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This dissertation explores the hybrid training and performance of Chinese classical dance (gudianwu) and ballet in China’s elite dance conservatory, Beijing Dance Academy (BDA), in post-socialist China (1980 - the present). Since the establishment of BDA in 1954, the hybridity of ballet and Chinese dance has been first institutionalized in training professional Chinese dancers and has had a profound influence on the development of dance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in the 1980s, many gudianwu practitioners and dance critics in PRC criticized the failure of the hybrid training and performance in promoting a unique Chinese national character. In contrast, hybrid performance practices as a means to Sinicize the Western dance form of ballet have been celebrated. To create a unique Chinese national body aesthetic, gudianwu practitioners have attempted to revive Chinese traditional culture in dance through minimizing the influence of ballet, while Chinese ballet practitioners have created ballet works incorporating Chinese stories and Chinese arts, such as gudianwu, Chinese opera, local music, and traditional costumes. Instead of considering the promotion of unique Chinese characteristics in dance as a fixed and essentialized cultural practice, this dissertation argues that the hybrid dancing bodies of gudianwu and ballet have become important sites for negotiating Chinese nationalism, modernism, and individualism within the context of globalization. In keeping hybridity and Chineseness as the two central concepts in this study, I examine three research issues: first, how ballet has shaped gudianwu classes and gudianwu dancing bodies; second, how Chinese forms, such as martial arts, Chinese opera, and Chinese folk dance, have influenced ballet training and performance; and third, how the tension and interrelationship between these two hybrid dance practices complicates the concept of Chineseness. My methodology is informed by an interdisciplinary lens that includes postcolonial cultural studies (Bhabha 1994), Chinese cultural studies (Chow 1998), and anthropological Chinese dance studies (Wilcox 2011). I apply ethnography as my primary mode of collecting data while taking the meanings, functions, and historical and cultural contexts of dance into account. As the first dissertation that foregrounds the operation of hybridity in Chinese dance and ballet, this dissertation aims to enrich the theoretical framework of postcolonial and Chinese cultural studies and contribute to a mutual understanding between Chinese and Western cultures. / Dance

This dissertation explores constructions of Chineseness in China Wind music, a trend that emerged in the 2000s in Chinese popular music. China Wind music typically references traditional Chinese culture and incorporates Chinese instruments into global pop genres, such as hip hop, R&B, rock, and ballad. The trend was popularized by artists based in Taiwan but also includes those from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Singapore. China Wind music’s seemingly pro-China messages belie the diverse political and cultural realities of Chinese-speaking artists and consumers residing in different regions. To better understand the complex relationship that China Wind artists and consumers have with Chinese identity, culture, and politics, I suggest that China Wind artists are acting as cultural nationalists who construct “an imagined cultural China” based on a supposedly shared culture and history. The three approaches to analyzing China Wind music employed in this thesis are: examining the musical construction of Chineseness in China Wind songs through the use of pentatonicism and musical borrowing, surveying the social meanings of instruments (e.g. erhu, pipa) and their deployment in China Wind music, and analyzing the relationship between the song and visual narratives in China Wind music videos and their remediation of Beijing opera, calligraphy, and martial arts. These analyses reveal how China Wind music incorporates a mix of living traditions and invented traditions (Hobsbawm 1983) to evoke an ambiguous “ancient” Chineseness that fosters a sense of belonging and connects audiences from various locales to an imagined cultural China. / Music Theory

This dissertation examines the ‘failed’ forced migration of the Kashmiri Sikh community after they became targets of an attack carried out by unknown perpetrators on March 20th, 2000, in Chittisinghpora, a quiet Sikh village hidden away in the mountains of South Kashmir. Claiming the lives of thirty-five Sikh men from the village, the attack was a first for Sikhs who by all accounts had been ‘spared’ the violence of the Kashmir conflict and had been living peacefully in Kashmir Valley for generations. Although no one knows who perpetrated the attack or why, speculation runs rife that its foremost purpose was to trigger a mass displacement of Sikhs from the region. Yet, after days of contemplating whether they should move, the Sikhs stayed. If indeed the aim of the violence was to trigger a mass displacement, then what explains why the Kashmiri Sikhs were not displaced? Using Chittisinghpora as an entry point, my dissertation aims to interrogate displacement as a response to violence. I use the term ‘rootedness’, which Myron Weiner describes as a sort of territorial ethnicity with which people make claims to a space, to describe the Sikh decision to stay and argue the ability (and desire) of people to continue living in a place of violence may be construed as an act of resistance not only to the intended consequence of violence, in this case displacement, but to the violence itself. Examining a failed forced migration, therefore, allows us to understand not only the circumstances under which a community resists getting displaced despite experiencing violence but also how people continue to live in the place of violence. To understand Sikh rootedness in Kashmir, I conducted ethnographic research in Kashmir over a period of eight months in 2018 and follow up visits in March 2019 and 2021, during which I collected over 100 interviews with Sikhs and Muslims in North, South and central Kashmir, and completed several hours of observation every week. Additionally, I collected data from newspaper archives located in Punjab and historical archives located in New Delhi. I explain Sikh rootedness as a function of two main factors: 1) the precarity that comes with being a group that is neither considered the ally of the Indian state nor of the Muslims, which allows Sikhs to negotiate safety and 2) the landedness of Kashmiri Sikhs, and to a lesser extent, their employment in government which are economic anchors. Together, both factors allow Sikhs to assert social and economic agency and maintain a peaceful ‘coexistence’ with Muslims, enough to justify remaining rooted. Although the focus on displacement in migration studies is certainly warranted given the massive numbers of people displaced due to conflict, the fact is that not everyone can, or wants to, leave. Given this, a focus on what keeps people rooted is urgently needed. In the scholarship on Kashmir, displacement has been a predominant theme, given the large-scale exodus of the Kashmiri Hindus (Pandits) following an escalation of violence in the state in the 1990s. This has led to an unfortunate communalization of much of the discourse that comes out of Kashmir, and also sometimes reduced it to a ‘Hindu-Muslim’ or ‘India-Pakistan’ conflict. Sikhs are predominantly absent from this scholarship. Even in the discipline of Critical Kashmir Studies which has sought to focus on the people’s experiences of conflict rather than a religious or statist narratives, Sikhs experiences in and of conflict, remain missing. Understanding their lived experience in Kashmir, therefore, attempts to correct this erasure and also disrupts binary discourses. / Geography

This thesis intends to explore the peacebuilding process in East Asia. It mainly examines the politics, cultures, and economies of China, Japan, and South Korea, along with the on-going issues between South Korea and North Korea. To be able to establish a stable and prosperous society in East Asia, these three countries play a major role, and they can create greater cooperation within the region and on the international level. Peacebuilding process highly depends on politic, culture, and economy of these three countries. Confidence Building Measures (CBM) and Peaceful Settlement of Disputes (PSD) are the excellent strategies for achieving peace in the region after studying each country carefully. Economic activities and good trade relations are essential to the peace development in East Asia.

This dissertation critically examines both the discursive and empirical significances of recent newcomers in the Haitian religious field, namely Korean and Korean American Protestant women missionaries. This confluence of Korean and Haitian Protestantism, which first emerged in the early 1990s, is a compelling case of the diversification of contemporary transnational and even global Christianity. Protestant Christianity was implanted in Haiti and Korea at around the very same time, in the nineteenth century, by North American missionaries who were inspired to work in new national religious fields by the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) and its evangelical fervor. In the eyes of North American missionaries, both countries were religious wildernesses waiting to truly receive and understand the Good Word. Since then, in both Korea and Haiti, westernization, Western hegemony, and Western neo-colonialization have featured strong undercurrents of North-American-derived Protestantism. However, the respective lots and religious fields of each country have been dramatically different overall largely because of national and global economic and political forces. South Korea enjoyed formidable growth both in its economy and its evangelical Christian population after the Korean War (1950-1953), resulting in Korean Christianity’s zealous participation in evangelical Protestant mission overseas, following the models of North American mission enterprises, especially toward the end of the century. Meanwhile, Haiti continued to suffer from natural disasters, political turmoil, and widespread abject poverty. Thus, overseas Haitian Protestant mission work is altogether non-existent, though internally evangelical prosetalization efforts are legion and often aggressive. Vodou and Catholicism, meanwhile, continue to captivate the majority of the Haitian masses, but Protestantism is clearly on the rise across the nation. In is into this socio-religious context that Korean Protestant missions expanded in the Caribbean nation, an expansion that has amplified especially since the tragic 2010 earthquake. Toward understanding these developments, this project investigates the influx of Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries in contemporary Haiti and the reverberations of North American evangelicalism as channeled through and adapted by Korean missionaries. With all of these historical and contemporary contexts in mind, this dissertation more sharply focuses on a specific group of actors in the Haitian religious field, namely contemporary Korean American Protestant women missionaries. I argue that their activity suggests a new type of examples for current scholarly discourses about the relationship between gender and evangelical missions. By way of historical analyses of both Korean and Haitian Protestant Christianity and oral histories based on interviews with Korean missionaries in Haiti, this study argues that Korean evangelicalism has developed a distinctive gendered praxis that claims both continuity with and divergence from North American evangelicalism. It also shows that in both South Korea and Haiti, twentieth-century U.S. hegemony and military occupation were significant factors in propelling Protestant Christianity. / Religion

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