Asian/American Feminisms: Power, Expressive Culture, and the Cold War

Catalog description

The course follows Asian and Asian American feminist thinkers navigating history and its uses – particularly the present history of the Cold War. Reading interdisciplinary Asian/American feminist theory and expressive culture, this course marks the Cold War as more than just the historical period between the end of WWII and the fall of the USSR (also cast as the preeminent dominance of US democratic and imperial order as the good life). Rather, we will unpack the Cold War as an interpretive framework, a lineage of powerful institutions, a persistent emotional landscape, and (in short) a knowledge project that continues to shape and direct political life, imaginative capacities, and formations of power inhering in race, gender, nation, sexuality, ability, class. Assessing this global knowledge project, we’ll ask after the resources of Asian/American feminist visions of time, power, and liberatory potentiality.