Kinship in Literature from Militarized Northeast Asia
Video Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Jiaxin Yan
Exhibition Number 515
Abstract
My project focuses on formations of kinship in sites across the northwestern Pacific Ocean, particularly in Okinawa, Taiwan, and Jeju that have become the frontiers of military expansion. After the Vietnam War, some Northeast Asian writers and artists shed light on new forms of intimacy as critical social networks that challenge the imperial logic behind a US-backed “free world.” The project sheds light on the operational mundaneness of militarization in gendered and racialized forms, and the complex ways it impacts but does not overdetermine interpersonal relations. Drawing from cultural artifacts as diverse as fiction, poetry, installation art, and activist manifestos, I use kinship as a critical analytic to shed light on the affective ties and strategic alliances people forge, explicitly or unconsciously, amidst military and ideological confrontation. The project traces and nurtures intimacies bound not by nationality or family lineage, but by a shared sense of precarity under militarized peace. The project builds timely dialogues across literary studies, visual culture, and transnational feminisms. It makes important theoretical interventions on understanding state-sanctioned military violence, especially its less immediate impacts on intimate ties among individuals and environments. Inspired by feminist scholarship on kinship and critical fabulation, I attend to liminal spaces between nations, and highlight creative testimonies from marginalized communities who struggle against militarized peace. Combining textual analysis, archival research, with community engagement, the project enhances collaborative partnerships with local art groups and transpacific anti-militarist networks. It elevates voices from underrepresented communities living in militarized zones within and beyond the northwestern Pacific.
Importance
My project examines an array of literary texts, activist art, and historical moments to empower creative testimonies from marginalized island communities. It incites reflection and action from readers and the broader community to challenge racist, nation-centric visions of kinship and peace. While grounded in the sociopolitical realities of Northeast Asia, the project extends beyond the region, fostering partnerships with anti-colonial, feminist scholars and nonacademic artists and thinkers. It helps dissolve the boundaries between art and daily life to cultivate personal experiential knowledge of (de)militarization. My work will raise the public awareness of oft-invisible actors behind militarized peace. It strengthens transnational feminist networks and offers tools for taking informed action against militarization.