Overview
Prompt:
How do the cultural texts we have encountered in the last four weeks (be it literature, film, song, or painting) represent protest or dissidence as a form of art, everyday life, memory, or survival in modern East Asia? Pick ONE of the following texts and analyze the relationship between the aesthetic form (how the work is made) and action (what the work does). Consider how the text, film, or song imagines resistance against structures of patriarchy, violence, censorship, or forgetting.
Texts:
* Kobayashi Takiji, The Crab Cannery Ship
* Na Hye-sŏk, “Kyŏng-hŭi”
* “The Southern Land That Does Not Sleep” 잠들지 않는 남도 (1989)
* The Gate of Heavenly Peace (dir. Carma Hinton, 1995)
* Soh, Sarah. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 79-106.
* Shusenjo: Comfort Women and Japan’s War on History (dir. Miki Dezaki, 2018)
* Choo, Hae Yeon. 2021. “From Madwomen to Whistleblowers: MeToo in South Korea as an Institutional Critique.” Feminist Formations33(3): 256-270.
* Noriko Manabe, “Music in Japanese antinuclear demonstrations: the evolution of a contentious performance model.” Asia-Pacific Journal 11.42 (2013)
Be sure to support your central argument and analysis of the text/event of your choice with supporting textual evidence from the course readings.
The length should be around 900-1000 words.
Formatting: 1-inch margin throughout, double-spaced, and Times New Roman. I will not require a works cited page for this assignment. However, you must state clearly which text you are engaging with, including the author's name and the year of publication. You must provide parenthetical citation whenever you draw evidentiary support from relevant text(s). Be sure to add a title that encapsulates the argument of your paper.