Browsing by Subject "Asian studies"

Brother Is a Street Musician – Viewing the Landscape of Modernity Through Popular Songs by Zhang Eujeong was originally published in Korean in 2006. Described as a “fascinating journey upstream into the past to understand where the current will bring the future of Korean pop music,” (Busan Ilbo Review, 2009) Brother Is a Street Musician does not deal with contemporary K-Pop; rather, it visits the first chapter of Korea’s popular music history, which coincided with Japanese colonization in the first half of the 20th century. Combining archival research with a critical analysis of the earliest popular songs, the early recording industry, the first modern era musicians and composers, and the first formation of the consumer masses, Zhang’s book seeks to address the essential question – how did a colonized people construct their own, unique form of popular culture? Today, popular music from Korea has established itself as a formidable, global cultural phenomenon, garnering the interest of not only the power players in the global music industry, but also scholars in many cross-disciplinary fields. As an academic inquiry into the first moment in the history of popular music from Korea, an English translation of this book will be an essential resource in today’s lively conversations around the emerging field of Korean popular music. Furthermore, as a companion to more books coming from Korea to meet the growing demand for resources with diverse perspectives in the study of popular music and culture from the periphery, this book can spur on thoughtful discussions about how dialogue between English academia and the academia of host-language countries/regions, facilitated by translation, can progressively enrich the way we expand knowledge about transnational phenomena as they flow across time, borders, and languages.

Christianity in South Korea has long been touted the one success story in Asia, dubbed the “Korean miracle,” whose traction and trajectory of explosive growth are unanimously traced back to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in numbers at the end of the nineteenth century. Among them, one monumental figure towers over all: the Presbyterian Reverend Horace G. Underwood (1859-1916), widely considered the single most important and influential western missionary ever to set foot on Korea, in large part due to his extraordinary sacrificial love for the nation and the people of Korea.

As such, his theology and practice of missions represent a work of love from the missionary par excellence of Korea, who missiologically operated out of best intentions and overwhelming love for the natives. However, as this dissertation critiques, it is a work of love compromised by his racial imagination, not incidental to his missiology but at its core. Specifically, this dissertation theologically examines how race manifests and functions in Underwood’s missiology as a multifaceted pseudo- or anti-Christology. Hence, the story of Underwood is one in which his theology of mission problematically operated out of a thick and dynamic racialized Christology, even as he imagined he was espousing and performing the very teachings of Jesus, making it all the more ironic and tragic. At the core of such a false and faulty “Christology,” whiteness, with Underwood himself as its white masculine exemplar, as racially constructed and stabilized, unrelentingly seeks to usurp the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. In this way, race as an anti-Christology with the white masculine posing as Christ functions as the missiological basis for his formation of a de facto white Korean Christianity.

The dissertation deconstructs and critiques Underwood’s racialized Christology in two parts. In Part I, I argue that Underwood’s missiological approach in making Koreans known through a comprehensive and comparative racial characterization presupposes a racialized doctrine of creation, whereby the white body, in lieu of Jesus, is deemed the revelation of full humanity (Chapter 1). What is more, in this doctrine, the white body positions itself also as the definitive judge of all humanity, and through its “all-seeing, all-knowing” judgment, the white body creates humanity anew, which in Underwood’s case meant re-creating Koreans as racialized modern subjects with a subjectivity posed to perform whiteness. As such, whiteness arrogates for itself Christ’s divine roles as the Judge and the Creator (Chapter 2).

In Part II, I shift to the heart of Underwood’s missiology: his racialized soteriology. I show that his argument for the missionary investment in Koreans is predicated on a racialized doctrine of salvation, which designates the white body, as opposed to Jesus, as the very incarnation of the elect, the very image of the saved (Chapter 3), along with the nation, as opposed to the church, as the body politic of the elect, with the emerging American empire the very image of the elect nation (Chapter 4). Moreover, in his racialized soteriology it is the white body who is the savior or the one electing, in place of Jesus, the true Elected One and Savior. Here, his racialized doctrines of creation and salvation come together in his re-creation of Korean religious subjectivity for the sake of saving the nation and the people of Korea. In this way, Underwood helps to establish a vision of racial nationalism for Korea that continues to shape the interaction between Christian practice and nationalist goals of well-being and progress in whiteness within Korea and in other parts of the world.

This dissertation develops a "politics of ambiguity" through case studies of affect in contemporary works by European, American and Singaporean composers. While studies of intercultural music have focused on narratives of power relations (e.g. orientalism, postcolonial ambivalence), a new method of interpretation can be based on the affective ambiguity that arises from intercultural encounters, indicating a less than totalitarian power and thus forming a basis for political struggle. The focus is on three pieces of music by American-born John Sharpley, Belgium-born Robert Casteels, and Singaporean Joyce Koh, who hail from across the globe and incorporate Asian musics, arts, and philosophies into a variety of modernist, neo-romantic, and postmodern musical idioms. Modalities of ambiguity include: perceptual focus on musicalized Chinese calligraphy strokes, versus perceptual liminality arising from modernist technique; the musical embodiment of Buddhist disembodiment; and, ambiguous relationality of intercultural sounds. Liminality, disembodiment, and relationality mark the cessation of identity politics in favor of a form of cultural hermeneutics that pays heed to the complex interaction between society, sonic media and the neurophysiology of listening.

As the twenty-first century has entered an era of catastrophes, post-catastrophic trauma writings in world literature bear witness and give testimonies to the moments of crisis. With a comparative literary study of the post-catastrophic trauma writings and other forms of representations that respond to the 9/11 terrorism in the United States and the Covid-19 pandemic outbreaks in China, this research explores the question of how the collective traumas develop dynamic relationships with individuality and influence individuals’ mental lives affectively. In the catastrophic aftermath, the collective traumas shared by the individuals act on their interiority and form a sense of collective isolation, which means that an individual staying in a collectivity remains unconsciously isolated affects. The research will illustrate the embodiments of collective isolation at an individual level and delve into its social causes at a collective level. On an individual level, collective isolation is recognized as a traumatized subject’s sense of detachment from the chronological present, showing a dislocation with time. On a collective level, collective isolation is an exteriorization of a traumatized society by two types of violence: subjective violence and objective violence. The intensive conflicts around subjective violence directly by catastrophes may transform into invisible objective violence, which constantly and implicitly influences politics, cultures, and human affects. This research would land at the point that collectivity and individuality as two spatial concepts could be interpenetrated through affects, illustrating that the collective traumas represent dynamic relationships among violence, affects, public spheres, and the individual’s mental world.

Until the end of the 20th century, with the deepening of the Opening-up and Reform movement under the context of globalization and advancement of communication methods, both culture and economy in the PRC have achieved unprecedented success. Due to this mobilized improvement, the queer community in the PRC seems to have gained more and more visibility at the same time. In this case, the increasing queer activities in the PRC may be associated with a Westernized sense of “queer mobility”, which indicates an expanding space of recognition, identification, and presence for queer individuals. However, regarding the specific post-socialist context in the contemporary PRC, the economic, cultural, or social mobility may directly result in the phenomenon of “queer mobility”, since such progression in other aspects may potentially neglect or conceal the marginalized backwardness that has been embedded in the process of development. In other words, the sense of queer mobility cannot fully represent the intricate reality of queer subjects in the PRC. Thus, this thesis will primarily focus on the concept of “queer immobility” as an alternative to interpret the queerness in the contemporary PRC. Specifically, this queer immobility may not be understood as negative or an outright opposition to the sense of queer mobility; instead, the stress of “immobility” may offer us a novel lens to re-investigate the underlying circulation of loss and continuous melancholy structured by the spatial and psychological constraints within Chinese queer subjects. Also, the intervention of “immobility” may tentatively break the illusion of queer activism structured by the economic, cultural, or political prosperity. To visualize such queer immobility, the thesis will focus on four films in the contemporary PRC. Through the analysis of the immobilized psychological and geographical space, the thesis intends to reveal the multifaceted conundrum of Chinese queer subjects, who struggle between the mobilized illusions and uncompromising restrictions.

This dissertation examines how un(der)employed South Korean young adults maintain optimism in their pursuit of a “good life” that itself is contingent on regular employment. Based on fieldwork about everyday economic insecurity in neoliberal Seoul, I propose that the labor invested to keep their employability viable includes a labor of the voice. I examine how my informants cultivate the aesthetic, poetic, and communicative qualities of their voice in order to get ahead in a world in which quantitative assessments, communicative labor exchange, and technological mediation—the “digitalities of neoliberalism”—confer value on particular kinds of voice. I attend to the shifting demands that inform what one’s voice can do or should be (or not) to be aurally recognized as an employable subject, arguing for how this conceptual instability keeps Koreans’ aspirational pursuits continuously unfinished, and their social mobility largely horizonal. Listening durationally to how my informants’ vocal articulations register this potential, this dissertation critiques the teleological orientations of neoliberal (im)possibility that aurally implicates their voice and limits their futurity otherwise. Terming this specific process “analog optimism,” I propose that laboring (over the voice) is a process which continuously hints at the qualitative capaciousness of more life, both in the future and the meantime, even as the rationalized logics of a knowledge economy compresses the vitality of life, reduces time for pleasure, incites exhaustion, and complicates their status as a liberal human.

Many psychologists and philosophers hold that anger is a completely normal and often healthy human emotion. This position perhaps traces back to Aristotle, who argued that anger is morally good when it is moderated, such as towards the right people, to the right degree, and for the right reasons. Even though Aristotle’s position has widespread acceptance, this view of anger is challenged by the philosophical traditions of Stoicism and Buddhism. Despite starting from disparate premises, both conclude that anger is impermissible and ought to be eliminated, a position called anger eliminativism. Even so, there has been little critical engagement with their respective arguments as bona fide philosophical positions, worthy of consideration in their own right. This dissertation hopes to help remedy that lack. To do so, it offers a philosophical exploration of Stoic and Buddhist arguments. It contrasts and critically evaluates the views of Stoicism and Buddhism, evaluates the Buddhist metaphysical reasoning about anger, responds to existing interpretations of Stoic anger eliminativism, and presents Stoic objections to arguments from the Confucian tradition that anger is at least sometimes the morally virtuous response to perceived wrongdoing.

In his five-year-long world literature lecture series, running from 1989 to 1994, the Chinese diasporic writer-painter Mu Xin (1927-2011) provided a puzzling advice for the group of emerging Chinese artists living in New York: “Art is to sacrifice.” Reading this advice in tandem with other comments on “sacrifice” that Mu Xin provided throughout the lecture series, this study uses the concept of “art is to sacrifice one’s death” to examine the intricate relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Mu Xin’s project of art. The question of diasporic positionality is inherent in the relationship between aesthetic and ethical discourses, since the two discourses themselves were born in a Western tradition that was once foreign to Mu Xin. Examining his life together with his works in different medium, I trace the intellectual genealogy of his works to the legacy of Lu Xun and Lin Fengmian’s debate in the late 1920s. Then, I examine how Mu Xin reinvented their aesthetic-cum-ethical project to shape his role as an artist in the world. Finally, through comparing him to a similar Chinese diasporic artist Gao Xingjian, I put the artistic image that Mu Xin established for himself in relation to the political position that he inhabited as a diasporic artist working across cultural boundaries. I argue that Mu Xin not only vigorously forwarded an ethical project in pursuit of humanness with his advice on art but also envisioned such humanness to be a mediative process of social activity instead of any essential state of being or sentimentality in a singular mind. Through such an artistic project, Mu Xin managed to participate in reforming the static boundaries of culture and nation-state, such that he carried out a political project though fictional means, making the world more adaptive to individuals living within it.

This thesis investigates the work and life experiences of an under-discussed and female-dominant Chinese diasporic community, Chinese immigrant teachers in American K12 education. I argue that, firstly, while being privileged as high-skilled professionals and enjoying more mobility compared to their domestic sisters, Chinese female immigrant teachers are also subject to the precarity and intersectionality deriving from the underfunded American education and their triple marginality of being women, Asian and first-generation immigrants. Secondly, the structural inequality of gendered labor performed in both the professional and domestic roles of female teachers tends to be reinforced in the diaspora. By adopting mixed approaches of interview-based ethnography and digital ethnography, this thesis offers a critical alternative to the masculine and material version of Chinese immigration and contributes to a more extensive intellectual effort to understand the systematic racial and gender inequality associated with globalization.

While China’s recent Belt and the Road Initiative and its expansion across Eurasia is garnering public and scholarly attention, this dissertation recasts the space of Eurasia as one connected through historic Islamic networks between Mecca and China. Specifically, I show that eruptions of unpredictable wars and political turnovers across Asia in the twentieth century sparked a sector of Chinese Muslim militarists and scholar-politicians to constantly reformulate extensive networks of kinship, scholarship, patronage, pilgrimage and diplomacy between China, the Indian Ocean world and the Arabian Peninsula. In these endeavors, Mecca represented a hub and mediator of mobility, a diplomatic theater filled with propaganda and contestations, and a fictive homeland that turned into a real home which absorbed streams of exiles and refugees.

Each chapter adds a layer of Chinese Muslims’ engagements with Mecca as a locale and a metaphor – from old little Meccas in Linxia (southern Gansu) and Canton (Guangzhou), to the new logistical hub of Shanghai that hosted Mecca-bound pilgrims from across China in the first half of the twentieth century, and to Mecca where competing pilgrimage diplomatic delegations and refugee settlers asserted their belonging. By doing so, the dissertation unleashes Chinese Muslims’ sphere of activities, imaginaries, space-making, and historiographical reconfigurations from the confines of the territorial state of China, revealing the creation of sacred places and logistical hubs across regions, and channels of circulations that went through them. I draw from a wealth of pilgrimage and diplomatic travelogues, interviews with living communities in Saudi Arabia, mainland China and Taiwan over multiple generations, archival documents, memoirs and biographies.

While the protagonists in this dissertation represent only a portion of the diverse groups of Chinese Muslim populations, they present an indicative view of Chinese Muslims as a collective — as a people for whom real and imagined connections with external places have been central to their self-understandings and social mobility in multiple locales. At certain moments when inter-state relations were about to take off, they undertook roles as diplomatic mediators in official and unofficial capacities. Their spatial configurations, in turn, show the role of Mecca as a physical site and a symbolic center in assembling inter-Asian circulations -- giving rise to little Meccas and infrastructural hubs elsewhere, attracting competing diplomatic missions, and offering a haven for pilgrim sojourners and diaspora communities who have constituted the diverse social make-up of Saudi Arabia.

When Kizuna AI debuted as the first VTuber in the world, a new Japanese popular culture emerges. In just five years, as a new category of YouTubers, a group of VTubers (virtual YouTubers) is gradually coming into the public eye. Different from other YouTubers, VTubers use a digital avatar to represent their body and response to their audience. By using technologies such as 3D and live2D, VTuber are able to create any characters they want ignoring the limitations of their real-life identity. Through their interactions with audience through digital avatars, some VTubers have gained a large number of followers and earnings during live streaming. Graphics technology and VTuber’s performance create a connection between virtuality and reality. However, since the emergence of VTuber agencies in 2018, the VTubing phenomenon faces several new limitations. The agency’s business contract shatters the fantasy world that VTuber brings to their audience and prompt the audiences to shift their attention from the VTuber's behavior to that of the people manipulate the avatar (naka no hito). The result dilutes or even eliminates the connection between the VTubers and their digital avatar.

The term “Cloud Player” (云玩家) has been widely used as a put-down of the alleged pseudo-players who actively engage in online game discussion but seldomly play games themselves, and game live streaming is considered as the major channel for those to indirectly experience games. This paper enquires into the identification and population of the so-called cloud players in China by investigating Chinese players’ habits, consumption, and preferences in game and game live streaming through survey and interviews. The study showed that cloud players are an endogenic subgroup of the Chinese game community that has been marginalized and stigmatized. Cloud player as an identity is not a static but fluid and composite status an individual can opt for in experiencing one game at a time. To analyze the complex play mechanism of cloud players, a particular play conduct named proxy play by which gamers actively take on avatars of avatars and tune their levels of agency to varying play scenarios, is proposed and elucidated based on the established research on individuals’ motivations for and engagement in game live streaming as well as reflective discussion of prominent theoretical frameworks in game studies such as the magic circle and the frame theory.

The relationship between China and Hollywood has been a contested subject as a result of complicated historical trajectories. Whether during the Republican era or during the post-1994 period when Hollywood films were reimported to the Chinese market, Hollywood’s “dominance” seems to be the prevailing narrative, a narrative that describes one party’s (Hollywood’s) position of dominance over the other (the Chinese market). From the perspective of marketization, Hollywood and the Chinese film industry are entangled in an intense competition. From the perspective of culturalization, though, such a black and white binary is not entirely applicable, because culture itself is always undergoing continuous negotiation and reformulation. This thesis takes two recent Chinese films—Wolf Warrior II (2017) and The Great Wall (2016)—as my case studies to discuss two of the major forms of representation in the current Sino-Hollywood relationship, namely: “chollywooding” and “pandering.” I seek to highlight the dynamics of cultural negotiation and accommodation occurring between the two parties. Inspired by Prasenjit Duara’s concept of “circulatory history,” I challenge the idea of the “exclusiveness” of Hollywood, or the stationariness of any cultural form. I argue that Wolf Warrior II represents a new cultural space—a “Chollywood cinema” (that is, “Hollywood cinema with Chinese characteristics”) that combines Hollywood filmmaking techniques with Chinese ideology. I show that, while Chollywood cinema is particularly appealing to Chinese audiences, it is viewed much less favorably by overseas viewers. By contrast, The Great Wall employs a strategy of pandering that is less successful in terms of both its domestic and international receptions because it deviates from both “Hollywood” and “Chollywood/Chinese” ideologies. The aim of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, I demonstrate that, from a cultural standpoint, the Sino-Hollywood relationship must be characterized as one of “negotiation”: both parties are not simply in a competitive relationship but also a collaborative one, whether they wish to be or not. This reveals a dynamic global-local interplay between “chollywooding” and “pandering.” On the other hand, the growing popularity and success of “Chollywood cinema” indicates how “chollywooding” will take on an increasingly significant role in reformulating Sino-Hollywood negotiation in the foreseeable future.

The central question this dissertation engages with is why modern states in the Persian Gulf rely heavily on informal networks of untrained and inexperienced recruits from the region of Balochistan, presently spread across Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The answer, it argues, lies in the longue durée phenomenon of Baloch conquering territories abroad but not ruling in their own name. Baloch, I argue, conquered not to establish their sovereign rule, but to open channels of mobility for others. The rise of nation-states and citizen-armies in the twentieth century limited the possibility of Baloch conquest. Yet, the Baloch continued to find a place in the Gulf’s protection industry through historically shaped informal, familial, commercial, and parapolitical transnational networks. Flexible and persistent Baloch networks provided territorially bounded states the ability to access resources outside their boundaries without investment in formal international contracts.

Moreover, this dissertation makes the argument that mobile Baloch operated as ‘Portfolio-Mercenaries’, offering their military-labor to foreign states in order to build their own portfolio of transnational economic, social and political activities. At times these portfolio projects contradicted state interests; at other moments they corroborated them. In either situation, the non-soldiering activities of mercenaries went on to transform the nature of political order in the twentieth-century space of the Indian Ocean. They shaped the nature of international law, carried state order beyond borders, stabilized unpopular regimes, and provided ready sources of labor. Through the example of Baloch Portfolio-Mercenaries, the dissertation thus highlights the thick and enduring relationships between state and transnational networks.

This project offers an introduction to the Japanese art auction market, analysis into insights for auction house specialization and segmentation, insights on the top 100 artists in terms of median hammer prices (unfiltered and filtered with at least ten works sold) and volume, the prominence of Avant-Garde artists in the Japanese art auction market from the years 2008 to 2017, and a new provenance model initiated through digital images in artist analysis. The goal of the project is to draw a general scope of view on Japanese art auction market through data visualization, as well as to offer rudimentary digital models for novel methodologies to approach art market research.

Japanese art auction houses have history back to the 1970s. In this project, six different auction houses were examined (Shinwa, Est-Ouest, Mainichi, SBI Art, The Mallet, and The Market). This range of auction houses reflects the segmentation in the Japanese art auction market, with Shinwa dominating the upper-end of sales, and Mainichi the lower-end. After analyzing the top 100 artists sorted by hammer price, median hammer price and volume and looking at sample works, it is concluded that the Japanese buyers favor relatively cheap art by Japanese paintings whose styles are reminiscent of more expensive Western artists. Among the top 100 by hammer price and median hammer price, many artists belong to the Avant-Garde movement, suggesting that the Japanese art auction market has a strong preference towards Avant-Garde artists.

It is generally considered that the art market is too complicated to be explained within a specific digital framework as there are too many social variables that are too difficult to recognize, yet it is still possible to address questions of market performances and characteristics, with sales prices as the primary information indicating values and relative scarcities. Also, by creating data matrices for pre-set art movements, historical periods and specific artists, the distinct roles that a movement or an artist played can be drawn into the big picture of the contemporary Japanese art market.

With empathy, agony, and hatred, the "Comfort Women" issue has sparked vehement discussions in 21st-century China. Despite its belated emergence, the rising Chinese "Comfort Women" case has adopted a new format of commemoration to continue its discussion, situated at the crossroads between the international redress effort related to the comfort system and the creation of a legitimized narrative surrounding the "Nanjing Massacre." To contextualize the resurgence of attention towards Chinese "Comfort Women" within the framework of questions about why, for whom, and how the memory of wartime sexual violence can and should be narrated, this paper explores the contested effort in constructing Chinese "Comfort Women," considering collective remembrance, gender disparities, and national sentiments in contemporary China. This research provides a substantial analysis of news coverage from 1992 to 2023. By analyzing the frequency of mentions of the discourse of "Comfort Women," I aim to explore the context in which "Comfort Women" were reintroduced in China and how history serves as a site of political activity. Followed by the emphasis on documentary "Twenty-Two" to dismantle this macro theme into the micro digital sphere, challenging state-approved patriotic sentiments regarding "Comfort Women." Furthermore, a case study of the "Lijixiang" museum highlights the contradictory tension between the overlooked subjectivity of the survivors and the prevailing national sentiments in the name of reflection. This helps to reveal the prevalent silence among Chinese survivors, shedding light on wartime violence in villages and the ongoing patriarchal suppression faced by women. To further challenge the authenticity of national sentiments, against singular emphasis on imperial perpetration.

What is a hot pot? As a Chinese cooking method, prepared with a simmering pot of soup stock at the dining table, containing a variety of East Asian foodstuffs and ingredients, hot pot is not just one dish. This thesis is aimed at using the booming hot pot catering industry in over the last three decades as an entry point to examine the shift from the socialist asceticism to the capitalist abundance in contemporary urbanities in PRC and attempt to address the following questions: first, in which ways does a hot pot express the post-socialist Chinese society? Second, how does the transformation and increasing popularity of hot pot represent the modern middle-class lifestyle? Third, what can hot pot tell us about the spread of a food trend via mass media and popular culture? Combining the ethnographical engagement with the physical restaurant space exemplified by Dong Lai Shun and Hai Di Lao, and an anthropological approach towards the cultural and historical representations of hot pot, this thesis argues that hot pot represents the postmodern feature in the post-socialist China.

“Guangchangwu,” or what is literally translated as “square-dancing,” is a form of public dance that has been exceedingly popular, albeit controversial, in China over recent years. Most of the participants are elderly women in their late-50s or above, who roughly fall in the category called “dama” (“big-mother”). Usually, a dancing group assembles in the evening and dances on a daily basis to the music played through a portable loudspeaker. Yet, because many dancing sites are in or close to residential compounds, the music played, or, the alleged “noise pollution,” have caused numerous conflicts nationwide. During the summer 2014, I conducted a three-months fieldwork on the dance in China. In this thesis, I first demonstrated how a specific guangchangwu dancing group organized in relation to the space it occupied, then I traced the media discourse of guangchangwu and showed how it became linked with elderly women, dama. I argue that this seemingly new and overwhelmingly women-dominated public dance emerges from a series of long existing activities, the embedded gender politics of which articulates China’s recent and ongoing revision of policies and laws regarding birth control and the retirement age. Moreover, it is precisely against the backdrop of such social discourse that the practice and persistence of individual dancing groups becomes meaningful: through an effective organizational structure, these elderly women made their existence visible, audible, and their stories irreducible.

My dissertation interrogates the figure of the priestly charlatan in colonial India. It begins in a theoretical register by arguing that the unmasking of charlatans serves as a metonym for the secularizing procedures of modernity. Tales of charlatans' exposure by secularist skeptics promise a disenchanted world freed from the ill-gotten influence of sham divines; such tales evacuate the immanent frame of charismatic god-men, thereby allowing the extension and consolidation of secular power. I trace the trope of charlatanic exposure, beginning with Enlightenment anxieties about "priestcraft," continuing on to nineteenth century criticisms of religion, and then making a lateral move to colonial India. I suggest that by the 1830s it had become difficult for many English critics to extricate the problem of priestly imposture from the broader problematic of empire and, more specifically, from the specter of the "crafty brahmin." I track the cultural crosscurrents that conjoined English and Indian anticlericalisms, not only to insist on the centrality of colonial thinkers to the constitution of modernity, but also to reconsider modernity's putative secularity. The "anticlerical modernity" that I identify brings religious and secular skeptics together in a shared war on sacerdotal charisma, best observed at the interstices of empire.

The dissertation disperses the intellectual lineage of the "imposture theory of religion" by rerouting it through colonial India. The imposture theory, or the notion that religion is but a ruse concocted by crafty priests to dupe gullible masses, was central to the emergence of secular modernity and its mistrust of religion. Closely associated with the English and French Enlightenments, it was also pervasive in British polemics against Indian religions. My dissertation demonstrates how in its colonial redeployment the imposture theory came to abut Indic imaginaries of religious illusion, ranging from folkloric spoofs of gurus' authority to philosophical debates about the ontological status of "maya." Starting from religious controversies of the colonial era, my interrogation of Indic illusion extends from the ninth century philosopher Shankaracharya to the sixteenth century saint Vallabhacharya to the twentieth century guru Osho. Its focus, however, is on three nineteenth century religious reformers: Karsandas Mulji, Dayanand Saraswati, and H.P Blavatsky. Through archival research, textual analysis (in Hindi, Gujarati, and English), and theoretical inquiry, I insinuate these three colonial thinkers into the history of the imposture theory of religion. In doing so, my aim is to contribute to scholarship on the genealogy of religion, particularly in colonial contexts.

In this modern era, our lives are largely influenced by digital technology and the Internet. The interactive feature of the new technology has transformed our conventional understanding of objects. Technology that provides easiness to our life is not unmoved but actively and interactively reshapes and forms human culture and society. This thesis is based on the hypothesis that religious communities and people's religious lives are also under the influence of and transformed by this revolution in technology.

The purpose of this thesis is the examination of the formation and operation of a Chinese online Buddhist forum called Dizang forum and analysis of how it works as a virtual Buddhist community and deconstruct the model of the traditional Buddhist community. By doing close research on how the members of the forum inherit and innovate traditional Dizang belief and practices with modern values and online technology, the aim of this thesis is to explore how technology, and specifically the Internet, transforms religion. The methodology used in this study involved gathering and analyzing data, web page analyzing, religious study, historical study, and media study.

The conclusion of the thesis is that online Buddhist forums, taking the Dizang forum as an example, have already revolutionized the traditional lay people community and thus transformed people's interaction with religion.