Godzilla vs. Wall Street

Godzilla Vs. Wall Street... Part II Big Gulp

Or, the global rumble in the Pacific jungle

Title: Godzilla Vs. Wall Street II: The Battle for Silicon Island
Listing: Spring 1999, COLT 204 Fiction
Meets: TBA
Your host: Dennis Redmond
Office: 313 Villard
Phone: 346-0522 office, 683-9303 home
E-mail: dredmond@gladstone.uoregon.edu
Check out Comparative Literature's website: http://babel.uoregon.edu/complit/complit.html

Course Description: East Asia is home to some of the world's oldest societies and newest economies, an explosive contradiction which has given rise to some of the most interesting political and cultural phenomena of the 20th century. The Godzilla films in particular have become classics of early global culture, by crystallizing many of the overriding themes of recent East Asian history -- both the highwater mark of the American Empire and its ignominious retreat before East Asia and the EU; the zenith of the anti-colonial revolutions epitomized by Vietnam and China and the nadir of Pol Pot and Suharto; and the epic achievements and harrowing degeneration of the Chinese Revolution -- into a powerful new aesthetic language. We're going to be looking at five decades' worth of East Asian texts, films, poems, TV clips and related narratives in an attempt to map out Godzilla's rise from washed-up ex-military reptile, to ravenous export-platform lizard, and finally to Ueberbeast of the Silicon Jungle.

So what does Wall Street have to do with any this? Plenty. Wall Street money and American markets powered the fifty-year Asian boom. As late as 1997, Wall Street punters were telling us that we were living in the dawn of the Asian Century; that the welfare state was dead, and that free trade, wage cuts and Chinese slave labor would bring prosperity to all. Instead, one of history's most manic speculative binges self-destructed in a frenzy of exploding stock markets, crashing currencies and imploding banks. To make matters worse, Wall Street and its braindead satraps over at the IMF tried to force Asian countries to deregulate their markets, throttle their industrial bases, slash wages and in general do everything humanly possible to turn a deep recession into a Thirties-style depressionary collapse (Wall Street talks self-righteously about "free markets", but what it came down to was a surgical strike aimed at excising pesky South Korean, Taiwanese and Malaysian competitors from American auto and electronics markets, thus enabling rich US investors to buy up Asian companies on the cheap).

The surgical strike failed, thanks to one little factor which Wall Street hadn't counted on: the terrain. The rumble for supremacy in the Pacific jungle between Godzilla & Co. and the high-tech mercenaries of the global rentiers wouldn't be fought out on Wall Street, but on keiretsu-infested Silicon Island. To paraphrase James Brown, Act II of Godzilla vs. Wall Street is all about the Big Payback.

What you have to do: Most of your grade will depend on either a final paper (12 pages) or a final in-class presentation of about 15 minutes or so, plus some short essays.

What you need: There are three required texts in this class, Doug Henwood's excellent and witty Wall Street, and two books by Vietnamese writers: Bao Ninh's searing The Sorrow of War and Thu Huong Duong's bittersweet Paradise of the Blind.

Useful Websites:
SME Japan Info on small and medium-size business in Japan, plus good economic links.
Left Business Observer World-class economics site from the author of Wall Street.
Culture of Japan Links to things Japanese.
Singapore Inc. What Temasek is up to and why.
Singapore Human Rights 1998 Proof positive, as if we needed it, that Orwell was an optimist.
Samsung Economic Research Institute Stats on Korean economy.
Barry's Temple of Godzilla Exactly what it sounds like.
Animation Turnpike Comprehensive directory of anime.
AsiaBiz All the latest news.

Godzilla graphics courtesy Barry's Temple of Godzilla

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