Unresolved Issues:Wars in Asia

Catalog description

This seminar undertakes a multidisciplinary investigation into the international conflicts, atrocities and legacies of modern warfare in Asia. Seminal theoretical works on the experience and after effects of traumatic experience, perpetrator/victim/survivor psychology and the politics of collective memory will be considered and applied to three representative “unresolved issues” from the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945): the “Rape of Nanjing”, the military exploitation of “comfort women” and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Artistic representations of these controversial historical events will also be analyzed to determine what novel insights they afford into the psychodynamics, costs in human terms, and enduring consequences of ideological manipulation, the psychological shift from “sensory” to “mythic” reality, objectification/dehumanization of the enemy/other, and mass violence and victimization.