Embodied Reckonings examines the political and cultural aspects of contemporary performances that have grappled with the history of the “comfort women,” the Japanese military’s euphemism for the sexual enslavement of girls and young women—mostly Korean—in the years before and during World War II. Long silent, in the early 1990s these women and their supporters initiated varied performance practices—protests, tribunals, theater, and memorial-building projects—to demand justice for those affected by state-sponsored acts of violence. The book provides a critical framework for understanding how actions designed to bring about redress can move from the political and legal aspects of this concept to its cultural and social possibilities. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, the study argues for the central role of performance in how Korean survivors, activists, and artists have redressed the histories—and erasures—of this sexual violence. Merging cultural studies and performance theory with a transnational, feminist analysis, the book illuminates the actions of ordinary people, thus offering ways of reconceptualizing legal and political understandings of redress that tend to concentrate on institutionalized forms of state-based remediation.

An illuminating study of how former Korean "comfort women" and their supporters have redressed history through protests, tribunals, theater, and memorial-building projects

In Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura investigates the role of artistic production in the commemoration and memorialization of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in Japan since 1989. During this time, survivors of Japanese aggression and imperialism, previously silent about their experiences, have sparked contentious public debates about the form and content of war memories. The book opens with an analysis of the performance of space at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine, which continues to promote an anachronistic veneration of the war. After identifying the centrality of performance in long-standing dominant narratives, Transgenerational Remembrance offers close readings of artistic performances that tackle subject matter largely obscured before 1989: the kamikaze pilot, Japanese imperialism, comfort women, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japanese American internment. These case studies range from Hirata Oriza’s play series about Japanese colonial settlers in Korea and Shimada Yoshiko’s durational performance about comfort women to Kondo Aisuke’s videos and gallery installations about Japanese American internment. Working from theoretical frameworks of haunting and ethics, Nakamura develops an analytical lens based on the Noh theater ghost. Noh emphasizes the agency of the ghost and the dialogue between the dead and the living. Integrating her Noh-inflected analysis into ethical and transnational feminist queries, Nakamura shows that performances move remembrance beyond current evidentiary and historiographical debates.

The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” for decades, with a major wave beginning in the 1990s. However, Indonesian survivors, and even the system’s history in Indonesia to begin with, have largely been sidelined, even within the country itself. Here, Katharine E. McGregor not only untangles the history of the system during the war, but also unpacks the context surrounding the slow and faltering efforts to address it. With careful attention to the historical, social, and political conditions surrounding sexual violence in Indonesia, supported by exhaustive research and archival diligence, she uncovers a critical piece of Indonesian history and the ongoing efforts to bring it to the public eye. Critically, she establishes that the transnational part of activism surrounding victims of the system is both necessary and fraught, a complexity of geopolitics and international relationships on one hand and a question of personal networks, linguistic differences, and cultural challenges on the other.

Unique in its global and interdisciplinary scope, this collection will bring together comparative insights across European, Ottoman, Japanese, and US imperial contexts while spanning colonized spaces in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural, intellectual and political history, anthropology, law, gender and sexuality studies, and literary criticism, The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism combines regional and historiographic overviews with detailed case studies, making it the key reference for up-to-date scholarship on the intimate dimensions of colonial rule. Comprising more than 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five parts: Directions in the study of sexuality and colonialism Constructing race, controlling reproduction Sexuality in law Subjects, souls, and selfhood Pleasure and violence. The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism is essential reading for students and researchers in gender, sexuality, race, global studies, world history, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism.

The contributors to Race and Performance after Repetition explore how theater and performance studies account for the complex relationship between race and time. Pointing out that repetition has been the primary point of reference for understanding both the complex temporality of theater and the historical persistence of race, they identify and pursue critical alternatives to the conceptualization, organization, measurement, and politics of race in performance. The contributors examine theater, performance art, music, sports, dance, photography, and other forms of performance in topics that range from the movement of boxer Joe Louis to George C. Wolfe's 2016 reimagining of the 1921 all-black musical comedy Shuffle Along to the relationship between dance, mourning, and black adolescence in Flying Lotus's music video “Never Catch Me.” Proposing a spectrum of coexisting racial temporalities that are not tethered to repetition, this collection reconsiders central theories in performance studies in order to find new understandings of race. Contributors. Joshua Chambers-Letson, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Nicholas Fesette, Patricia Herrera, Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Mario LaMothe, Daphne P. Lei, Jisha Menon, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Post, Elizabeth W. Son, Shane Vogel, Catherine M. Young, Katherine Zien

Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981--2022 is a new book about South Korean cinema in the private and independent sectors from the early 1980s to the present day. Drawing on the methodologies of documentary studies, Korean studies, and local documentary discourse, author Jihoon Kim argues that what is unique about this forty-year history of South Korean documentary cinema is the intensive and compressed coevolution of activism aspiring to advocate democracy, progressiveness, and equality through alternative media, and post-activist experiments in documentary forms and aesthetics in the service of renewing the activist tradition.

What did violence against women and children mean for ancient audiences and how do modern audiences hear and process the meaning of violence in the texts of the Hebrew Bible? The rape of Tamar, the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, babes ripped from the womb during war-texts such as these are hardly fodder for Sunday School classes; yet we are left with the reality that the Bible is a violent text full of war, murder, genocide, and destruction, often carried out at the behest of God. The essays in this volume explore ways in which the Hebrew Bible uses and abuses women and children to make indelible points concerning the people of Israel, the lived realities of the Israelite society, and God's relationship to His people. Where other works turn to the study of the violence itself, or to the divine nature of violence, this volume focuses in on the human component. As a result, these studies are reminders that women and children born out of trauma are at once vulnerable and valuable, fragile and resilient.

Troubling Traditions takes up a 21st century, field-specific conversation between scholars, educators, and artists from varying generational, geographical, and identity positions that speak to the wide array of debates around dramatic canons. Unlike Literature and other fields in the humanities, Theatre and Performance Studies has not yet fully grappled with the problems of its canon. Troubling Traditions stages that conversation in relation to the canon in the United States. It investigates the possibilities for multiplying canons, methodologies for challenging canon formation, and the role of adaptation and practice in rethinking the field’s relation to established texts. The conversations put forward by this book on the canon interrogate the field’s fundamental values, and ask how to expand the voices, forms, and bodies that constitute this discipline. This is a vital text for anyone considering the role, construction, and impact of canons in the US and beyond.

"Critical Ethnography is a rare and beautiful synthesis of deft theorizing and principled pragmatics. The complexities of ethnography demand a grasp of both theory and practice, but rarely have they come together so clearly and completely as in this passionately written text. I especially appreciate the thoughtful attention to the intellectual roots of the critical tradition in ethnography, and to the way students are rigorously led through the methodological consequences of critical epistemology." —Judith Hamera, Texas A&M University "I would strongly recommend this book for use in any course that explores the role of critical analysis in research. This book thoughtfully discusses and teaches about trying to understand the meanings attributed by others in regard to their expertise." —Amy Paul-Ward, Florida International University What is critical ethnography? How do we use theory to interpret research data? What is performance ethnography? Readers can find answers to these fundamental questions in D. Soyini Madison′s engaging and highly multidisciplinary Third Edition of Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance. The book presents a fresh new look at critical ethnography by emphasizing the significance of ethics and performance in the art and politics of fieldwork. The productive links between theory and method are celebrated in this title. Theoretical concepts range from queer theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory to Marxism and phenomenology. The methodological techniques range from designing and asking in-depth interview questions and developing rapport to coding and interpreting data. The various theories and methods culminate in three fictional ethnographic case studies that "enact" the interdependence between theory and method and the significance of social theory, ethics, and performance.