The depiction of women of East Asian descent in science fiction films reveals how racial hierarchies are mapped onto, and used as justification for, mistreatment of women—and misogynistic prejudices inform racism. Contributing to the patterns that dehumanize Asian women are multiple sci-fi films that feature cyborgs and androids in Asian female b…[Read more]

The screen as an interface immerses audiences in an alternate universe. As a result, that interface seems transparent. Through analyses of performances that call attention to filmic genres, such as Edgar Wright’s parody film, Hot Fuzz (2007), and the Wooster Group’s multimedia production, Hamlet (2007), as well as (meta)theatrical operations on…[Read more]

This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

Abstract in English :::

Shakespeare adaptations share an intimate relation with global studies, because Shakespeare – as a cultural institution – registers a broad spectrum of practices that generate productive dialogues with world cultures.

Global studies enables us to examine deceivingly harmonious images of Shakespeare’s works. This…[Read more]

Even though Shakespeare’s plays were initially performed by all-male casts, they were designed to appeal to diverse audiences. Many modern adaptations reimagine those plays as expressions of gender nonconformity. Over the past decades, prominent films and theater works have fostered new public conversations about the politics of appropriating g…[Read more]

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities as viral origins—in the United States. Offering strategies for inclusion and for identifying tacit forms of misogynistic racism, this article analyzes the manifestation of the ideas of yellow peril and yel…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

In “I, Stereotype,” Seo-Young Chu applies Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the “yellow peril.” Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s plays and motifs have been appropriated in fragmentary forms on screen since motion pictures were invented in 1893. Allusions to Shakespeare haunt our contemporary culture in a myriad of ways, whether through brief references or sustained intertextual engagements. ::::: This collection of essays extends beyond a US-UK axis to bring t…[Read more]

In Craig Brewer’s analysis of Gene Wolfe’s Interlibrary Loan he argues that the treasure, the green box, is something that allows characters means to keep their memories intact; it affords them integration which is otherwise ostensibly unavailable to them for being reclones who have only partial memories.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick analyses the sudden isolation graduate students find themselves in during the dissertation process. In the humanities, she observes, graduate students are regularly habituated into an anxiety of intellectual independence whereby sharing ideas, collaboration and publishing work in progress is to be considered suspect and…[Read more]