Asian Studies

In 1900, China was a faltering empire ruled by an autocratic foreign dynastic house and an entrenched bureaucracy of Confucian officials. Its sovereignty heavily battered and its territory compromised by foreign powers, China was commonly called “The Sick Man of Asia.” In 2000, China was a modern nation-state ruled by an authoritarian party and an entrenched bureaucracy of technocrats and administrators. With a surging economy, swollen foreign reserves, dazzling modern cities, and a large and technologically advanced military, China is regularly predicted to be the next global superpower. Yet, the path between these two startlingly different points was anything but smooth. China’s 20th century was a tortuous one. Policymakers, elites, and the common people oscillated between the poles of reform and revolution—bouts of wild radicalism alternated with more sober policies—as they pursued changes that they hoped would bring a better society and nation. This class examines some of the major events and personalities of this arduous century and its momentous political, social, and cultural changes. We will learn and apply skills of historical analysis to primary documents (in translation), some fiction, and film. Along the way, we will encounter a rich cast of characters, including Sun Yatsen, China’s “national father”; colorful warlords; corrupt bureaucrats; fervent intellectuals; protesting youths; heroic communist martyrs; the towering and enigmatic chairman Mao; long-suffering peasants; and fanatical Red Guards. These men and women made and remade modern China. This class is history and, thus, is not primarily concerned with contemporary China; but by the end of the year, students will be well-equipped with an understanding of China’s recent past, knowledge that will help immeasurably in making sense of today’s China as it becomes increasingly important in our globalized economy and society. This seminar is open to first-year students as a First-Year Studies course, as well as to sophomores, juniors, and seniors as an open seminar. All students will complete an individual research (conference) project each semester; these projects will be guided through one-on-one meetings. For those taking this class as an FYS, conferences in the fall semester will consist of biweekly individual meetings, with a group session held on alternate weeks to discuss matters concerning all FYS students (e.g., the nature of academic work in general and the various skills related to conference work, such as research, reading, writing, and editing). All conferences in the spring, for all students, will be on the regular biweekly individual schedule.

Throughout Chinese history, high literature and popular folklore shared a fascination with certain subjects, including ghosts and spirits, heroes and bandits, lovers and friends. Elite authors used these subjects as metaphors to contemplate and criticize their cultural, economic, and political traditions. In folklore, these subjects gave voice to non-elite concerns and preoccupations and merged with a variety of practices in popular culture (secular festivals, ancestor worship, and religious practices). Although technically and stylistically different, high literature and popular folklore enjoyed a continual interplay in which each redirected and influenced the other. This course aims to build different, and sometimes competing, conceptions of “tradition and culture,” “elite and folklore,” as well as to understand their continuing relevance today. To that end, we will focus on the close reading of short-story fiction, folktales, stage plays, opera, and religious practices from three pivotal periods in Chinese history: the Tang-Song period (eighth-12th centuries), the Ming-Qing period (15th-18th centuries), and the 20th century. Our approach will involve both literary and historical analysis, and our goals will be to discover continuities and transformations in both content and form and the interchange between elite and popular practices. Topics for class discussion will include: the nature and definitions of the individual; the relationships among the self, family, and society; changing notions of honor, virtue, and individualism; attitudes toward gender and sexuality; and the role of fiction and folklore in promoting or overturning cultural norms. This course is open to first-year students as a First-Year Studies course, as well as to sophomores, juniors, and seniors. For those first-year students, this will be a yearlong course that includes biweekly individual meetings to discuss students’ independent research projects. On alternate weeks, we will have group activities that will include research and writing workshops, film screenings, and field trips.

East Asia, like much of the globe, has been powerfully shaped by the arrival, presence, and activity of imperialist power in the region. In both China and Japan, in fact, nationalism is founded on resistance to the encroachments of Western imperialism. Both nations cast themselves as victims to the rapacious West. And yet, often unnoticed by patriots and pundits, both China and Japan are deeply indebted to their own domestic imperialisms, albeit in very different ways. Relying on a wide range of course materials (historical scholarship, paintings, lithographs, photographs, literature, and relevant primary sources), this course is an intensive investigation of the contours of Asian imperialism, covering the colonialism of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the aggressive Western expansion in the 19th century, and the Japanese Empire (1895-1945). We will ask what features (if any) these very different empires shared and what set them apart from each other. How and why were Asian empires built, how did they end, and what legacies did they leave? We will excavate the multiethnic Qing imperium for how it complicates China’s patriotic master narrative. Does Qing ethnic policy toward native Miao tribes differ from Western powers’ Civilizing Discourse? What are the legacies of Qing colonialism for China’s modern nation-state? The Qing campaigns to subjugate the Mongols in the northwest and the colonization of the untamed southwest both predated the arrival of the Westerners and the Opium War (1839-42). How does that impact our understanding of the clash between China and the rapidly expanding West? We will trace earlier academic views on the classic confrontation between these two presumed entities before examining more recent revisionist formulations on the Western penetration of China. What were the processes of Western intrusion, and how did Western imperialism come to structure knowledge of China? And finally, we will turn to the Japanese Empire. What were its motivations, its main phases, and its contradictions? Should we understand it as similar to Western imperialism or as an alternative, something unique? What are the implications of both those positions? To understand the Japanese Empire in both its experiential and theoretical dimensions, we will range widely across Japan’s possessions in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. The questions and topics in this seminar will complicate the master narratives that prevail in both East Asia and the West, not to delegitimize or subvert Asian sovereignties but, rather, to understand the deeply embedded narratives of imperialism within those sovereign claims in order to see how those narratives (and their blind spots) continue to frame and support policies and attitudes today.

This course explores a variety of forms of traditional popular culture that continue to survive in China and abroad. Among the topics we will cover are: folktales (Mulan, Butterfly Lovers), festivals (New Year’s, Dragon Boat, Herdboy, and Weaving Maid), popular deities (Mazu, Guanyin), and religious practices (All Souls, Hell, ancestor worship). Our focus will be on their historical origins and transformations through a variety of cultural forms. Particular attention will be paid to their entertainment, political, ideological, and sociological functions. This course aims to build different—and sometimes competing—conceptions of “tradition” and understand their continuing relevance today. Since many of these practices and beliefs reside outside the lens of elite taste and political authority, our materials will include opera, drama, popular fiction, and visual arts.

This seminar course will examine both the historical and cultural context of Mainland Chinese cinema from 1949 to the present. The course will be focused on full-length feature films from the People’s Republic of China, providing an eclectic mix of movies covering socialist propaganda of the high Maoist period (1949-76), the critical stances of the “Fifth Generation” (of graduates from the Beijing Film Academy) in the 1980s and early 1990s, the more entertainment-focused films of post-Deng (2000s) China, as well as contemporary art films that are largely seen outside of the commercial exhibition circuit. This wide variety of films will open up questions of cinematic representations of Chinese identity and culture in at least four major modes: socialist revolutionary (1949-76), critical reflections on China’s past and the revolution (1982-1989), what one might call neoliberal entertainment (1990-present), and the more underground art cinema that has emerged as mainstream Chinese cinema has become increasingly commercial. Along with the close analysis of films (their narrative structure, audiovisual language, relationship to other films from both China and beyond), the course will deal with Confucian legacies in Chinese society, communist revolutionary spasms and the censorship system, and the more open market and ideology of the post-Mao reform era. Assigned readings will be varied, as well. Several key movies will be paired with their textual antecedents (e.g., LU Xun’s New Year’s Sacrifice will be read alongside HU Sang’s by the same title, while LI Zhun’s The Biography of LI Shuangshuang will accompany the 1962 movie that followed). Appropriate readings will cover important historical background in some detail; for example, the Great Leap Forward (1959-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are both crucial events for understanding the revolutionary experience, while the latter is particularly relevant for its impact on reform-era filmmakers. Other readings will focus specifically on cinema, ranging from broad historical overviews on the material/financial conditions of production, distribution, and exhibition to close analyses of individual films, the transition from socialist to postsocialist cinema, the construction of “Chineseness” as an object for the Western gaze, and the avant-garde/independent responses to the current global/commercial Chinese cinema. This course is an open super-seminar (capped at 30 students), meeting once a week for 2.5 hours in order to facilitate in-depth discussions of paired material; for example, two movies or a movie and significant historical texts (either primary or secondary). In addition to this weekly class time, film screenings (one or two per week) will be required. For conferences, students will be divided evenly between the two professors, using the regular model of biweekly meetings.

This seminar centers on the two foundational texts in the classical Taoist tradition, Lao-tzu’s Tao-te ching (Daode jing) and the Chuang-tzu (Zhuangzi). The Tao-te-ching, an anthology of poetry, asks us to contemplate the nature of the Dao and the possibility of the individual’s attainment of it; the role of the government and rulers in making the Dao prevail in the world; and a rudimentary cosmology that proposes an ideal relationship of the individual to society, nature, and the cosmos. By contrast, the Chuang-tzu defies all categorization and, instead, invites readers to probe through its layers of myth, fantasy, jokes, short stories, and philosophical argumentation. Along the way, Chuang-tzu plunges us into an examination of some of the core questions of moral philosophy and epistemology: What is being? What is the nature of human nature? What does it mean to be virtuous? What is knowledge? How does one know that one knows? And, what does it mean to attain true knowledge and the Dao? To explore those topics and answer these questions, our seminar sessions will revolve around the close, detailed reading and interpretation of the texts.

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world. —Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A man’s statement that he “can’t breathe” ricochets across North America. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the Internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual, acoustic, or tactile in nature; made by hand or machine; circulated by word of mouth; or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images—and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization and social media. We will also consider the spectral, haunting qualities of many imaginal moments in life. Readings are to include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images are to be drawn from photographs, films and videos, paintings, sculptures, drawings, street art and graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine. The seminar will be held during two class sessions each week during the fall and spring terms. Along with that, students will meet individually with the instructor every other week through the course of each semester to discuss their ongoing academic and creative work. In the fall semester, we will all also meet every other week in an informal group setting to watch films together, discuss student research and writing projects, and engage creatively with images and imaginal thought.

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and like-minded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

This course will explore the architecture and visual arts of societies in which Islam is a strong political, cultural, or social presence. We will follow the history of some of these societies through the development of their arts and architecture, using case studies to explore their diverse artistic languages from the advent of Islam through the contemporary world. We will begin with an introduction to the history surrounding the advent of Islam and the birth of arts and architecture that respond to the needs of the new Islamic community. We will proceed to follow the developments of diverse artistic and architectural languages of expression as Islam spreads to the Mediterranean and to Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America—exploring the ways in which arts can help define and express identities for people living in multiconfessional societies. We will then draw this exploration into the present day, in which global economics, immigration, and politics draw the architecture and artistic attitudes of Islam into the global contemporary discourse. Our work will include introductions to some of the theoretical discourses that have emerged concerning cultural representation and exchange and appropriation in art and architecture. One of our allied goals will be to learn to read works of art and to understand how an artistic expression that resists representation can connect with its audience. And throughout this course, we will ask: Can there be an Islamic art?

Students will be introduced to the traditional Chinese practices of Tai Chi and Qi Gong. These practices engage with slow, deliberate movements, focusing on the breath, meditative practice, and posture to restore and balance energy—called chi or Qi. The postures flow together, creating graceful dances of continuous motion. Sometimes referred to as one of the soft or internal martial arts, Tai Chi and Qi Gong are foundational practices within a lifelong, holistic self-cultivation in traditional Chinese culture.

This yearlong course, based on the professor’s new book—Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire?—introduces students to the emerging Law and Political Economy tradition in economics. The course will deal with four interrelated questions: (1) What does economic regulation mean? (2) What is the relationship between institutions, legal ones in particular, and the economy? (3) How does one theoretically analyze the nature of property rights, money, corporations, and power? (4) How does rethinking the relationship between law and the economy challenge conventional ideas about the nature of economic regulation? The course will seek to understand the nature of power and its relationship to institutions, especially legal ones, by considering property rights and money, the business corporation, constitutional political economy, the links between “free markets” and authoritarianism, colonialism and race, and inequality as it intersects across class, race, and gender lines. We will deal with these questions by focusing on the insights of the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realists and their relationship to the classical political economy tradition (especially Adam Smith and Karl Marx). The Law and Political Economy framework will be contrasted with the insights of New Institutional Economics, with the latter’s basis in neoclassical economics. Core questions that will be addressed include: What is laissez faire, and does legal-economic history show any proof of its existence? What is assumed when dueling perspectives advocate “more” or “less” government intervention; and are these, in fact, false binaries that distract from core questions of public policy and key challenges such as climate instability, growing inequality, and threats to democracy? No prior background in economics is required.

Where does the food we eat come from? Why do some people have enough food to eat and others do not? Are there too many people for the world to feed? Who controls the world’s food? Will global food prices continue their recent rapid rise; and, if so, what will be the consequences? What are the environmental impacts of our food production systems? How do answers to these questions differ by place or by the person asking the question? How have they changed over time? This course will explore the following fundamental issue: the relationship between development and the environment—focusing, in particular, on agriculture and the production and consumption of food. The questions above often hinge on the contentious debate concerning population, natural resources, and the environment. Thus, we will begin by critically assessing the fundamental ideological positions and philosophical paradigms of “modernization,” as well as critical counterpoints that lie at the heart of this debate. Within this context of competing sets of philosophical assumptions concerning the population-resource debate, we will investigate the concept of “poverty” and the making of the Third World, access to food, hunger, grain production and food aid, agricultural productivity (the Green and Gene revolutions), biofuels, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs), the international division of labor, migration, globalization and global commodity chains, and the different strategies adopted by nation-states to “‘develop” natural resources and agricultural production. Through a historical investigation of environmental change and the biogeography of plant domestication and dispersal, we will look at the creation of indigenous, subsistence, peasant, plantation, collective, and commercial forms of agriculture. We will analyze the physical environment and ecology that help shape but rarely determine the organization of resource use and agriculture. Rather, through the dialectical rise of various political-economic systems such as feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism, we will study how humans have transformed the world’s environments. We will follow with studies of specific issues: technological change in food production; commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and the decline of the family farm; food and public health, culture, and family; land grabbing and food security; the role of markets and transnational corporations in transforming the environment; and the global environmental changes stemming from modern agriculture, dams, deforestation, grassland destruction, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the interrelationship with climate change. Case studies of particular regions and issues will be drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The final part of the course examines the restructuring of the global economy and its relation to emergent international laws and institutions regulating trade, the environment, agriculture, resource-extraction treaties, the changing role of the state, and competing conceptualizations of territoriality and control. We will end with discussions of emergent local, regional, and transnational coalitions for food self-reliance and food sovereignty, alternative and community-supported agriculture, community-based resource-management systems, sustainable development, and grassroots movements for social and environmental justice. Films, multimedia materials, and distinguished-guest lectures will be interspersed throughout the course. One farm/factory field trip is possible if funding/timing permits. The lecture participants may also take a leading role in a campus-wide event on “the climate crisis, food, and hunger,” tentatively planned for spring. Please mark your calendars when the dates are announced, as attendance for all of the above is required. Attendance and participation are also required at special guest lectures and film viewings in the Social Science Colloquium Series approximately once per month. The Web Board is an important part of the course. Regular required postings of short essays will be made here, as well as follow-up commentaries with your colleagues. There will be occasional short, in-class essays during the semester and a final exam at the end. Group conferences will focus on in-depth analysis of certain course topics and will include short prepared papers for debates, the debates themselves, and small-group discussions. You will prepare a poster project on a topic of your choice, related to the course, which will be presented at the end of the semester in group conference, as well as in a potential public session.

South Asia, a region at the geographic center of the world’s most important cultural, religious, and commercial encounters for millennia, has a rich history of cultural exchanges. Its central location on the Indian Ocean provided it with transnational maritime connections to Africa and Southeast Asia, while its land routes facilitated constant contact with the Eurasian continent. The region has witnessed numerous foreign rules, from the early Central Asian Turkic dynasties to the Mughals and, finally, the British. After gaining independence from British colonial rule, the region was eventually partitioned into three different nations—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—each with its distinctive form of government. South Asia has produced a significant diaspora worldwide, preserving its cultural heritage and creating further cultural exchanges with the adopted nations, thereby influencing global culture. Despite facing development challenges and political instability, South Asia is rapidly developing within the capitalistic world economy and becoming an important player on the global scene, both politically and culturally. This course will provide students with a survey of South Asia from the era of the early Indus Civilization to the present. Lectures and sources will trace major political events and the region’s cultural, ecological, and economic developments that have significantly shaped South Asian history. Students will analyze both primary and secondary sources, enhancing their understanding of this diverse society. They are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in South Asian history and develop sound arguments.

East Asia, like much of the globe, has been powerfully shaped by the arrival, presence, and activity of imperialist power in the region. In both China and Japan, in fact, nationalism is founded on resistance to the encroachments of Western imperialism. Both nations cast themselves as victims to the rapacious West. And yet, often unnoticed by patriots and pundits, both China and Japan are deeply indebted to their own domestic imperialisms, albeit in very different ways. Relying on a wide range of course materials (historical scholarship, paintings, lithographs, photographs, literature, and relevant primary sources), this course is an intensive investigation of the contours of Asian imperialism, covering the colonialism of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the aggressive Western expansion in the 19th century, and the Japanese Empire (1895-1945). We will ask what features (if any) these very different empires shared and what set them apart from each other. How and why were Asian empires built, how did they end, and what legacies did they leave? We will excavate the multiethnic Qing imperium for how it complicates China’s patriotic master narrative. Does Qing ethnic policy toward native Miao tribes differ from Western powers’ Civilizing Discourse? What are the legacies of Qing colonialism for China’s modern nation-state? The Qing campaigns to subjugate the Mongols in the northwest and the colonization of the untamed southwest both predated the arrival of the Westerners and the Opium War (1839-42). How does that impact our understanding of the clash between China and the rapidly expanding West? We will trace earlier academic views on the classic confrontation between these two presumed entities before examining more recent revisionist formulations on the Western penetration of China. What were the processes of Western intrusion, and how did Western imperialism come to structure knowledge of China? And finally, we will turn to the Japanese Empire. What were its motivations, its main phases, and its contradictions? Should we understand it as similar to Western imperialism or as an alternative, something unique? What are the implications of both those positions? To understand the Japanese Empire in both its experiential and theoretical dimensions, we will range widely across Japan’s possessions in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria. The questions and topics in this seminar will complicate the master narratives that prevail in both East Asia and the West, not to delegitimize or subvert Asian sovereignties but, rather, in order to understand the deeply embedded narratives of imperialism within those sovereign claims in order to see how those narratives (and their blind spots) continue to frame and support policies and attitudes today.

This seminar course will examine both the historical and the cultural context of Mainland Chinese cinema from 1949 to the present. The course will be focused on full-length feature films from the People’s Republic of China, providing an eclectic mix of movies covering socialist propaganda of the high Maoist period (1949-76), the critical stances of the “Fifth Generation” (of graduates from the Beijing Film Academy) in the 1980s and early 1990s, the more entertainment-focused films of post-Deng (2000s) China, as well as contemporary art films that are largely seen outside of the commercial exhibition circuit. This wide variety of films will open up questions of cinematic representations of Chinese identity and culture in at least four major modes: socialist revolutionary (1949-76), critical reflections on China’s past and the revolution (1982-1989), what one might call neoliberal entertainment (1990-present), and the more underground art cinema that has emerged as mainstream Chinese cinema has become increasingly commercial. Along with the close analysis of films (their narrative structure, audiovisual language, relationship to other films from both China and beyond), the course will deal with Confucian legacies in Chinese society, communist revolutionary spasms and the censorship system, and the more open market and ideology of the post-Mao reform era. Assigned readings will be varied, as well. Several key movies will be paired with their textual antecedents (e.g., LU Xun’s New Year’s Sacrifice will be read alongside HU Sang’s by the same title, while LI Zhun’s The Biography of LI Shuangshuang will accompany the 1962 movie that followed). Appropriate readings will cover important historical background in some detail; for example, the Great Leap Forward (1959-62) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) are both crucial events for understanding the revolutionary experience, while the latter is particularly relevant for its impact on reform-era filmmakers. Other readings will focus specifically on cinema, ranging from broad historical overviews on the material/financial conditions of production, distribution, and exhibition to close analyses of individual films, the transition from socialist to postsocialist cinema, the construction of “Chineseness” as an object for the Western gaze, and the avant-garde/independent responses to the current global/commercial Chinese cinema. This course is an open super-seminar (capped at 30 students), meeting once a week for 2.5 hours in order to facilitate in-depth discussions of paired material; for example, two movies or a movie and significant historical texts (either primary or secondary). In addition to this weekly class time, film screenings (one or two per week) will be required. For conferences, students will be divided evenly between the two professors, using the regular model of biweekly meetings.

The Indian Ocean is the third-largest ocean in the world and contributes almost 30 percent to the total oceanic realm of our planet. Current scholars have defined the Indian Ocean to include the oceanic and littoral spaces in the southwest from the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, to the Red Sea in the north, then horizontally through to the South China Sea in the east, and down to Australia in the southeast. Commerce around the Indian Ocean continued as a web of production and trade that spanned across the ports of India, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Indian Ocean ports were the fulcrum of maritime trade that precipitated spontaneous transcultural interactions between traders and inhabitants of different geographic regions who mingled there to exchange commodities. Ships followed monsoons or seasonal wind patterns, and sailors were obliged to wait at length for return departures from ports, which was a significant cause of cultural transfer. Various religions, including Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, were mobile across the Indian Ocean networks; and extant beliefs, practices, and material cultures are evidence. The study of the Indian Ocean World (IOW), as some historians have termed it, is a newly emerging field in world history. New evidence from historical research of the last 30 years has recovered the lost significance of this region, which was the center of a robust and complex trade and cultural network for a millennium and that continues today. This course is designed to provide students with a survey of Indian Ocean world history from the medieval to the colonial era. Lectures and sources will help students deepen their knowledge of peoples and cultures around the Indian Ocean and gain a wider appreciation for the transnational trade and cultural and religious networks that existed there. Students will learn to examine that globalization is not a modern phenomenon but, rather, an ongoing aspect of the Indian Ocean. Each week, students will evaluate sources that explore the discrete regions of the Indian Ocean, their people, and the religious networks, commercial exchanges, migrations, and political events that they engender to make a complex and dynamic connected history. Students are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in Indian Ocean history and develop sound arguments.

This is an introductory queer and feminist studies course that centers the intellectual work of theorists within the traditions known as Black Feminism and Queer of Color Critique with the US academy. Each week, we will take up a key debate or concern within the interdisciplinary field of women, gender, and sexuality studies, pairing influential works from the past alongside contemporary scholarship. We’ll visit work by scholars including, but not limited to, Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Barbara Christian, Cathy Cohen, the Combahee Collective, Roderick Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Vivian Huang, E. Johnson Patrick, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, José Muñoz Esteban, Jennifer Nash, C. Snorton Riley, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams. Some topics will include survival, loss, care, “the academy,” archives, identity politics, respectability, and language. Conference projects will be based on archival research at the Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Students will meet every two weeks at the SLC library in one of four conference groups organized around overarching topics of concern and debate from the class, including “identity and intersectionality,” “institutionality and the academy,” “violence, resistance, and care,” and “emotion.” Alongside individual seminar projects, these four research groups will each produce a co-authored archival “finding aid,” a guide for future scholars who visit the SLC Archives.

What is the relationship between the language(s) we speak, the nation in which we live, and our understanding of ourselves? If language and place help shape our identity, what can we learn from those caught between borders and living in multiple tongues? This course examines transnational literary texts and films both to learn about the lived experiences and aesthetic experimentation of a variety of Japanese-language authors and directors and to explore how language, literature, and visual media are related more broadly to conceptions of “national belonging.” The works covered in this course highlight the destabilization of identity that accompanies both the act of border crossing and the geopolitical upheavals that cause those borders to shift and be redrawn, from the forced assimilation of colonial subjects during Japan’s imperial period, to the US military’s postwar occupation of Japan, to contemporary narratives of globalization, postmodern identity, and the internal borders that today demarcate Japan’s regional cultures and dialects. Through close readings of these texts and films, we will explore the ways that authors in Japan—who have historically been marginalized based on race and ethnicity, class, linguistic ability, and/or gender—have sought to challenge the Japanese national literary cannon and the very notion of “the nation” itself. Students are expected to develop a related research project over the course of the term through conference work that delves deeply into the production, circulation, and reception of some aspect of modern Japanese media.

This course examines the literary representation of urban space throughout modern and contemporary Japanese literature, considering how the figure of the city serves as a literary technique through which authors navigate issues of modernity, personal identity, the nation, and the world. Through close readings of texts written by Japanese, Korean, and Asian American authors that traverse Tokyo, Osaka, Berlin, colonized Seoul, semicolonial Shanghai, and visions of the cosmopolis of the future, we will explore the city in literature as a space that complicates and even transcends the borders of the nation in its navigation of collective histories and personal memories—with a particular focus on how representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and class intersect within the literary city. The course introduces basic concepts from urban semiotics and other philosophies of the production of space as a method for analyzing the uses of space in literature, as well as introducing recent scholarship in Japanese studies that presents new perspectives on the relationship of urban architecture, global and local geopolitics, and cultural production. We will explore a number of topics in modern, postwar, and contemporary Japanese history through the framework of “the city,” including early Japanese encounters with “the West” in the Meiji period, cosmopolitanism in the Japanese Empire, black markets in the aftermath of World War II, segregated spaces and the experiences of minority groups in the postwar period, and the social and material transformations of urban spaces in Japan after natural disasters such as the 3/11 Triple Disaster in 2011. We will also consider Japanese American engagement with the space of New York City. Through conference work, students will conduct individual research projects in service of extended creative and scholarly reflection on their own relationship to the urban space(s) they occupy and see represented in contemporary media.

This seminar centers on the two foundational texts in the classical Taoist tradition, Lao-tzu’s Tao-te ching (Daode jing) and the Chuang-tzu (Zhuangzi). The Tao-te-ching, an anthology of poetry, asks us to contemplate the nature of the Dao and the possibility of the individual’s attainment of it; the role of the government and rulers in making the Dao prevail in the world; and a rudimentary cosmology that proposes an ideal relationship of the individual to society, nature, and the cosmos. By contrast, the Chuang-tzu defies all categorization and, instead, invites readers to probe through its layers of myth, fantasy, jokes, short stories, and philosophical argumentation. Along the way, Chuang-tzu plunges us into an examination of some of the core questions of moral philosophy and epistemology: What is being? What is the nature of human nature? What does it mean to be virtuous? What is knowledge? How does one know that one knows? And, what does it mean to attain true knowledge and the Dao? To explore those topics and answer these questions, our seminar sessions will revolve around the close, detailed reading and interpretation of the texts.

This introductory course treats the evolution of Buddhism in India, from the origins of the religion as a group of “world-renouncing” ascetics through the development of large state-supported monastic communities and the emergence of the major reform movements known as Mahayana and Tantra. The course also focuses on the Buddhism of two regions of the world—the Tibetan plateau and Southeast Asia—where the respective traditions have been most self-consciously concerned with maintaining precedents inherited from India. Equal attention is paid to: (1) matters of philosophy and doctrine, (2) religious rites and practices, and (3) social and institutional arrangements. The lectures are accompanied by copious audiovisual materials.

This introductory course focuses on the Buddhism of East Asia: China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Buddhism first began to take root in China in the early centuries of the Common Era, having been transmitted from India via Central Asia and the maritime states of Southeast Asia. It initially met with much resistance, being branded an “alien” cult that was at odds with native Chinese (especially Confucian) values. Eventually, however, the Indian religion adapted to Chinese culture and came to have a profound influence on it, spawning new schools of Buddhism such as Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land, and Chan (called Zen in Japan). The smaller, neighboring countries that fell under the sway of Chinese civilization—Korea, Vietnam, and Japan—first imported forms of Buddhism that had taken shape in China, not India; but each, in turn, further changed the religion in ways that accorded with their own indigenous cultures. Equal attention is paid in this course to: (1) matters of philosophy and doctrine, (2) religious rites and practices, and (3) social and institutional arrangements. The lectures are accompanied by audiovisual materials. The course has no prerequisite but is suitable for students who have already taken the companion lecture—The Buddhist Tradition in India, Tibet, and Southeast Asia—which is offered in the fall.

Most branches of the Buddhist tradition throughout history have embraced the idea that a deluded apprehension of one’s “self” and the “things” that make up one’s world is the root cause of all suffering experienced by humans and other living beings in the round of rebirth (sa?sara). On a more mundane level, Buddhists have generally held that regulating the “mind”—the deep-seated nexus of habitual responses, proclivities, and beliefs that filters our perceptions and directs our actions—is the key to achieving individual satisfaction and social harmony and justice. Thus, whether the aim is ultimate salvation, happiness in this life, or simply the attainment of material benefits, Buddhists have often prescribed some program of sustained mental discipline—some kind of “meditation” practice—as the best means of working toward the goal. But “Buddhist meditation” is only a loose rubric that covers a wide range of different practices as, for example, techniques for calming the mind and entering into trance; procedures for the systematic philosophical analysis of ultimate reality; mental exercises meant to suppress negative emotions (e.g., anger) and foster postive ones (e.g., loving kindness); the cultivation of “mindfulness,” in which one strives to maintain a constant, detached awareness of one’s own physical and mental states without trying to change them; mental exercises for recalling and repenting bad deeds done in the past; the visualization of deities, performed in conjunction with devotional prayer; the “investigation of words” attributed to Zen masters, also known as koan practice; and so on. In this course, we examine a selection of texts deriving from the Indian, Southeast Asian, East Asian, and Tibetan Buddhist traditions that treat these different types of meditation. Readings are in English translation.

In public discourse, we are bombarded with assertions of the newly “global” nature of the contemporary world. This assertion assumes that former stable categories of personhood, ideational systems, nation, identity, and space are now fragmented and transcended by intensified travel, digital technology, and cross-cultural contact. This seminar is based on the premise that people have traveled throughout history; current global moves are but the most recent manifestation of a phenomenon that has historically occurred in many forms and places. This long(er) view of mobility will allow us to rethink and reexamine not only our notions of travel but their shifting connotations and significance across time and space. We will explore how supposed stable categories—such as citizen, refugee, nation, and commodity—are constructed and consider several theoretical approaches that help us make sense of these categorizations, the processes accompanying their normalization and dissemination, and their underlying assumptions. Our questions will include: What are the political, navigational, and epistemological foundations that go into mapmaking and schemas of classification? How do nomads change into settled city dwellers or wageworkers? How does time become disciplined? How does travel change into tourism? How do commodities travel and acquire meaning? What is the relationship between legal and illicit moves? How do technologies of violence, such as weapons and drugs, circulate? What is the meaning of their circulation in different contexts? How do modern technologies enable time/space compression? What are the shifting logics of globalization? What is their relationship to our notions and constructions of authenticity, subjectivity, and identity? During the fall semester, we will begin by developing an analytical approach toward our topic (which we will continue to develop throughout the year). We will then consider the implications of classification, categorization, and mapping. For the remainder of the semester, we will follow the travel(s) of ideas, commodities, and people. In the process, we will begin to think about questions of time/space compression. In the spring, we will return to some of the themes of the fall semester but examine them in a different context and through a different lens. Among our concerns in the spring semester will be issues of fusion and hybridization in cultural practices regarding people and things (e.g., food, music, romance, families); shifting places (e.g., borders, travel, and tourism); time/space compression through new technologies of travel and communication; and drugs, terror, violence, and poverty. As our sources, we will rely primarily on interdisciplinary analytical writings but will also include travel narratives, literature, and films.

The Iowa Writers Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included writing a postwar manual for the Army, called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. In much American poetry, the consequences of this project of domination are unseen. As is often not true elsewhere, the prison is seen (or unseen) from the point of view of the free. This course looks for the traces of this project of domination and asks what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the free from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it’s meant to be a poet elsewhere? Why hasn’t that been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power, “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? What might the poetry be that comes from it? Our text will be an anthology and workbook, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nazim Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. You’ll be asked to do in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, and bring drafts to conference. Each term, you’ll be required to make an anthology and a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, we’ll look together for “The most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet”—aka “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you/I haven’t said yet.”