Syncopating East Asia

Shiqi Lin
Comparative Literature
UC Irvine

Alexandra Yan
Comparative Literature
UC Irvine

Participants

Drawing theoretical inspiration from syncopation, the musical practice of stressing weak beats and creating new rhythms, “Syncopating East Asia” solidifies an interdisciplinary network of engaged graduate students and scholars to study East Asia against the strong beats of colonial, imperial and national frameworks. To syncopate East Asia means to disrupt rhythms of established historiographies and put emphasis on off-beats – the region’s repressed histories – as a vital step towards post-nationalist decolonization. Given East Asia’s shifting role in the post-Cold War international system, as well as the changing relationship between East Asia and the rest of the world in a global age of triumphal capitalism and rising ultra-rightism, this project asks: how one can generate a trans-border thinking that attends to ethical forms of cohabitation at the local level? In an age in which Asia is “on the rise”, how is East Asia imagined by itself and others? To address such questions, this project revisits silenced pasts and enduring traumas of colonialism, interrogates border zones at the confluence of militarism and capitalism, and attends to post-Cold War East Asia as a post-, neo-, and anti-imperialist space of entangled desires.