible for the proliferation of nonconformist practices in North Korea. Using Michel de Certeau's concept of the everyday as a sphere of creative inventiveness, this work describes and analyzes the small acts of "comic disobedience" by means of which the ordinary person has been able to outmaneuver the existing order and create a thriving underground culture of antidiscipline. Spanning a variety of media from print cartoons to live-action cinema to animation, the official response to the jester's challenge, on one hand, sought to create identifiable comic characters and, on the other, effectively demarcate between humor and satire with a view of turning a jarring cacophony of laughing voices into a harmonious chorus of collective mirth serving the state's needs. Based on Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, my method of analysis suggests that, despite the government's attempts to eliminate any ambiguity from newly constructed ideological texts, the ordinary individual always finds myriad ways to exercise autonomy through his unending playful subversion of official discourse. By tracing the evolution of this dynamic in the North Korean streets, movie theaters, and film studios over the course of nearly two decades, I argue that the production of formal film comedy was inextricably bound up with the state's desire to interpellate a politically loyal and socially conformist subject and should be seen as part of the larger everyday aesthetic of living that took root within the socialist world. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation began with a question: what does it mean to say or grasp "the economy"? This dissertation examines it examines on-the-ground trading, mining, and money lending between Russian and Qing subjects in Qing Mongolian territories and southeastern Siberia, primarily, though not exclusively, during the years 1860 - 1911. This dissertation uses archival records from Mongolia, the Russian Federation, and the People's Republic of China, in addition to travel accounts, economic surveys, gazetteers, and periodicals. Combining Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Russian primary sources, it provides a trans-imperial examination of both how quotidian trade was carried out as well as the broader intellectual and political contexts that shaped the parameters of economic life. A bourgeoning labor market developed in Mongolia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The legalization of Russian trade provided new labor opportunities for Mongolians and Russian alike, particularly in working in transportation, wool washing, and mining. In addition to the transportation industry examines cases of gold-mining, Russian-Mongolian debt, and Buddhist monasteries' roles in facilitating trade.

This thesis is a reflection upon objects of power and their roles in the lives of people through the lens of a single case example: power objects as they appear throughout the narrative, philosophical, and ritual writings of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialist Sog bzlog pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan (1552-1624) and his milieu. This study explores their discourse on power objects specifically for what it reveals about how human interactions with certain kinds of objects encourage the flow of power and charisma between them, and what the implications of these person-object transitions were for issues of identity, agency, and authority on the personal, institutional, and state registers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tibet.

At the heart of this dissertation lie two political events that hitherto have predominantly been interpreted from the perspective of the xining reform and the factional disputes that accompanied it: the so called qingli reform (1043-1045), and a ritual debate (puyi 1064-1066). One goal of this work is to assess these on their own merits, and in this way gain new insights for our understanding of Wang Anshi's failure to maintain literati consensus in the xining-period, and the nature of 11th-century socio-political associations, or factions, in general. A considerable number of counterexamples cast doubt on views that interpret opposing factions as the manifestation of pre-existing, intellectual or social structures, with firm boundaries between groups prior to the actual dispute. Instead, our discussion of said political events, and the social relationships of actors at the time showed that there were ample connections between leading figures both in the 1030s and '40s, and prior to the puyi and xining disputes. It turned out that in both periods literati networks were much more diverse and ambiguous than the later disputes would suggest, but there was one crucial difference: earlier, literati had been much more likely to reestablish working relationships with erstwhile opponents and their networks, whereas such mending of fences appeared almost impossible in the latter half of the 11th century. To explain the difference from an intellectual perspective, we have turned to an interpretation of ritual offered by Seligman et al., which due to its bearing on social relationships is pertinent to the question at hand. Drawing on a diversity of texts about ritual, as well as the actions and positions taken during the two political events, we argue that views of ritual changed during the period in question: whereas the qingli protagonists had taken ritual on its own terms, and in this way made social ritual usable to keep up and reestablish relationships through intellectual disagreements and political defeat, important later figures relegated ritual to being a part of their larger visions of integrated orders, and as a consequence it lost the mitigating potential it had had earlier. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This thesis will compare and contrast how different genres tell the stories of Japanese American experiences during World War II. In the 1980s and 1990s the emergence of different genres such as memoirs, historical fiction, and documentaries, inspired a fresh approach to portraying history. Using the traditional historical monograph as a foil, this thesis will analyze how these newer genres can deepen our understanding of historic events and peoples on a personal, psychological, and emotional level. Topics of medium, authorship, affect, influence, and authenticity are commonly discussed in the comparisons of these genres. Each chapter will focus on one genre and analyze two works. Chapter 1 on memoirs examines Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and Nisei Memories by Paul Howard Takemoto. Chapter 2 on historical fiction will compare David Guterson’s narrative fiction novel Snow Falling on Cedars and Alan Parker’s narrative film Come See the Paradise. Chapter 3 on documentaries will discuss Ken Burns’ The War and Steven Okazaki’s Unfinished Business. Ultimately, while each work and each genre is unique, the significant commonality among them is their ability to expose the intimate and emotional aspects of historical experiences. This, in turn, prompts our engagement and emotional connection to the portrayed stories, which heightens our understanding of history in a more holistic way.

My dissertation explores how the movement of missionaries across Asia responded to the currents of nationalism, decolonization, and the Cold War producing ideas about sovereignty, race, and religious rights. More specifically, it looks at how U.S. evangelicals in the China Inland Mission, an international and interdenominational mission society, collaborated with Christians in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. While doing so it also details the oft-neglected study of the post-China careers of former China missionaries by extensive use of oral histories. Forced to abandon its only field by the Chinese Communist Party, the mission redeployed as the Overseas Missionary Fellowship sending agents to new nations such as Japan, Indonesia, and Thailand and amongst the overseas Chinese populations scattered across Southeast Asia. The last chapter looks at the OMF’s return to the People’s Republic of China as tourists and expatriates as the means by which “rapprochement” took on religious meanings. Ultimately, I argue missionary mobility produced ideas about religious freedom as a human right across the international community rooted in ambivalent, racialized attitudes toward Asians.