Chao Center for Asian Studies welcomes new directors

By Cindy Dinh     1/15/09 6:00pm

While the rest of Rice may be experiencing a temporary hiring freeze, the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Center for Asian Studies welcomes new leadership. Earlier this month, Tani Barlow started her five-year term as the inaugural director of the Chao Center after being selected from an international pool of applicants in May 2008. Barlow, who previously worked as a professor in history and women's studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, takes over where interim director Richard Smith left off.

"Really, the leadership transition is to honor the work of the people who founded Asian Studies at Rice and look forward to creating a Chao Center that has an international research profile," Barlow said.

She credits her predecessors - including Smith and Professor Stephen Lewis - with helping to develop the Chao Center, which was created with a $15 million endowment from the Chao Foundation in 2007.

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"We're building on a great foundation, so my vision for the future includes intellectuals, students working together across national lines," Barlow said.

The Chao Center is a new research oriented center, whose staff is housed in various locations on campus including Fondren Library, Rayzor Hall and the Humanities Building. Though the Chao Center is separate from the Asian Studies program, they will continue to work closely together, Barlow said.

The overarching focus this year is on the transnationalism movement ideas, people, products and technology moving across borders which makes Asian Studies at Rice distinctive, Barlow said.

"When people are studying Asia, their interest and expertise tend to stop at the national border," Barlow said. "What has been significant about our focus from the very beginning is our emphasis on movement through borders."

The Chao Center plans to develop a seminar series on transnationalism, expected to last a year or two, which will help define and refine ways to analyze the term's various uses.

"I subscribe to Google Alert for the term transnationalism and have seen it used in many ways," Barlow said. "If we work together in a discourse community, then we can get a working definition of what we mean or don't mean [by transnationalism]."

Michele Verma, the new assistant director of the Chao Center also hired this month, said the seminar series seeks to identify the historical development of the term as well as its usages. She said she hopes to see students, researchers and faculty alike from a variety of disciplines at the seminars.

"I think you're going to find transnationalism as a key term in every discipline because it's fundamentally about crossing borders, whether you are talking about people, goods, ideas, finance or other things," Verma said, whose background is on the Indian diaspora. "One of my interests is the development of religious practice among migrants and the kinds of attachments they may have to one or more homelands."

Other terms caught in the fray include internationalism and globalization, which are used pervasively but sometimes in the wrong context. For instance, Barlow suggested transnationalism is a more accurate term to use in certain area of studies like migration. She stressed the importance of using words precisely.

"If we consider migration cross-border Mexico or the transmigration of Chinese from Taiwan, Indonesia or Vietnam into this community, transnationalism would be a better word than globalization," Barlow said. "We need a way of understanding why we put so much emphasis on the relationship between countries."

The transnational theme seems to be embedded in Barlow's own life. While at the University of Washington, Barlow noticed how traditional Asian studies departments focus on area studies with little collaboration across national boundaries.

"I belonged to the China program, and my other colleague belonged to the Indonesian program," Barlow said. "We had no institutionalized way of talking across borders." With funding from the Rockefeller Grant in Humanities, Barlow experimented with ways of talking across national boundaries with specialists on common topics such as war trauma and revolutionary trauma.

Trauma seems to be a common recurring theme in Barlow's work. She is the founding senior editor of the academic journal, positions: east asia culture critique, which recently won the "Best Special Issue" on War Trauma in December 2008. It is the publication's second award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals of the Modern Languages Association.

The award-winning issue focused on what trauma is and examined how it is dealt with in Asia.

"A lot of people who talk about post-WWII trauma think of the United States and Europe," said Meagan Williams, associate editor of positions. "The Asia focus kind of gets lost."

Published three times a year, the journal's upcoming themes will include "Philosophy and the Political in Wartime Japan, 1931-1945" and "The Cultural 'State' of Contemporary Taiwan."

Barlow founded the journal 17 years ago to provide space for cultural, artistic and philosophical expression, since Asian Studies at the time was primarily focused on social sciences.

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