The Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) is concluding a major study aimed at understanding the future role for natural gas in the rapidly growing economies of China and India. On June 4-5, 2007 PESD will convene a meeting at Stanford to present the results of the study and engage with participants from industry and academia on the implications of this work for global energy markets.

PESD has partnered with leading regional research centers in both China and India to construct detailed assessments of the key drivers for future gas demand in both countries. At the June meeting PESD and its research collaborators will share results from the natural gas study and explore the study's broader implications on China and India's role in the future world energy market. Meeting participants will include representatives from government, industry, academia, and non-government organizations from the United States, China, India, Europe, and others.

Panels at the meeting with focus primarily on the implications of the study on larger questions of energy and global geopolitics, including:

§ Competitiveness of natural gas vis a vis coal in the power sector

§ Geopolitical implications of major supply projects

§ Regulatory reform and pricing

§ Implications for CO2 and climate change

Hendrik M.J. Maier received traditional training in philology and textual criticism of the languages of Indonesia at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, where he held the chair of Malay and Indonesian Language and Literature before moving to UC Riverside in 2003. His major interests are the languages and literatures of Indonesia and Malaysia, which he now tries to understand within wider networks, in particular the socio-political and cultural interactions within the Southeast Asian region. Some of his secondary interests include so-called "colonial literature."

This talk will be in Japanese only.

Professor Kawamura is a specialist in colonial literature. His publications include Kankoku, Chôsen, Zainichi o yomu (Inpakuto Shuppankai, 2003). Ever since his debut as a literary critic in 1980, Kawamura has been opening up new vistas in the critical perspective on modern Japan. Whether writing about colonial literature or Japan's minority writers, Kawamura has revealed the central importance of cultural domains previously dismissed as marginal to modern Japanese history; his work has had a profound impact on the very definitions of "Japan" and "Japanese literature."

Kurahashi Yumiko's 1985 novel Amanonkoku Okanki (Record of a Round-Trip Journey to Amanonkoku) has been described as fantasy science fiction, feminist literature, political satire, and futurist picaresque. Whatever label one might pin on this novel, its thematic and structural emphasis on sexual adventures as an engine of storytelling is undisputable. The tale centers on the missionary P's journey to and from the land of men on earth to the land of women on Amanonkoku in the heavens, where his mission is to civilize and convert them to the monotheistic (monokami) belief system of men. By the end of the novel, however, the outer space travels of P turn out really to have been inner space travels in a woman's body; consequently, the imperialist plot to control Amanonkoku is revealed also to have been a bio-political plot about reproduction, sexuality, and gender difference.

Kurahashi's satire interrogates the politics of both feminism and anti-feminism even as it never lets the violence of presumptive male superiority off the hook. Professor Knighton will read Amanonkoku Okanki against the backdrop of Kurahashi's late-1960s Anpo and Beiheiren-era protests novel, Sumiyakist Q no Boken (The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q). In doing so, in today's historical moment of feminist backlash in Japan, American exceptionalism, and globalized military and religious war-mongering, Kurahashi's work takes on an almost prescient contemporary relevance.

Mary A. Knighton received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English (American Literature), as well as an M.A. in Japanese, at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research attends to global Modernism, the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and postwar Japanese literature, with a special interest in women writers and feminist theories of race, class and gender.