When and under what circumstances do people invent the concept of “the other”? This question has been posed and responded to many times over in a largely modern, colonial, Eurocentric context. However, the invention of “others” is not simply a European prerogative: it is a practice common to cultures and societies throughout the world, past and present. This timely symposium proposes to examine these issues in a visually rich, historically grounded and contextualized collection of talks and discussions that focus critical analytic attention on the manifold Asian imagination and invention of “others.” We seek to highlight and examine the robust and visually potent technologies of “othering” deployed in Asia by Asians past and present while addressing the multiple contexts, regional variations, and sets of interests, involved. In this way, we can focus both multi-media representations of "others" and on how and why these variable constructions were mobilized around complex cross- and intra-cultural negotiations over time.

Co-sponsored by the Charles Lang Freer Endowment and the U-M Museum of Art, with additional sponsorship from Office of the Vice President for Research, Institute for the Humanities, Rackham School of Graduate Studies, Department of Anthropology, School of Art & Design, Department of Asian Languages & Cultures, Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies, Department of History, Department of Screen Arts & Cultures, Center for South Asian Studies.