SHUM 425 Cold War Aesthetics in E. Asia
(also ASIAN 465)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
P. Liu.
T 2:30-4:25
This course is concerned with the Cold War in East AsiaCthe Apartitioning@ of China, Japan, and Korea into mutually hostile, geographically fractured and temporally de-synchronized Azones@ in the post-WWII eraCand how this historical experience produced a postmodern aesthetics in East Asia. How do literary texts, films, and popular music in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan explore this historical trauma and ideological rift? How might we understand postwar popular culture in East Asia as social formations standing in a structural relation to a US-led “new world order,” and how does this form of neo-colonialism differ from previous forms of territorial colonialism? Special attention will be paid to theories of the “East Asian economic miracle” as an exception to capitalist development.
Petrus Liu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Chinese, Latin, and German) from UC Berkeley. His teaching and research interests focus on Marxian economics, gendered subjectivities in (post-)colonial cultures, 19th- and 20th-century Chinese literary and intellectual thought, and popular culture. He has published in InterAsia Cultural Studies, positions: east asia cultural critique, and Asian Exchange. He is currently editing a special issue of positions on queer China and transnationalism and working on a book manuscript, Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and the Decolonization of Labor.