SoSe 19: (VS) Conflict, Crime and Memory in East Asian Relations: History and Contemporary Issues
Urs Matthias Zachmann
Additional information / Pre-requisites
Comments
This seminar traces the tortuous history of East Asian relations since the 19th century up until the end of the Cold War. It particularly focuses on the excessive violence that formed a large part of these relations and often was amplified by internal violence following. The seminar investigates different ways in which various actors tried to cope and overcome their traumata, be it through law and diplomacy on the national level, or through literature and art on the individual level. Ultimately, the seminar addresses the more fundamental question how nations (and people) despite horrendous experiences at the hand of each other can still overcome their traumata and start cooperating again.
Course Schedule
1. Paradise Lost in Asia? Asian relations before the advent of imperialism
2. Opium, guns and Jesus: Reassessing the role of agency during the age of High Imperialism
3. 1919 and the ‘Wilsonian Bubble’: Idealism and disillusion in interwar East Asia
4. Ordinary Men? Causes and motivations of excessive violence during the Asia-Pacific War
5. Lawyering Up: Military justice and war crimes trials in East Asia
6. Normalisation without reconciliation: Cold War diplomacy and its legacy in East Asia
7. Atomic nationalism: Japan’s victim complex and birth of post-war pacifism
8. The Red Room: Coming to terms with violence and trauma in contemporary Korean culture
9. Scar Literature: Memories of violence and victimhood in modern Chinese culture
10. A Visit to the Museum: Remembering war in Nanking, Yasukuni and the Smithsonian
11. National strategies of history education in Japan, China, Taiwan and Korea
12. Love songs and hate speech: Pop culture and populism in Japan and Korea
13. Visions of unity and strife: Geopolitical discussions on the future of East Asia
closeSuggested reading
Suzuki, Shogo, Civilisation and Empire: China and Japan's Encounter with the European International Society, London: Routledge, 2009.
Peter Duus et al. (eds.), The Japanese Wartime Empire: 1931-1945, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (ed.), The Cold War in East Asia, 1945-1991, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011
Goh, Evelyn, The Struggle for Order: Hegemony, Hierarchy, and Transition in Post-Cold War East Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Yang, Daqing et al. (eds.), Toward a History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012.
Hein, L. & Selden, M. (eds.), Censoring history: citizenship and memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000.
Kim, Mikyoung, Routledge Handbook of Memory and Reconciliation in East Asia, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.
close12 Class schedule
Regular appointments