This talk will focus on Koizumi Kikues Manchu Girl (Manshû no shôjo, 1936), a nonfiction work which depicts the author's attempts to "educate" her Manchu maid Li Guiyu in colonial Manchuria. Through the women's conversations on cultural differences between Japanese and Manchu, the text reveals how the colonial project, and in particular cultural assimilation, was promoted and expanded in the domestic sphere. Koizumi's evocation of the tropes of family and motherhood in relation to Guiyu also recasts colonial relations in gendered and familial terms and reflects on the specific roles made available to Japanese and Manchu women within empire.

Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

Japan is at the forefront of the trend in developed nations to have an increasing proportion of the population represented by the elderly. By 2030, people over 65 years of age are expected to reach 30 % of Japan's population. Despite the significance of this demographic group, remarkably little is known about how the elderly adjust to the social changes that they experience with aging. The focus of this talk is on the issue of change as it impacts on the aging individual and how this change is discursively interpreted and negotiated. Recorded informal conversations of elderly Japanese women both with peers and with younger acquaintances will be used to illustrate the speaker's continuing adjustment of her established persona, identity and attitudes in recognition of the changing reality associated with age.

Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

There was nothing inherently unified about the diverse cultures, religions and languages that comprised the Indian subcontinent under colonialism. The European model of nationalism, which took for granted the existence of one religion, one language or one ethnicity was doomed to failure. It was for this impossibility that the British argued that India was not fit to rule itself. It was on behalf of this sense of identity that, beginning in the nineteenth century, Indian writers of literature began to imagine cultural unity through their fictional and poetic works.

By the 1920s and 1930s, literature had come to occupy a central role in the Indian nationalist movement. Yet literary texts not only reflected the politics of Indias leaders (increasingly represented by the Indian National Congress,) but questioned some of their assumptions about the path India's future should take. For instance, the Hindi novelist Premchand set his stories primarily in rural India and satirized the machinations of the urban elite, emphasizing the rural-urban divide that was increasingly visible in mainstream nationalist politics. Likewise, the English-language author Mulk Raj Anand located his stories among the urban poor, disempowered not only by colonialism, but also by the kind of heavy industrialization supported by congress.

Authors affected by partition, such as Saadat Hasan Manto, painted a poignant picture of the injustices perpetrated on displaced families on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. Attention to the details and artistry of these and other fictional writings can add to our understanding of these hugely significant decades in sub-continental history.

Ulka Anjaria is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program of Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. Her dissertation, entitled "Novel Forms: Literary Realism and the Politics of Modernity in India, 1920-1947," discusses the works of Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Raja Rao, Manik Bandopadhyay and Ahmed Ali, relating innovations these authors make on the novel form to larger political developments of the pre-Independence period. She has published articles in Sarai Reader and Economic and Political Weekly.

Ms. Anjaria's talk is the third seminar of the winter quarter South Asia Colloquium Series.

Professor Dittmer received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1971. His scholarly expertise is the study of contemporary China. He teaches courses on contemporary China, Northeast Asia, and the Pacific Rim.

His current research interests include a study of the impact of reform on Chinese communist authority, a survey of patterns of informal politics in East Asia, and a project on the China-Taiwan-US triangle in the context of East Asian regional politics. Professor Dittmer's recently published books and monographs include Sino-Soviet Normalization and Its International Implications (University of Washington Press, 1992), China's Quest for National Identity (with Samuel Kim, Cornell University Press, 1993), China Under Modernization (Westview Press, 1994), and South Asia's Nuclear Crisis (M. E. Sharpe, 2005.)

Dr. Dittmer's talk is the second seminar of the winter quarter South Asia Colloquium Series.

The islamization process in Pakistan is at the core of the contradictions and identity conflict of Pakistan. It is the permanent attempt to rewrite the history whose founding fathers intended to make the homeland for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent, much the against the will of the clergy. However it is also an instrument of perpetuation in power of a largely secular military, which constantly manipulates Islamic symbols.

Although widely discussed, the process of islamization in Pakistan has remained relatively limited. No elected legislature went beyond the expression of the idea of the supremacy of the Islamic law. No elected legislature ever passed a somewhat substantial provision. Despite an increasingly strong, or at least vocal religious pressure, the constitution and the legislation of the Pakistani state are still based on a compromise between modernist institutions and ever more pressing religious demands, yet still limited. The supremacy of the Sharia is regularly reaffirmed, yet its implementation does not progress.

The presentation will analyze the impact of the islamization policies, less however on the legal and constitutional system than on the economic, political and social life of Pakistan. Starting from the observation that the islamization process is more limited that it may seem, the presentation will draw on to say that this process reinforces more than it challenges the existing political and social order, and its most salient political expression, the current military regime, by preventing, on the one side the emergence of any real alternative political project and, although in a more pragmatic manner, by bringing back in mainstream politics the fraction of the social body which could possibly be tempted by more radical means of actions.

In this perspective, four dimensions will be more specifically studied: 1) The evolution of the role of religious movements and parties within the Pakistani state; 2) The relationship between these same religious movements and parties and the Pakistani establishment; 3) The specific role of the madrasas in this relation; 4) The relation the religious parties entertains with democracy.

Frederic Grare is a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He will lead a project assessing U.S. and European policies toward Pakistan and, where appropriate, recommending alternatives with Ashley J. Tellis and George Perkovich. Grare will focus on the tension between stability and democratization in Pakistan, including challenges of sectarian conflict, Islamist political mobilization, and educational reform. Grare also will facilitate interactions between U.S. experts and officials and European counterparts on the main policy challenges in South Asia.

Grare is a leading expert and writer on South Asia, having served most recently in the French embassy in Pakistan and from 1999 to 2003 in New Delhi as director of the Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities. Grare has written extensively on security issues, Islamist movements, and sectarian conflict in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He also has edited the volume, India, China, Russia: Intricacies of an Asian Triangle.

His most recent publications include: "India, China, Russia: Intricacies of an Asian Triangle, with Gilles Boquerat"(eds), (New Delhi, India Research Press, 2003); "Pakistan and the Afghan Conflict, 1979-1985: At the Turn of the Cold War" (Karachi, Oxford University Press, 2003); "Political Islam in the Indian Subcontinent: The Jamaat-i-Islami" (New Delhi, Manohar, 2001)

Grare has an advanced degree from Paris Institut d'Etudes Politiques and received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of International Studies.

Dr. Grare's talk is the first seminar of the winter quarter South Asia Colloquium Series.

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, and terrorism. He will be joining the faculty in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in the fall of 2007. His current work focuses on U.S. military compliance with the Law of War in Iraq. His research on the topic has been published in Foreign Affairs ("How We Fight," November/December 2006) and International Security ("Rules of Engagement: Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq," forthcoming). His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in March 2006, and related articles have appeared in International Security and the Journal of International Affairs. From January 2005 to August 2006, Kahl was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow conducting research on Law of War issues at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he worked in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. He has also been a consultant for the U.S. government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. He received his BA in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993, and his PhD from Columbia University in 2000. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at Harvard University's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American studies).