NEW!  Photos from seminar "Remembering War Time in Japan"

Quick Links:

Home Page
What is a presidential dream course?
Guest speakers
Why this course now?
Syllabus
Pictures

WHAT IS A PRESIDENTIAL DREAM COURSE?

OU President David Boren initiated a new program focusing on undergraduate teaching in 2004. Six courses university-wide were chosen by the President and announced by Provost Nancy Mergler as the inaugural group of “Dream” Courses to be offered beginning Spring 2005. Each Dream Course receives special funding for the purpose of inviting expert guests from around the U.S. and the world to participate in the course, and to offer lectures or other events open to the public.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Carol Gluck, George Sansom Professor of History, Columbia University
Public Lecture: “Past Obsessions: War and Memory in the Twentieth Century”
NEW DATE! February 8 (Tuesday), 7:30 pm, Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. A reception will follow the lecture.

The first guest to visit OU in conjunction with Presidential Dream Course Remembering Wartime in Japan will be Carol Gluck from Columbia University, who will give a talk based on her forthcoming book called Past Obsessions: War and Memory in the Twentieth Century. Gluck is a renowned professor of Japanese history, and a past president of the Association for Asian Studies. She has produced path breaking work on Meiji period ideology and on Japanese historiography. She will be a guest instructor in our seminar and will give her public lecture on February 8 (Tuesday).

 

Mark Selden, Bartle Professor of History and Sociology, State University of New York, Binghamton
Public Lecture: “Notes From Ground Zero: War and Reconstruction in Two Eras—The American Experience in Japan and Iraq”
February 21 (Monday), 7:30 pm, Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. A reception will follow the lecture.

An historian of China by training, Mark Selden has written several influential books in that field, including The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (1971) and Chinese Village, Socialist State (1991), whose sequel, Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China will appear in 2005. In recent decades Selden's research has turned towards regional issues of power in East and Southeast Asia, including studies of war and memory involving Japan, America and the Asia-Pacific. His edited volumes, including Living With the Bomb: American Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, and War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, are part of larger series for which he serves as the series editor, including Rowman & Littlefield's "Asian Voices" and the "War and Peace Library," as well as "Critical Asian Scholarship" and "Asia's Transformations" from Routledge. Professor Selden will join us as a guest instructor on Tuesday, February 22.

Gary Nash, Professor (Emeritus) of History, UCLA; Director, National Center for History in the Schools
Public Lecture: "Rethinking the Unthinkable: Could the Founding Fathers Have Abolished Slavery?"
March 7, Monday, 7:30 pm, Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. A reception will follow the lecture.

American historian Gary Nash author of First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (2001), and co-edited with Charlotte Crabtree and Ross Dunn the book History on Trial: National Identity, Culture Wars, and the Teaching of the Past (1997). Professor Nash is currently the Director of the National Center for History in the Schools, and is a past-president of the Organization of American Historians. He will give a public lecture titled "Rethinking the Unthinkable: Could the Founding Fathers Have Abolished Slavery?" on Monday, March 7. This lecture poses the problem of historical memory by rethinking an old question in American historiography. Professor Nash will visit the seminar as a guest instructor on Tuesday, March 8.

Takashi Fujitani, Associate Professor of History, University of California, San Diego
Public Lecture: “Remembering Ethnic and Colonial Soldiers: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII”
April 18 (Monday), 7:30 pm, Sam Noble Museum of Natural History . A reception will follow the lecture.

Takashi Fujitani's Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (California, 1996) was a widely reviewed and influential study of modern Japanese emperorship. In 2001 he co-edited a volume with Lisa Yoneyama and Geoffrey M. White titled Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001). He will give a public lecture at OU on Monday, April 18 titled, "Remembering Ethnic and Colonial Soldiers: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII." Professor Fujitani’s analysis involves the use of film as well as other historical materials, and his presentation at OU will include the screening of film clips and a comparison of Japanese war films, Hollywood empire films and WWII multiracial combat films. Professor Fujitani’s lecture will be drawn from materials related to his current book project, the working title of which is Racism Under Fire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII. He has received funding for the research and writing of this book from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the Stanford Humanities Center. He will visit our capstone seminar as a special guest instructor on Tuesday, April 19.

 

WHY THIS COURSE NOW?

AN INTRODUCTION FROM ELYSSA FAISON

While my main area of research is early twentieth century gender and labor history—especially focusing on the female textile workers who were the driving force behind the turn-of-the-century capital accumulation that set the stage for Japan’s later development into an economic superpower—I have been acutely interested in issues of war and memory since I began my graduate work at UCLA in the early 1990s. It was at that time that the first Korean “comfort women”—women used as sexual slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army in China and elsewhere—came forward with their stories and demanded apology and restitution from the Japanese government. While anecdotal evidence of a system of military sexual slavery existed as early as the late 1930s, no victims had ever publicly acknowledged what had been done to them before 1992. Japanese government denials that any such organized and state-sanctioned system existed began to fall apart as historians, inspired by the stories of the women coming forward, uncovered documents from military archives proving government involvement in the system.

It was also in the early 1990s that preparations began in Japan and the U.S. for commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War. Plans by the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian to stage a major exhibit about the end of the war featuring the restored Enola Gay—the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima—were scuttled after veterans groups and others protested that the plans depicted the Japanese as victims rather than perpetrators.

Both of these events—the uncovering of evidence (and reactions to it) about Korean “comfort women” and the “Enola Gay controversy”—made it clear that “remembering” and writing history are always contested projects. In both instances a multiplicity of viewpoints have been put forward by individuals and groups with different interests and experiences. These debates about memory and commemoration have profound political implications for us today, effecting everything from international relations (for example, between Japan and Korea in the first instance, and between Japan and the U.S. in the second) to the public funding of museums, to the writing of textbooks for school children.

Today, with the U.S. engaged in a new war in Iraq that is already producing its own histories and memories, and with a Presidential election that some have claimed has focused more on how we remember the Vietnam War than what we think about education, healthcare and the economy, understanding what is at stake in the production of historical memory is of vital interest to us all. In this Presidential Dream Course, we will be looking at the way memories of the war in Asia have shaped the politics and daily lives of Koreans and other Asians living under Japanese occupation, American’s who became P.O.W.s in the Pacific theater, Chinese civilians in the city of Nanjing when the Japanese invaded in 1937, Japanese children who became orphans during the American fire-bombing of Japanese cities, Japanese-Americans sent to interment camps by the U.S. government, and many others. We will study debates about how these experiences should be written about in textbooks in Japan and the U.S.; debates about whether or not the Japanese Prime Minister should visit Yasukuni Shrine every August to pay tribute to Japan’s war dead; and how “national pride” holds different meanings for Korean women, South Korean men, the North Korean government, the families of Japanese former soldiers, and U.S. veterans. In short, we will be studying the way history and the remembering of historical events shapes the world around us.