“(Un)archived: Photography Against/Along the Grain of Absence in Global Asias”,
Developing Room's 8th Annual Graduate Student Colloquium
The Developing Room, a photography working group at Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis, announces its eighth graduate colloquium in collaboration with the positions: asia critique journal and New York University.
With a special focus on Global Asias, this year’s colloquium is organized by three PhD students, from Comparative Literature and Art History at Rutgers and East Asian Studies at NYU. We invite doctoral students—at any stage and from any field of study—whose research critically engages with photography in/as/and/against the archive around the issues of Asia and its diasporas. The colloquium will open with a keynote speech, and each graduate participant will give a 20 to 25-minute presentation and engage in a faculty-led panel discussion. Selected papers will also be considered for publication in positions politics, the online platform of positions.
The optical field of photography paradoxically leaves open as much as it forecloses the possibility of interpretive reimagination and speculation. It is this opening, the utterance that draws attention to what the photograph does not show, that lies at the heart of our concerns. With its line of inquiry oriented toward the discourses on historiography, futurities, temporalities, and contingencies in relation to photography, the “(Un)archived” colloquium turns to the archival absence and silence within, on the edge of, and/or in excess of the visual documents. In so doing, we seek to break with the ideology of empiricism and positivist demands of history, instead making room for what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “critical fabulation.” We call on our participants to consider, without limiting themselves to, the following questions:
- How do absences and silences register in photography?
- How do we attend to and articulate that which is invisible, yet present, in the photograph? How might we do this by turning to the archive?
- What are the instances where photography and the archive stand at odds with one another? What can we learn from such dissonances?
- How do certain photographs activate alternative ways of engaging with the archive?
- What kind of image emerges when we move away from the optical realm of photography? In other words, how does photography engage extra-visual senses?
- What is at stake when we embrace imagination and speculation as viable methods in the face of archival absences?
- How do artists, filmmakers, writers, and other cultural practitioners respond to such absences through photography?
- How do the material and archival conditions of certain photographs speak to or unsettle our notions of the (un)photographed?
Keynote Speaker
Jae Won Edward Chung is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is also an affiliate faculty of the Comparative Literature program. He specializes in modern and contemporary Korean literature and visual cultures. He has previously taught at the University of Colorado Boulder and Ewha University. His work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Korean Studies, Azalea, Apogee Journal, Boston Review, and Asymptote. He is currently completing a monograph on the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, and art of South Korea’s First Republic (1948-1960), entitled Aesthetics of Abandonment: Literary and Visual Culture of Early South Korea.
Respondent
Lily M Cho is Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President (International) at Western University. Her research focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial literature and theory, and Asian North American and Canadian literature. Her book, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-citizens (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) is a SSHRC-funded project that focuses on Chinese Canadian head tax certificates known as "C.I. 9's." These certificates mark one of the first uses of identification photography in Canada. Drawing from this archive, her research explores the relationship between citizenship, photography, and anticipation as a mode of agency.
Organizers
Vero Chai is a third-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and editorial assistant of positions: asia critique. Her research concerns the interplay of film, literature, and photography in relation to the archive, with an emphasis on the Asian diasporas and their sonic, affective, and intersubjective articulations.
Julian Wong-Nelson is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Rutgers University-New Brunswick Art History program. Their research interests include Asian-diasporic performance, photography, and video, queer & trans* theory, and cinema studies.
Junho Peter Yoon is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the East Asian Studies Department at New York University. His research mainly focuses on the question of how to rethink ethics in the age of Anthropocene beyond the categorical confines of the human by contextualizing this inquiry through modern and contemporary Korean history, literature, and cinema.
To apply, please submit the following materials to our web form no later than January 15, 2024:
- an abstract of 250 words or less
- a summary of your larger project or dissertation progress, 250 words or less
- a short bio of 150 words or less
- CV
Contact Information
Contact Email: developingroom@gmail.com
