Postwar Ecologies and Reconciliations in Asia

This course introduces the concept of postwar ecologies in Asia. Its approach focuses on understandings that integrate social relations with environmental relations when it comes to the aftermath of violence. Students will engage with experimental ethnographies of visual and auditory media as well as written ethnographies that explore these relations in the Asia-Pacific Region. We will consider how postwar reconciliations are affected by and affect the remnants of war like bombs that become ghosts, planes that become gods, and rats who become landmine detectors.

Media as Mask

This course considers media like film, art, video games, as intimately connected to how we understand ourselves. How do humans make? And what do these made things tell us about humans? Media then, is ultimately not just materialities that mediate understandings but also an in- betweenness, caught in the relations of what and how we know of the world. The study of medias is not just the study of how media portrays difference for our contemporary age, but also the study of when new forms of media in the past opened up the possibilities for understanding human beings. Thus we consider art movements influenced by alternative portrayals of human bodies from other cultures, such as Fauvism and Cubism, which represent influences from Dogon masks on European art. We will see how media like these masks were new media, novel ideas in Europe about form, bodies, and existence. Media, in its multiple technologies, from drawing, sculpture, writing to cyber collectives, helps us define and understand modes of being.

Humans and Nonhumans

The contemporary Cambodian artist, Sokuntevy Oeur, has a series of paintings called Human Nature. The paintings feature humans with galaxies for heads, humans with flowers for faces, animals with human hands, and plants with animal bodies. Or, do they feature galaxies with humans for bodies, flowers with human shapes, humans with animal bodies and animals with plants growing from their heads? Her work examines how humans, plants, animals, and spirits share sensory connections between themselves and the world. This course works through these paintings’ field of questioning and interrogation of sensory relations. We will explore experimental ethnographies and art, both in non-textual and textual forms, which portray these relations. Students will learn with a hands-on approach by making a short sensory ethnography of human and nonhuman relations in their own lives. In so doing, the course will also urge students to question who or what counts as human.