Topics in Korean Lit and Culture: An Uneasy Coexistence: North and South Korea in the Modern World

What is the role of performance in shaping contemporary Korean politics and cultures? In this course, we will examine a variety of performances that represent and transform Korean cultures and histories, both South and North, and across the Korean diasporas in the 20th and 21st centuries. Performance, as we understand in this course, does not simply mean a set of aesthetic works. Rather, it encompasses a much broader cultural phenomenon that includes practices of everyday life, products of popular culture, and embodied communications in the public sphere. Course materials will come from various genres, including plays, musicals, dance, avant-garde theatre, postdramatic theatre, and digital media arts. Engaging with these materials, we will pay attention to historical contexts from which each performance emerges, as well as what interventions it makes in contemporary Korean politics. Some of the key events and topics include the "Comfort Women," the Jeju 4.3 Uprising, the Korean War, military dictatorship, the Gwangju Uprising, democratization movements, and globalization. We will wed these historical discussions with critical discourse on gender, modernity, nationalism, diaspora, multiculturalism, human rights, and digital media.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU BA; AS HUM; AS LCD; AS SD I; UC CD

Topics in Korean Lit and Culture: An Uneasy Coexistence: North and South Korea in the Modern World

GLOBAL STUDIES 3550

Section 01