150060 SE How Sinophone Societies Remember (2025S)

How do Sinophone societies remember? How do these societies produce distinctive memories of a shared past? How do past events and experiences shape the contemporary construction of memory in different Sinophone contexts? This seminar aims to explore and compare the politics of memory in the Sinophone region from a cultural perspective.

The specific focus will be on the cultural memory of Japanese colonial violence and wartime imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century, as reflected in contemporary narratives from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The examination of historical testimonies and fictional representations of war, violence, and trauma will be structured around the key themes of colonialism, invasion, occupation, reparation, and reconciliation. The purpose is to reflect on the collective and often contested memories of the colonization of Taiwan, the Second Sino-Japanese War in China, and the occupation of Hong Kong and Singapore during the Pacific War.

A comparative analysis of relevant films, plays, performances, literary and visual artworks, and digital media emerging from these distinct spaces of Sinophone cultural production will inform the discussion of issues such as ideology, nationalism, imperialism, (post-)colonialism, the construction of ethnic and national identity, the relationship between official and unofficial memory, cultural diplomacy, censorship, activism, and the aesthetics and ethics of representing atrocity and narrating trauma.

Selected readings on these topics will introduce students to relevant methodological approaches to the study of cultural and collective memory, while theoretical frameworks derived from theories of transnationalism and inter-Asian cultural studies will facilitate cross-regional comparisons.

By the end of the seminar, students will have developed a nuanced understanding of the politics of memory in the Sinophone cultural context, also in comparison with other Asian societies. They will have become familiar with relevant methods of textual and visual analysis, and acquired critical tools for examining and comparing the production and circulation of historical memory and its contemporary legacies across the region.