Undergraduate

In a recent essay on teaching gender in China, the historian Gail Hershatter writes: "First, we need to disaggregate the subject of 'women.' Which women, where, and when? Urban, rural, old, young, elite, poor, northern, southern, Han, non-Han—each of these terms fractures the unitary category 'women,' continually forcing us to ask who, and what, we are talking about. Disaggregation also reminds us that revolutions, like other social processes, are uneven, fragmentary, messy, and fragile. 'Women' is not the only category that should be scrutinized in this way—'China' itself is another shorthand category begging for disassembly and analysis."

 Hershatter’s invitation to “disaggregate” and “disassemble” both the subject of “women” and “China” constitutes an important methodological premise for this course, which asks which women wrote in late Imperial and modern China, where and when they did so, and perhaps most crucially, why. We’ll keep in mind the imperative to “disaggregate,” then, but will also consider the ways in which women (and men) reimagined the collectivity of women and the concept of “women’s literature” (funü wenxue) in order to stake out a position in the cultural sphere. In sum, how did Chinese women use literature to redefine what it meant to be a woman, and what was their role (both of women and of literature) in the major social and political upheavals and in the reformist and revolutionary movements of their day?

Readings include essays, poetry, diaries and fiction by women writers from the 12th to the 21th century in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. All assigned readings are in English translation, but students who read Chinese are encouraged to read the original texts.

Following FDR’s Executive Order 9066 and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans, Chicago’s Japanese American population exploded beginning in 1943 when the wartime internment camps began to release internees deemed sufficiently ‘loyal’ on the condition that they not reside on the West Coast. More than 20,000 former internees settled in Chicago, creating new communities that persisted for decades with their own institutions and cultural practices—often in the face of racial discrimination, economic hardship, and continuing Cold War suspicions of ‘disloyalty.’ This course traces the history of this local community in terms of questions of collective and individual memory and cultural imagination. With a focus on visual culture (photography, painting, and motion pictures), musical practice, fiction and poetry, and oral history, we will explore the complex legacies of both the prewar and postwar Chicago Japanese American communities, including their alliances and conflicts with other marginalized groups and with more recent immigrants from Japan and elsewhere.

This course will introduce students to theories and practices of performance that center East Asian forms and experiences. We will engage with East Asian performance not as essentialized and static cultural displays, but as sites for disciplinary intervention and innovation that can motivate more capacious theories of performance. The course will feature several guest scholars and practitioners who will introduce forms such as noh, kabuki, Kun opera, pansori, butoh, and K-pop through guided discussions and workshops. No background required, all readings in English.

From everyday social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and WeChat, to more complex real-time immersive social and gaming sites, virtual realms are propagating at a fantastic rate while transforming what it means to live and interact in the physical world. As such virtual world, communities, and spaces increasingly command our attention, time, and money, scholars from various fields have begun to tackle questions concerning the ethics, logics, patterns, and social specificity of the virtual through experimental forms of virtual ethnography. This advanced undergraduate course introduces students to some these recent ethnographies and corresponding theoretical interventions into the nature of collective techno-life within virtual realms. Students will build on this material in order to develop an ethnographic inquiry into a virtual world of their choosing. In so doing, they will work individually and as a class through the processes of pre-field planning, fieldwork, and post-field analysis and writing.

The class examines closely types of materials used--ceramics, stone, lacquer, silk, paper, ink--and their significance in the production of artworks through Chinese history. Students will be expected go to the Field Museum of Natural History, the Smart Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago where classes will in the galleries, storage, and conservation areas. Students will be able to examine groups of objects of similar materials and individual pieces in detail. They will have opportunities to speak with curators and conservators about their work with museum objects--acquisition, research, exhibition planning, restoration. From their early use beginning in the prehistoric period to their place in the material culture of urban society, certain materials had special significance over time. Craftsmanship of materials, artistic refinement, and local production were related to their social function. Many pieces known in museums today were once buried with the dead, including precious items and emblems of power and wealth, objects for daily use, and inexpensive models of buildings, animals, and figurines made for funerary purposes. Others were used for antiquarian research by scholarly collectors. The Field Museum has an extensive collection of ink rubbings, taken from historical objects that had carved inscriptions and ornament. Ceramicware particularly durable and continuous in use. The Field Museum also has a large cache of Chinese ceramics retrieved from a shipwreck in the Java Sea. Through their close study of works of art and their readings, students will be expected to speak about objects descriptively and discuss them in historical contexts. They will write essays about selected objects as might be featured in an exhibition catalogue.

In China, landscape, literally “mountains and waters” (shanshui), has been a primary theme of artistic expression since the tenth century, as revealed most elaborately in two-dimensional works of art. This course surveys major areas of study in the history of Chinese landscape painting from its full bloom in the tenth century to the end of dynastic China in the twentieth century. It aims to equip students with basic knowledge and skills required to analyze the key elements of its pictorial representation, such as format, style, technique, material, etc. On a broader level, the course will investigate topics including religious significance of early landscape images, stylistic analysis and art historical accounts in relation to court and literati arenas, landscape aesthetic and theoretical foundations, and landscape representation as socio-political commentary. Considerable attention will be paid to the inherent features of various portable formats, such as scroll, fan and album leaf, as well as their historical context, viewing convention, audience and social function.

The third quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence covers the emerging nation-states of China, Korea, and Japan in the context of Western and Japanese imperialism and the rise of an interconnected global economy. Our themes include industrialization and urbanization, state strengthening and nation-building, the rise of social movements and mass politics, the impact of Japanese colonialism on the homeland and the colonies, East Asia in the context of US-Soviet rivalry, and the return of the region to the center of the global economy in the postwar years. Similar to the first and second quarters, we will look at East Asia as an integrated region, connected by trade and cultural exchange even when divided into opposing blocs during the Cold War. As much as possible, we will look beyond nation-states and their policies at underlying trends shared by the three East Asian nations, such as demographic change, changes in gender roles, and the rise of consumer culture.

The second quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence covering what are now China, Japan, and Korea from roughly 1600 to 1895. Major themes include demographic and economic change; the social and cultural effects of widespread but uneven commercialization; state formation, rebellion, and political change; migration, urbanization, and territorial expansion; changes in family and gender roles; changes in the "natural" environment, particularly as related to agricultural expansion; changes in religion, ideology, and relationships between "elite" and "popular" culture; and increasingly consequential encounters with Western Europeans, Russians, and Americans, especially in the nineteenth century. The course aims to treat East Asia as a single interacting region, rather than as three (or more) sharply separated proto-nations; however, it will also call attention to the enormous diversity both among and within China, Japan, and Korea, treating those differences as constantly evolving and as something to be explained rather than assumed.

The first quarter of the East Asian civilization sequence examines the politics, society, and culture of East Asia from ancient times until c. 1600. Our focus will be on examining key historical moments and intellectual, social, and cultural trends with an emphasis on the region as a whole. Students will read and discuss culturally significant texts and be introduced to various approaches to analyzing them.

The recent popularization of “true crime” in film, television shows, and podcasts has prompted critical discussions about the ethics of mixing documentary with entertainment and fact with fiction, as well as concerns about whose narratives are given public attention as others are ignored. Using these considerations as a starting point, this course examines some of the mainstays of the genre of “true crime”—scandal, violence, disaster, law, and the supernatural—in fiction and theater in early modern Japan in order to trace the fluctuating relationship between news, fiction, and performance over the course of the Edo period. This course examines the many ways that works of literature and stage were already deeply invested in these tropes of rumor, scandal, sensation, spectacle, and documentary long before the advent of regularly circulating printed newspapers in Meiji Japan, as well as how these existing configurations of sense and sensationalism informed later developments in media and fiction. The goal of this course is for students to gain not only a breadth of knowledge about various literary and theatrical forms in early modern Japan but also a critical awareness of how early modern spectacles of infamy or violence intersected with categories of class, gender, sexuality, and disability to transform some figures into targets of sympathy and others into paragons of villainy or horror. 

All course readings will be available in English. The course is designed for undergraduate students but graduate participation is welcome with advanced consultation.