Cinematic Witnesses: Documenting Survival in East Asian Democracies

 

Our proposed film screening series “Cinematic Witnesses: Documenting Survival in East Asian Democracies” reflects on a number of broader trends illuminated by the recent political crisis in Korea. The declaration of martial law was not only a crisis of institutional democracy but the latest manifestation of colonialisms, militarized masculinity, hypercapitalist mediatization, and fascist modernity that have reverberated throughout East Asia from the Cold War to the present.

 

We ask through this series: What enables the synchronicity between democracy and martial law? What is the relationship between masculinity and sovereignty? What happens when we rethink martial law no longer as an exceptional event but as the modus operandi of colonialism–militarism? Featuring Professors Erin Y. Huang as discussant, Juwon Kim (Ph.D. Candidate, East Asian Studies) as Moderator we aim to trouble the exceptionalization of the martial law crisis and open up a space for a critical examination of democracies throughout East Asia.

 

 

Erin Y. Huang is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature and a certificate of advanced Feminist Studies in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her work in general probes the relationship between aesthetics and politics, raising questions about the mediation of power through literary, visual, and media practices. Her areas of study center on 20th- and 21st-century China, Sinophone Asia (Hong Kong and Taiwan), and the transpacific relationship between Chinese and American empires.

Huang is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Duke University Press, 2020), a work of affect theory, film studies, and post-Cold War China and Sinophone Asia. The book transforms the conventional approach to horror as a genre and refocuses on “urban horror” as the name of a spectrum of affects and feelings that exceed the norms of comprehension and therefore challenge the existing sensory regime that is conditioned by political norms. It is the first study of Chinese and Sinophone film and media culture to focus on the speculative and specifically affective powers of moving images and their ability to rehearse and generate new aesthetic forms of resistance that are specific to the era of the post. Huang is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled Islands of Capital: Media Aesthetics of Zones across Militarized Oceans. Introducing a new direction in Sino-postcolonial environmental media studies, her approach to “islands” and “oceans” differs from the study of natural geographical island cultures and focuses on zones and other “technologies of the ocean” developed by global empires in the history of maritime capitalism. The project draws attention to the militarized oceans in the Pacific and the contested region of the South China Sea that is known as the site of global conflict between the United Stated, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Tracing the “ocean” as “media” in contemporary maritime capitalism and global warfare, the project critiques the conventional claims of territory and introduces an archive of anti-colonial eco-media, including maritime photography, environmental documentary, indigenous autoethnography, and queer feminist art, among others.