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New Arrivals to the East Asian Collection

International and Area Studies at Duke University Libraries

A new exhibit in the IAS Office Exhibit Space, located on the second floor of Bostock library, showcases recent acquisitions on East Asia. New Chinese-language arrivals provide a glimpse of perspectives surrounding female agency and subjectivity during major political shifts in contemporary Chinese history. New Korean-language publications (including graphic novels) focus on important historical issues and events, such as the experience and testimony of Korean women during periods of Japan’s colonial occupation, and contemporary social and political movements in 20th-century Korea. Finally, our existing holdings in Japanese have been enhanced by a major gift of volumes focused on Japanese religion, which provides new research avenues for scholars of East Asian Buddhism.

Chinese Women’s Liberation
Luo Zhou, Librarian for Chinese Studies

Duke University Libraries has expanded its collection with over 200 titles, primarily published during the 1950s and 1960s in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). These titles consist of original booklets and pamphlets that focus on women’s liberation and the promotion of the new Marriage Law, which was issued by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1950, only one year after the establishment of the PRC. The Marriage Law, which was the first fundamental law of the PRC, sought to provide a legal foundation for Chinese women to combat oppressive practices such as polygamy, widow chastity, child brides, and bride-wealth. The 1950 law was a significant legislative accomplishment for the CCP in terms of women’s liberation. The promotion of the new law was a nationwide effort, with numerous illustrated publications intended for women, 90% of whom were illiterate in the early 1950s. Concurrently, publications were issued to promote a new image of women as citizens capable of doing the same job, and seeking the same rights, as men. “Holding Up Half the Sky,” a slogan first introduced in the People’s Daily in the mid-1950s, best encapsulates the CCP’s goal of achieving two main social objectives: nurturing women’s individuality and their social productivity.

英勇坚持社会主义道路的吕玉兰 (1966)
https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE010468709
英姿飒爽新妇女 (1972)
https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE010468716

20th-Century Korean History
Miree Ku, Librarian for Korean Studies

Duke’s Korean collection recently added new graphic novels (Korean manhwa), monographs, and biographies about important historical issues and events in 20th-century Korean history such as “comfort women, “the Korean War, and civil rights and pro-democracy movements.

Between 1932 and 1945, women from Japanese-occupied areas in Korea, China, and the Philippines were coerced or tricked into joining private military brothels. In some cases, women were kidnapped from their homes. Many of the new additions to Duke’s Korean collection focus on direct attestations of women, including oral interviews and letters, which provide a grim picture of violence against women during this period of Japanese colonial expansion. By preserving the physical record of East Asian female subjectivity, such accounts help researchers to understand not only the range of women’s experiences in colonial contexts, but also how direct testimony remains a valuable source of our historical knowledge. Additionally, the Libraries acquired several works covering contemporary democratic movements in Korea, especially the Gwangju Uprising (1980), which was a period of armed conflict between local citizens and South Korean military. Likewise, there are also new works on the June Democratic Struggle, which was a nationwide pro-democracy movement in South Korea that generated mass protests in the summer of 1987.

나비의 노래 (2014) https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE006150494
풀: 살아 있는 역사, 일본군 위안군 할머니의 증언 (2017)
https://find.library.duke.edu/catalog/DUKE008113730

Japanese Buddhism
Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese studies & Asian American studies

Finally, as part of a large-scale gift generously donated by Emeritus Professor of Buddhist Studies Paul Groner (UVA), Duke University Libraries received key works on Buddhism in East Asia. The work of Dr. Groner, who is a renowned scholar of Japanese Tendai Buddhism, has engaged disciplinary precepts and ordination, the status of nuns in medieval Japan, and later Buddhist educational systems in Japan. The first part of this two-part donation is comprehensive in scope, and includes biographical works focused on key Buddhist figures; expository and commentarial works focused on significant scriptures; philosophical works focused on concepts such as emptiness, non-self, the nature of the mind, and disciplinary ethics; as well as critical reference works. Duke’s current holdings tend toward contemporary Japanese Buddhist histories with a focus on the Zen sect. Dr. Groner’s donation thus fills a crucial chronological and sectarian gap in our current holdings and provides new and important resources for scholars working on East Asian Buddhist philosophy, philology, textual studies, commentarial traditions, law, or ritual. The second part of this donation will arrive in a few years, once Dr. Groner has completed the last of his projects, and will be of similar scale, but contain far more volumes in Japanese. Taken together, this gift will robustly support Buddhist Studies, and the study of East Asia more generally, among Duke faculty and students for decades to come.

最澄と天台の国宝 : 天台宗開宗: 二〇〇記念
https://www.worldcat.org/title/70254660
APSI Spring Speaker Series talk by Dr. Groner; Image: Renate Kwon for APSI.

APSI launched its Spring Speaker Series by inviting Dr. Groner to give a talk, which was held at Duke Libraries on February 16th. He spoke about the nature of precept-taking in medieval Japanese Buddhism, after which attendees gathered to formally announce Dr. Groner’s donation to Duke Libraries. The exhibit showcasing these new arrivals to the East Asian Collection is on now through May 2023. Visitors to this exhibit space are encouraged to take a bibliographic guide to each title, located on the windowsill to the right of the exhibit case.

Event Debrief: “Manuscript Fragmentation Across Cultures”

This post was authored by Matthew Hayes, Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies.

On September 9, 2022, Duke faculty, librarians, archivists, graduate students, and affiliates from the Manuscript Migration Lab gathered in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall at Smith Warehouse to discuss how incorporating cultural diversity can broaden humanities research in general and, in particular, the young and interdisciplinary field of “fragmentology.”

The disassembly of manuscripts into fragments is something that happens over time, whether by accident or design. Despite the fact that fragmentation occurs in every textual culture, however, scholars who study medieval manuscripts have tended to ignore the contextual and cultural diversity of fragments. As a result, their primary sources (and objects of discussion) have often been only manuscripts from medieval Europe, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. This symposium was an attempt to broaden our perception of the term “fragmentology” to include these often-ignored cross-cultural realities.

To this end, symposium attendees were asked to consider several guiding questions: Can we apply the term “fragmentology” equally to textual cultures well beyond medieval Europe? How might we define the production, use, and value of manuscript fragments in cultural contexts that may have very different considerations in the production, use, and valuation of texts as objects? And what broad conclusions can we draw from these comparisons with regard to the role of fragmentary manuscripts in Europe and parts of East Asia? Each of the three invited speakers sought to answer these questions from their own regional perspective.

Dr. Christopher Nugent, Professor of Chinese at Williams College, was the first speaker and focused on the example of the literary anthology titled Repository of Rabbit Garden Questions (Tuyuan cefu 兔園冊府). The content of this anthology is delivered in a question-and-answer-style model and annotations added later were meant to prepare individuals for civil service examinations. Yet, among those manuscripts unearthed at Dunhuang, they only contain the first fascicle of this anthology. Dr. Nugent highlighted the tension between, on the one hand, textual contraction by way of fragmentation and, on the other, textual expansion by way of annotation, and enumerated several issues that remained in conversation throughout the afternoon: Why were fragments important to premodern communities that engaged with them? What does the fragmentation of manuscripts tell us about their reception and reuse over time?

Dr. Nugent referring to one of the cave interiors at Dunhuang. Photo by the author.

Dr. Nugent’s discussion concluded with further provocations surrounding heritage and repatriation by focusing on the figure of the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot (pictured below), known for having helped to excavate the “Library Caves” at Dunhuang and for removing large caches of texts that are now housed in museums and libraries around the world. Considering the fact that premodern Dunhuang was a multiethnic region historically occupied by not only Chinese, but also Mongol, Tibetan, and Uyghur peoples, among many other groups, Dr. Nugent asked: To whom do we repatriate these fragments? How do we mediate between modern territorialities and the multiethnic realities of premodern eras?

Paul Pelliot at work in the “Library Caves” at Dunhuang. Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis, paleographer, codicologist, and Professor of Manuscript Studies at Simmons College, was the second speaker and explored some of the common criteria for fragmentation in medieval European contexts, with a focus on the status of collections within the United States. With regard to common criteria, Dr. Davis gave an overview of the practice of fragmentation in the context of loose leaves and ornamental cutting, but also of in situ fragmentary reuse, such as in new bindings and paste-downs. In all of these cases, we can observe sets of social practices that differed markedly from those explored by Dr. Nugent.

Dr. Davis covering some examples of in situ uses of fragments. Photo by the author.

Like Dr. Nugent’s discussion of the exploits of Paul Pelliot, Dr. Davis also focused on an infamous figure in the world of “book-breaking” named Otto Ege. Ege spent several decades of the 20th century disassembling the pages of dozens of medieval illuminated manuscripts, which he reassembled into “portfolios” according to his own loose themes; two of these are held by Duke Libraries (see below) and Dr. Davis referred to both during her talk. As Dr. Davis described, Ege has been a major influence on the current state of fragmented manuscripts in the United States and worldwide; he has produced “portfolios” of unidentifiable provenance under disjointed themes and has misidentified or misdated dozens of the fragments therein. One positive outgrowth of Ege work, however, has been recent initiatives to digitally reassemble the leaves from the Ege “portfolios.”

Cover of Ege’s “Fifteen original Oriental manuscript leaves of six centuries : twelve of the Middle East, two of Russia and one of Tibet : from the collection of and with notes,” Rubenstein Library, Duke University. Photo by the author.
Prayer scroll leaf fragment (Tibet) from Ege’s “Fifteen Original Oriental Manuscripts.” Photo by the author.

The final speaker of the symposium was Dr. Akiko Walley, Maude I. Kerns Associate Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Oregon. Dr. Walley’s talk focused on the production and use of sets of sutra fragments (kyо̄gire 経切) and “mirrors of hands” or calligraphic fragments (tekagami 手鏡) in early modern Japan. Dr. Walley introduced these genres by first exploring the phenomenon of statuary and architectural fragmentation. As she described, whether in the case of the broken-off heads of Buddha statues or broken rooftiles, the fragmented pieces are representative of the larger whole. Art historians can study these fragments as a means of learning about the whole, but even Buddhist devotees will ontologically value the head of the Buddha just the same as they would the entire statue.

Dr. Walley opening her talk with reference to statuary fragments and restoration practices. Photo by the author.

Kyо̄gire and tekagami functioned similarly insofar as they are fragmentary, but were also valued as a representation of the complete source from which they derived; kyо̄gire represent the entire sutra and, ultimately, every word spoken by the Buddha, while tekagami represent the calligrapher’s entire corpus of written work. These fragments were assembled into albums and other ornamental collections and were often displayed as an object of appreciation beginning in the Edo period (1603-1868). In this way, Dr. Walley introduced us to yet another type of social practice surrounding fragments, which differed from the cases of China and Europe.

Dr. Walley presents an image of a burned fragment of the Daihōkō butsu kegonkyō 大方廣佛華嚴經 (Skt: Avataṃsaka sūtra). Photo by the author.

During the Q&A portion of the event, symposium attendees picked up on several threads from the speakers’ talks, especially about the role of technology in the reassembly of fragments, imperatives to repatriate manuscript fragments, instances of talismanic or religious uses of fragments, methodological approaches to Quranic manuscript fragments, and other varieties of social practices surrounding the use of fragments. The event concluded with a group-wide acknowledgment that events like this one, which appears to have been the first of its kind among the young subfield of fragmentology, is only the beginning of a much more comprehensive dialogue surrounding the effectiveness of the term “fragmentology,” what is meant (and not meant) by the term “fragment,” and how cross-cultural considerations can help us to better understand these issues in the context of textual studies, librarianship, and archival and museum practices.

Two opposing leaves from Apidamo dapiposha lun” (“Great Exegesis of Abhidharma,” Rubenstein Library, Duke University). This is another example of Buddhist fragments and does not derive from Ege’s “portfolio.” Photo by the author.

The “Manuscript Fragmentations Across Cultures” symposium was  sponsored by the Manuscript Migration Lab and the Franklin Humanities Institute. For questions about this symposium, please contact its co-organizers, Matthew Hayes (Librarian for Japanese Studies and Asian American Studies) and Clare Woods (Associate Professor of Classical Studies).

My Duke Library: Tyler Goldberger’s Perspective

Tyler Goldberger is a senior studying History, Spanish, and Jewish Studies. He’s writing his double honors thesis on Spain’s difficulty in commemorating all of the victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism dictatorship and the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica to actively confront this history. Tyler recently authored the Duke Chronicle editorial Confronting Being a Low SES Student At Duke.


How has the library impacted your Duke experience?

The Duke Libraries have provided me with incredible opportunities to perform well in my classes and conduct research. As a low SES (socioeconomic status) student, I thought I would struggle with purchasing the necessary books to excel in my coursework. However, through the help of the librarian staff and search queries, I have never had to pay for a textbook, reducing my financial burden and allowing me to concentrate fully on my classes. Through the library system, especially through the ILL opportunity, I have also been able to retrieve necessary primary and secondary sources for various research projects over my four years. Duke Library System has greatly enhanced my academic journey, and I am so thankful for all of the resources it has provided me.

What’s something you’ve discovered in the library?

The library has allowed me to really learn what research is all about. Before entering the library, my vision of research was limited to high school experiences that really just made me synthesize secondary sources. Once coming to Duke, I have realized that research is alive, especially with the incredible resources provided by Rubenstein. I have had the opportunity to engage with local election results in Durham, abolitionist pamphlets from the 19th century, human rights policy in Spain, and so much more!

What’s a favorite space or service? And why?

The Chat a Librarian function on library.duke.edu has been extremely helpful. There have been many times when I am stuck somewhere but need to know the various resources that exist at the library. This service has saved me time and has helped me locate great sources for a project or personal research.

Tyler’s library pro tip

Utilize the specialist librarians. They will help you formulate questions and find resources for your next great research project!

My Duke Library is a project of the Research and Instructional Services department

Video Spotlight on Women Filmmakers

It’s Women’s History Month! Spend this March 2016 watching wonderful films created by talented women from around the world.

The Video Spotlight on Women Filmmakers, created by Lilly Library’s own audio-visual specialist and film aficionado, Ken Wetherington, can give you great ideas of where to start.

In recent years women in film have begun to be slightly better recognized, like Katheryn Bigelow’s oscar-winning direction (the only time for a woman!) of The Hurt Locker.  hurt locker

But did you know that in the early days of cinema, many women were powerful creative forces? Movies like Lois Weber’s SuspenseThe Ocean Waif by Alice Guy Blaché and Cleo Madison’s Eleanor’s Catch,  and other women pioneers of early cinema, can be viewed in Duke Libraries’ new subscription database, Kanopy Streaming Video.

WomenFilmmakers2

Check out Lilly’s foyer display exhibiting films by women in the history of cinema. Some of the titles just may surprise you…

Browse Ken’s Video Spotlight Archives for more topical viewing inspiration.