Two Koreas

Catalog description

This course examines the historical formation of the South and North Korean societies from the mid-1940s up to the present moment. Among the topics discussed are colonial collaboration and resistance, Korea in the Cold War order, postwar industrial and economic reforms, and the global consumption of Korean culture. We will look at these topics through a wide range of sources (including films, memoirs, diaries, art, and scholarly assessments) that reflect the diversity of experiences of Koreans across social, class, gender, and regional lines. In analyzing these sources and their representations, we will pay close attention to the politics of images, the role that images play in producing cultural meaning, visuality and power relations, and images as forms of visual communication. We will also examine how images circulate through our digital environments and networks, how they shape our perception of the