Korean Cultural Studies Seminar

This course inaugurates a new seminar series that moves across the pre- and post-1945 divide to address cultural forms that navigate intersections among gender, sexuality, mind, body, self, race, empire, technology, militarism (among other concerns). Working across disciplines, the present seminar will focus on the institutionalization of care as central to the idea of the modern and the empirical project of modernization. We begin with an overview on science and technology followed by an engagement with clinical psychiatry, women’s health, and literary representations that connect incarceration to broader rehabilitative praxis. Building off of the discussion of the colonial medical complex, the seminar will conclude with a consideration of the relations between the colonial modern and postcolonial developmentalism.