Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Adhy Kim
Meeting time: Monday, 12:45-2:45 pm
The term “transpacific” denotes the interrelation between East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as geographies and geopolitical territories shaped by power struggles. In this course, we will examine historical and cultural artifacts that attest to past and ongoing imperial arrangements from the twentieth century to the present. How have U.S., Japanese, and other empires structured the exchanges, intimacies, transformations, and tensions linking diverse peoples across Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of colonial invasions, hot wars, cold war, migrations, and racial formations? And how does the transpacific enrich our study of both Asia and Asian America? Drawing on films, novels, poetry, photography, government documents, speeches, and more, this course will track the relationship between the personal and political and ask what kind of subjects emerge from competing imperial modernities. Possible texts include Yokomitsu Riichi’s Shanghai (1931), Eileen Chang’s Rice Sprout Song (1955), Carlos Bulosan’s The Cry and the Dedication, opera by John Adams, poetry by Craig Santos Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Ocean Vuong, and the films Godzilla (1954), Arrival (2016), and Lingua Franca (2019).