Asian Studies

This seminar engages with key moments in the development of Asian American critical discourses. It takes as its starting point Chih-ming Wang's contention that much of the Asian American critical work that has been produced in Taiwan so far has downplayed or neglected the interdisciplinary and internationalist character of Asian American studies. We will ask: what, then, would constitute an adequate form of engagement with Asian American critical discourses and texts? Our working hypothesis will be that Asian American culture is not a stable pre-constituted object awaiting excavation and recovery; we will instead approach it as a process of contestation and critical reformulation that is not yet settled. Our starting point will be critical accounts of the Asian American movement including the 1968-1969 student strikes at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley. We will then examine other key moments that may include the following: the controversy over the canonization of Maxine Hong Kingston's _The Woman Warrior_; the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit; “the fall of the International Hotel” in San Francisco; the heated debates surrounding Ronald Takaki's popular history _Strangers from a Different Shore_; the politics of ethnicity; the near implosion of the Association for Asian American Studies following the granting of a book award for Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel _Blu's Hanging_; debates concerning the internationalization of Asian American studies; and the stakes involved in reading Asian American literature after the catastrophic events in Japan on March 11, 2011. We will conclude our seminar by asking (following a forum published in the _Journal of Asian American Studies_): has Asian American studies failed? Students in this seminar will be expected to read widely across interdisciplinary debates and to write regularly about the texts in our course readings. Students will have a chance to learn about and use key Asian American studies library resources available in Taiwan.

This course examines a variety of anime movies and television series featuring problems of the city, urban design, ruins, environment, and ecology as a central theme and as a source of creative inspirations. The course examines Akira, Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Nausicaä, Psycho-Pass, and Your Name.

The course closely analyzes and discusses each animation work (narrative, world-setting,audio-visual style, etc.) but also a wide range of critical texts on anime, urban space, environment, and ruins. This course examines why anime is an important cultural text, and what socio-political, philosophical, and ethical issues they often raise for further critical thinking.

The course addresses the history, current state, and future of North Korea, essential to understanding its human rights and human security situation. It examines the vast oppressive apparatus employed to execute North Korea’s policy of human rights denial and to maintain the status quo. The course also covers the applicable international legal framework, and the available remedies embedded in relevant provisions, as well as the methodology employed by human rights organizations dealing with North Korea, including the execution, processing, and analysis of interviews with North Korean defectors and other witnesses, and their corroboration with satellite imagery and other available relevant data. Also explored in depth is the structure and functions of both the UN system and international civil society.

This course introduces fictional and other critical and cultural perspectives from the postcolonial world. It focuses on selected texts from postcolonial Asia. The course begins by critically investigating the concept of the nation—what Benedict Anderson has famously called an “imagined community.” It explores this concept through reading and discussing texts representing the complexities of imagined communities in Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, texts that also represent uneven power relations with China, Japan, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. The course explores the question: why should these texts and ideas matter to us now? 

This course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course offers a comparative modern history of East Asian countries, with a special focus on Hokkaido, Ryukyu-Okinawa, Taiwan, Korea and China, in the framework of Japanese “Nation-Empire” building. The course also explores categories of people, including trafficked children, peddlers, “abducted” women, the Ainu, Taiwan's indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans. The second half of the course focuses on cultural studies (pop culture, movies, music manga, etc.), political economy (regional integration, ASEAN+3, TPP, RCEP, One Belt One Load), comparative politics (political regime, identity, nationalism, democracy), regional security (U.S.-Japan Alliance, U.S. military presence, military cooperation, South China and East China sea, bandwagoning or hedge). The course uses active learning in groups, making maximum use of the mixture of students from different regions and countries, and bringing out different perspectives, points of view, and opinions on various issues and topics.