At this point I’ve gathered and read through most of the primary sources and scholarly articles for the historical side of my project. Doing research on regions and periods that I don’t have a lot of academic background in has definitely brought its fair share of challenges. Particularly, looking into scholarly source in two separate languages is much more difficult than I initially thought, since it’s hard to combine the information and put things together in a coherent manner. While I anticipated that the translation of the sources of themselves would take work, I realized as I was taking notes for my essay that a lot of background research not directly connected to my topic would be necessary. In Western scholarship on East Asian studies there already exists a set of specific translations for certain concepts, periods, or peoples, and I should be using this set of vocabulary to the best of my ability, rather than ways I might personally translate a word, for my essay to “join the conversation”. Herein lies my strange perspective that is both “inside” and “outside”, shaped by the ways I experienced this subject. The encounter of my two worlds turned out to be just a bit more messy than I thought, but has been overall a really informative experience.
With most of the historical research already done, I’m now in wrapping up the more modern part of my project. As a very history and literature based student, media studies is pretty new to me. The films I chose for this project all created big splashes and are all ones that I vividly remember watching for the first time. I hope that this would be an opportunity for me to look at them in a more analytical point of view and bring an interesting modern connection to my historical research.