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ASA-JAAS
ASA-JAAS Project 2003
ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee Annual Report
The purpose of this committee is to coordinate the participation of two delegates from the ASA in the annual conference of the Japanese Association for American Studies (JAAS), under a grant from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. Coordination includes the selection of delegates, through a call for applications from the ASA membership, and the promotion of long-term benefits to scholars and the organizations on both sides of the exchange. Beginning with the ASA conference of 2002, in Houston, the project also includes domestic travel support for selected graduate student members of the JAAS who apply for funding to defray their ASA conference expenses.
Not under the JUSFC grant but under sponsorship by the U. S. Department of State, Public Affairs Sections of the U. S. Embassies in Seoul and Tokyo, the ASA President tours South Korea and Japan as a speaker requested by the American Studies Association of Korea (ASAK) and the JAAS, scheduled so that the lecture tour coincides with the JAAS conference and the Ritsumeikan University American Studies Seminar that follows the conference. After the Seminar the two ASA delegates and the ASA President again generally go their separate ways under assignment by the U. S. Embassy’s Public Affairs Section to fill requests from various Japanese universities, colleges, and American Centers. In Korea, ASAK assumes responsibility for making the request to the U. S. Embassy for the ASA President to come as a speaker and for coordinating the specific programs and activities ASAK sponsors. The ASA President is sent by the State Department on a whirlwind lecture tour thereafter, during which the President is continually under the care of a member of the Public Affairs Section and, in addition, usually an interpreter and other Embassy staff members at the site of the talk. In May of this year, after spending a week in Seoul under the care of ASAK and the State Department, I was rushed by plane to two cities in one day, Gwangju and Daegu. After speaking at a formal program on the first day in Gwangju and at another in Daegu the next day, I was taken by train to Pusan, where the audience in a large lecture hall was already awaiting our arrival on the run. It was three cities and three talks in two days. The State Department evidently must work our speakers—and themselves—this hard to justify their substantial budgetary support for the speaking tour. This applies not only to the ASA President. It applies too to the ASA delegates when they are sent here and there in Japan during the two weeks of their visit. Although the ASAK project (the ASA President’s visit) is not part of the ASA-JAAS Project funded by the Japan-US Friendship Commission, the Korean link has been in place for three years now and is tied directly to the funding of the ASA President’s trip to Japan by the State Department.
According to Professor Masako Notoji of the JAAS International Committee, this year’s ASA participation in the JAAS conference was the “glorious” culmination of fourteen years of everyone’s work in the ASA-JAAS Project. In a related development, during the past three years the interactions with ASAK through the JAAS project have become increasingly productive, not only because of the ASA Presidents’ trips to Korea (beginning with Michael Frisch and George Sánchez) but also because of ASAK participation in the JAAS conference, where three-way, lasting collegial friendships are growing among ASAK, ASA, and JAAS participants. The selection of no more than two ASA delegates annually has been strengthening the project as intended: in the past, sending up to four delegates plus the ASA President has been unwieldy and very difficult for our JAAS colleagues to coordinate. The quality of the project has risen in several ways because of the application, selection, and coordination procedures that we first tried in 1998. Our ASA delegates again performed splendidly this year. Professor Carla Kaplan was intellectually nimble and supple in her work in the JAAS conference, her assignments around Japan, and her ability to navigate cities and train systems that presented her with the unexpected despite their vaunted precision. Not intentionally but again unexpectedly and with great value, Professor Ramón Saldívar did his part in a very well-attended conference workshop on “Patriotism Old and New,” where certain conflicts, tensions, disagreements, and testimonials rose up to produce one of the most “volatile” sessions that JAAS has enjoyed—and has continued to think about—in recent years. Both Professor Kaplan and Professor Saldívar went on in the Ritsumeikan American Studies Seminar—where the three of us were empaneled as the featured speakers for an audience of about fifteen scholars and students—to speak on subjects close to their research and current scholarly interests.
In my ASA President’s report on the trip—a report that incorporates and draws recommendations from the Delegates’ reports—I offered five recommendations. (1) The three ASA speakers need more lead time than they have had, from the State Department, about what topics and talks are requested when and by whom, since at least some of these talks are new ones for the delegates and need to be written well in advance. (2) Along with this, we need clarification for future delegations about whether new, original papers are expected, or would presentations of one’s prior research, possibly published already, be expected. We have received conflicting advice about this question. (3) The JUSFC has suggested that a budget line for General Administrative Costs be added to the grant, to enable the JAAS to hire a part-time staff member who would assume many of the travel coordination duties that the JAAS International Committee members, all of them busy fulltime faculty members, have been performing. (4) A fourth recommendation calls attention to the possibility and value of spontaneous and “volatile” discussions during the lecture tours—not to stifle them but to encourage the free and positive expression of differing views and responses, in part by making some structural changes to facilitate how JAAS scholars can participate in the workshop. (5) A fifth recommendation extends this concern or interest: there is a possibility that sponsors of this project—the JUSFC and, in its important role in the project, the State Department—could disagree with what our speakers say or intend to say. A longtime Embassy staff member in Tokyo, however, has clarified that the ASA speakers do not represent the State Department; they represent themselves, through their presentations of scholarship, critiques, and even polemics, and they can play valuable roles in stirring up argumentation. Our speakers should be open to discussing and even initiating discussions, with the various facilitators in the U. S. Embassy and colleagues in the JAAS, about the sensitivity of their presentations in order to try to make the best of the opportunity for discussion with audiences that can very well include journalists. This concern comes especially in a time of American war and strong responses to American actions around the world and critiques within the United States. In recent years there have been discussions and analyses, in ASA conferences, of the role and effectiveness of the public intellectual. The ASA President and delegates in the ASA-JAAS Project necessarily join their JAAS peers as public intellectuals in speaking and acting. Considerations of relations with the public, governmental funding agencies come with this role.
Professor Notoji and I worked on the proposal for the next year of the project. The two themes that emerged for the ASA delegates’ workshops for 2004 are “Transmission of Culture(s)” and “Gateless or Gated? New Social Stratification in American Society.” These were chosen from a list of five considered by the JAAS Executive Board on 19 July, and Professor Notoji and I went on to sketch the workshop themes in writing. Executive Director John Stephens worked on the budget and wrote and compiled the complete proposal for the ASA and submitted it to the JUSFC at the end of July 2003.
The proposal for 2004 covers the third year of a three-year cycle of JUSFC grant funding under the overall theme of “New Dimensions in American Studies,” 2002-2004. We are in the process of proposing the next three-year grant to fund the ASA-JAAS Project through the JAAS conference years from 2005 through 2007.
The JAAS has expanded its International Committee. Joining Professors Notoji, Masako Iino, and Naoki Onishi are: Professors Noriko Shimada (Japan Women’s University), Hisako Yanaka (Kyoritsu Women’s University), Juri Abe (Rikkyo University), and Julie Higashi (Ritsumeikan University). Professor Shimada is coordinating the 2004 JAAS conference, to be held at Japan Women’s University, Tokyo, on 4 and 5 June 2004.
The members of the ASA-JAAS Project Advisory Committee for 2003-2004 are: Professors Amy Kaplan, Carla Kaplan, Gail Nomura, Gary Okihiro, Ramón Saldívar, Hiroko Sato, myself as Chair, and John Stephens (ex officio).
Respectfully submitted,
Stephen H. Sumida
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