Sunday, January 26, 2020

Week 4_Melanie Manuel_ASA 150E


Melanie Manuel
ASA 150E 001
25 January 2020

The theme of this week: “Third World Alliances and Social-Political Movements” is a rather interesting one, because as Professor Valverde says, it “turns history on its head” by reconfiguring how hegemonic discourses depicts the role of women in war. Particularly in Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s Radicals on the Road, her chapter called “We Met the ‘Enemy’—and They Are Our Sisters” prove to disprove how Southeast Asian women sat back and solely became war fodder, which simply just means they were there to be killed or, rather, silenced. In Wu’s chapter, she discusses a much larger role in which Southeast Asian women were very much at the forefront of bringing attention to the atrocities of the Vietnam War. This creates a different image of women at the time, rather than just working in factories and taking care of households, we are given an image of how American women were working to understand what was happening, while also reaching out to women of these countries to hear their stories. This is important because women are textually silenced consistently, probably even more so in the realm of war, and so to have this take is extremely important in understanding the larger picture as well as the resistance of Southeast Asian women happening during this time.

I embedded an image of a poster that advocates for the solidarity of Southeast Asian overseas. The use of “brothers” and “sisters” indicates more than just vouching for the sake of people, but rather a claim in standing beside them in their fight to freedom. This inclusion is important, and not quite highlighted in today’s textbooks, even if it is an extremely vital moment in history. 


Works Cited
Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun. “Chapter 7: We Met the ‘Enemy’—and They Are Our Sisters.” Radicals on the Road, 2013, pp. 193-218. 

Image Used
http://historyandcurrentcontext.blogspot.com/2014/08/journeys-towards-peace-internationalism.html

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