AAAS 531Unresolved Issues:Wars in Asia

Catalog

Unresolved Issues From Modern Wars In Asia This seminar undertakes a multidisciplinary investigation into the international conflicts, atrocities and legacies of modern warfare in Asia. The central aim of the course is to facilitate informed, critical thinking and nuanced understanding of modern and contemporary Asian experience by cultivating appreciation of the diverse ways individuals and collectives have undergone, remembered, responded to and represented their traumas, the factors affecting the extent to which they have been able to constitute, acknowledge, confront, worked through and articulate their violent pasts, and the implications of such (re)constructive efforts for personal/national identity, sociopolitical action and international relations. Seminal theoretical works on the experience and aftereffects of psychological trauma, perpetrator/victim/survivor psychology and the politics of private and public memory will be studied and applied to three representative unresolved issues from the Asia Pacific War (1931-1945): the Nanjing Massacre, militarized sexual slavery ("comfort women") and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Artistic representations of these controversial historical events and lived experiences will be analyzed to determine what novel insights they afford into the psychodynamics, costs in human terms and enduring consequences of ideological indoctrination, the psychological shift from "sensory" to "mythic" reality, objectification/dehumanization of the enemy/other, and mass violence and victimization. At the end of the semester, students will present to the class the results of their individualized research into the Nanjing Massacre, militarized sex slavery, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or another clearly identified unresolved issue from modern wars in Asia (e.g., Korean War, Vietnam War).