Early Movies Depicting WWII

[Mark Nornes]

Wow, bold and everything!

On Apr 11, 2007, at 10:36 PM, Mark Anderson wrote:
> I've taught a series of courses examining imperial culture in Japan  
> and the US for several years now and I have to say that the  
> atmosphere three or four years ago felt incomparably more menacing  
> than in the last year or two, especially since the last election  
> which finally and publicly repudiated quite a bit of what Bush has  
> been up to.

This is exactly what I was suggesting. The last time I taught this  
class was around the time of the Afghanistan War and the pressure was  
high. Perhaps not menacing, but palpable. This is why I felt gun shy  
this semester, only today did I realize that the situation for  
students seems to have shifted completely.

> I have not had a student who simply refused to engage historical  
> fact since around 2001. I don't know if that is self-selection on  
> the part of students, or what. It probably has a lot to do with the  
> difference between humanities majors and the other majors more  
> financially ambitious young Republicans tend to choose.

I have. I co-taught a course on Imperialism Asia with Henry Em, and  
we had a class full of good old fashioned imperialists. They were  
impervious to logic, completely indifferent to the history. "Life's a  
bitch. Colonialism was inevitable. Iraq's the same." Ann Arbor is a  
famously liberal campus, but as you might suspect these students were  
pretty much all from pre-med and engineering. We had the whole  
political spectrum around the table, but the conservative students  
managed to shut down alternative views. It was extraordinary.

I've always liked teaching this class, as it provided a way of  
looking at Japanese film history with an eye to the lived present.  
Always seemed like a war broke out whenever I taught it (as if the  
class caused it!). But I have to say, it was pretty hard to teach  
this semester if only because it was really, really depressing. Too  
real for me....but obviously not for the students!

Markus


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.service.ohio-state.edu/mailman/private/kinejapan/attachments/20070411/6099019c/attachment.html