TRAMEVIC: Transnational Wartime Memories in Asian Visual Culture
Symposium 1: Representations of Victims & Perpetrators
23 May 10-16h
TRAMEVIC (Transnational Wartime Memories in East Asian Visual Culture) examines the creation of transnational wartime memories through contemporary visual culture, approaching fluid and changing phenomena that constantly take on new meanings. The project revolves around unresolved issued that are particularly relevant today as they keep conditioning international relations in the region. This project proposes transnational and multidisciplinary perspectives that assess new and extensive usage of images on mnemonic practices (from film, TV series, animation to photography and print media) that expand beyond national borders and have the potential to create new bridges across the countries.
To that end, TRAMEVIC assesses a variety of war-related images, their usage across several formats (big and small screens as well as museums and print formats), their cultural and social implications, their impact on the international arena, and their role in not only representing the past but also transforming reality in the present. Thus, TRAMEVIC deals with images as contested places, examining how new mnemonic practices in visual culture seem to challenge previous hegemonic discourses and dominant narratives, articulate nuanced approached to the past and have the potential to create new bridges across nations in the present.
PROGRAMME
Venue: Facultad de Filología, Traducción y Comunicación, Room 702 (7th floor)
University of Valencia https://maps.app.goo.gl/PRF83hSRrfT3WhUc7
Zoom link: https://uv-es.zoom.us/j/91903593800
10-10:10h Welcome introduction
10:10-11h
Panel 1. Moderator: Marcos Centeno
Aaron William Moore
The University of Edinburgh
(ponente invitado)
'Who Played during WWII? Amateur Art by Japanese Children in Evacuation, Memory, and Exhibition'
Seth Jacobowitz
Texas State University
(ponente invitado)
Transnational Wartime Memory in Fernando Morais’ Dirty Hearts
11-11.50h
Panel 2. Moderator: Vicente Sánchez-Biosca
Jordi Serrano
Ghent University
Whitewashing and Atonement in Godzilla Minus One: From Traumatized Perpetrators to Empowered Victims"
Ivo Plsek
Uppsala University
"War crimes, war criminals and postwar Japanese cinema"
11.50-12.00h break
12-13:00h
Panel 3. Moderator: Ivo Plsek
Ryan Choi
The University of Edinburgh
“Remembering the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong: Hero(in)es, Hanjian, and Perpetrators in Postwar Chinese-Language Cinema”
Syada Dastagir
University of Westminster
(ponente invitada)
"Cinematic Depictions of the Battle of Imphal"
13:00-14.30h Lunch break
14.30h- 17:00h
Room: Espai Cultural (1st floor)
Tramevic Workshop
Discussion on relevant texts, ideas, concepts, theoretical debates and frameworks, publishing options
Coordinated by Marcos Centeno
Organising Committee: Marcos Centeno, Berto García, Jordi Serrano, Ryan Choi, Jordi Tordera, Raúl Fortes, Amparo Montaner, Ana Prieto, Terushi Morimoto, Alberto Porta, Antonio Blat, María Ferrer, Enrique Burgos, Chuan Li.
Zoom moderators: Ana Prieto, Alberto Porta.
Scientific committee: Blai Guarné (UAB), Vicente Sánchez-Biosca (UV), Jaume Peris (UV), Forum Mithani (Cardiff Univ), Irene González (Birkbeck, University of London), Dolores Martínez (SOAS, Univ of London/Oxford), Edward Vickers (Kyushu University), Bruce Grant (NYU), Barak Kushner (Cambridge)
Funded by Generalitat Valenciana, Conselleria de Educación, Cultura, Universidades y Empleo, Reference CIGE/2023/066.
In collaboration with:
REPERCRI. Contemporary Representations of Perpetrators of Mass Crimes. Project NUREVIO: Nuevos paradigmas en la representación cultural de los espacios de violencia de masas: mirar y contar el siglo XX desde el XXI. Ref PID2022-140003NB-I00, funded by MCIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE”.
GREGAL. Cultural Circulation Japan-Korea-Spain. Project El boom cultural japones y surcoreano en España: aspectos culturales, politicos y socioeconomicos. PID2021-122897NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 / FEDER, UE. Total 82.522€
SPEAKER’S BIOS
Aaron William Moore
The University of Edinburgh
Bio: Prof. Aaron William Moore is the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is a comparative historian who has worked with materials in China, Japan, Russia, the US, and Great Britain, publishing on combat soldiers' diaries in Writing War (Harvard, 2013), civilian accounts of air raids in Bombing the City (Cambridge, 2018), and personal documents by wartime children and youth in a number of articles and book chapters. He has co-edited two new volumes, How Maoism Was Made (Oxford, 2024), which features new work on early PRC Chinese diary writers, and Mass Culture and Intermediality in Interwar Japan (Bloomsbury, 2025), which includes his original translations of the path-breaking intellectual Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke. He is currently finishing a book on transnational wartime youth entitled What Can Be Said, and a series of articles on science fiction, wartime violence, and the memories of Japanese occupation among Taiwanese indigenous communities. His research has been previously supported by the AHRC, British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, and in 2014 he was awarded the Leverhulme Prize.
Seth Jacobowitz
Texas State University
Bio: Seth Jacobowitz is Assistant Professor of Japanese at Texas State University. He is the author of Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard Asia Center, 2016), which won the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize in the Humanities in 2017 and is now available in Portuguese translation as A escrita no Japão da era Meiji (Editora Estação Liberdade, 2024). He is also the translator of The Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan Press, 2008) and Fernando Morais' Dirty Hearts: The History of Shindo Renmei (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021).
Jordi Serrano
Ghent University
Bio: Jordi Serrano-Muñoz is a MSCA fellow at Ghent University focusing on comparative literature and climate crisis representation. His current research project explores disasters as a narrative device for representing the climate crisis in contemporary Japanese, Latin-American, and Australian literary productions. He has also worked on the literary representation of post-war Japanese trauma, particularly from Okinawa. He also teaches at the Open University of Catalonia and the University of Granada and is a member of the research groups GREGAL-UAB, INDOVIG-UOC, and STAND-UGR. He was lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at El Colegio de México (2020-2021) and has been a Japan Foundation Fellow at Waseda University (2021-2022). He co-edits Asiademica: Open Journal of East Asian Studies.
Ivo Plsek
Uppsala University
Bio: Ivo Plsek is as postdoctoral researcher at the Uppsala Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Uppsala University. He specializes in the study of modern Japan, East Asia and memory studies. He has written extensively about the problems of WWII legacies in East Asia and Europe (with a special focus on Japan and Germany). Before coming to Uppsala, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at Masaryk University.
Ryan Choi
The University of Edinburgh
Bio: Ryan Choi is a PhD candidate in Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where his thesis, Collaborationism in Wartime Hong Kong: The Cultural Production of Hanjian (Traitors) under Japanese Occupation, 1941–1945, explores the cultural and literary history of Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. His research specifically focuses on marginalised cultural figures labelled as hanjian (漢奸), or traitors to the Han Chinese, in the post-war period. As a cultural historian, Ryan Choi engages with a diverse range of literature and archival documents from Japanese-occupied regions in East Asia, including Hong Kong, Manchukuo, and Shanghai during World War II, as well as colonial Taiwan.
In 2024, Ryan Choi served as a visiting scholar at the Hong Kong History Centre at the University of Bristol. He previously earned an MA in Chinese Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, in 2021, and a BA in Chinese from the University of Hong Kong in 2019.
Syada Dastagir
University of Westminster
Bio: Syada completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London on the South Asian of Representations in Japanese Animation and has a continuing interest in the field, talking at a number of conferences including an International Symposium on Teaching Comics and publishing a chapter on how India is idealised in depictions of World War 2 by history revisionists and glorify the Japanese Empire. She has also taught several undergraduate modules at Birkbeck including Manga and Anime and currently has a YouTube Channel called Everything Eastenders which discusses the long-running British Soap through an intersectional (and fan) perspective.
