2020-2021

EALC 20042/30042 Busan Biennale: The Chicago Chapter Seminar

(ARTV 20024, ARTV 30024)

Timed to coincide with the Busan Biennale's Chicago Chapter, a series of events and exchanges with artists and organizers of the project, this interdisciplinary class will examine the context of the biennale and respond to works in the show-- giving special attention to the interplay between sound, text, and image. Using Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's Picture at an Exhibition as inspiration, artists, musicians, and writers from South Korea and around the world were invited to respond to both the city of Busan and to each other's work. Similarly, we will likewise read, listen, and look at the work and create projects while considering our own context here in the city of Chicago. Students will be asked to complete one short writing assignment, one short creative piece, and develop a larger project. Weekly reading assignments will be discussed, drawing mainly from the Biennale reader and other artist writings that will guide our thinking about artistic practice across mediums and the nexus of artistic writing and conceptual art more broadly. What kind of artworks will emerge from this encounter with an international biennale? What is the meaning of interdisciplinarity and experimental form when conventional forms of exhibition making that have been so upended by the pandemic? These are just a few of the questions that will guide our inquiry during the seminar.

Z. Cahill
2020-2021 Spring

EALC 29432 Cold War Cultures in Divided Korea and Germany, 1945–2000

(GLST 29432, GRMN 29432, HIST 29432)

This course introduces students to the history of the Cold War through the comparative study of its front lines: divided Korea and Germany. Germany and Korea shared little in common—culturally, geopolitically, and historically—before 1945. And yet for both nations, the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War brought with it the near parallel division of their societies into two mutually antagonistic states, each allied with the opposing ideological camp. To what extent did the experience of division and marginality in the bifurcated world order give both Germanys and Koreas simultaneously unique and yet similar experiences of the conflict? To answer this question, we will examine how the Cold War shaped conflicts over culture, consumption, and power in all four states while following how each positioned themselves on the international stage vis-à-vis each other, the superpowers, and the "Third World." This course requires neither background knowledge of Korean or German languages, nor these regions' histories, nor previous coursework in history.

E. Pérez and B. Van Zee
2020-2021 Spring

EALC 28218/38218 Buddhist Visual Cultures

(HREL 38218, RLST 28218)

Throughout the centuries, Buddhism has developed a unique and immensely diverse visual culture. Indeed, attention to the visual may well be one of the fundamental characteristics of this religious tradition, to the point that Buddhism in China was known as the “teachings of images” (xiang jiao). This course explores the rich world of Buddhist visual culture through a focus on some of its most representative aspects. We begin with a discussion of the Buddha’s absence and the need for representations in the Indian context. Next, we study forms of meditation and visualization in China and Japan, together with dream-making technologies and dreamscapes. Then, we move into the complex world of Buddhist material artifacts in East Asia (images, mandalas, temple architecture, and Buddhist fashioning of landscape). Toward the end of the course, we examine material that is rarely studied in terms of Buddhist visual culture, namely, maps and visions of the world (Indian, Chinese, and Japanese models), and the cultural components of display of Buddhist objects at temples and museums. The course concludes with theoretical considerations on the dichotomies of absence/presence and visible/invisible that seem to characterize much of Buddhist visual culture. Through an analysis and discussion of a wide set of readings, ranging from Buddhist meditation texts to studies of visualizations, dreams, icons, and the landscape, from practices of display to acts of iconoclastic destruction, this course aims at offering a wider conceptualization of visuality in Buddhism, not confined to consideration of art.

2020-2021 Spring

EALC 24506 Disability in East Asia, Past and Present

(HMRT 24506)

Why does disability matter to East Asia? This course uses this overarching question to anchor discussions on the role disability plays in historical and contemporary issues of social inequality and human rights in China, Japan and Korea. Students will think critically about disability identities, institutions, theories, experiences, and interactions that have made disability what it is today. We will learn to narrate disability from a wide range of sources that represent bodily impairments (blindness, madness, autism, trauma, deformities etc.) in medicine, literature and film, and to relate disability narratives to theoretical debates over stigma, medicalization, the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and human rights. We will also to look more closely into the lives of “disabled persons”—who they are, how they are disabled and by what circumstances, how they identify themselves and are represented in different media. More broadly, this course unsettles the concept of East Asia by making sense of disability as “difference” and to think about how it may expand our “mainstream” assumptions of body, culture and society.

A. Wang
2020-2021 Spring

EALC 23216 Cold War, Religion and Religious Freedom in East Asia

(HMRT 23216)

“Religious freedom” is enshrined in not only liberal democratic constitutions but also in constitutions of socialist nation-states such as North Korea, although the latter are frequently dismissed by the West as veneers of democracy. The concept of “religious freedom” has been used by the West (i.e. United States) to categorize the world into “modern” and “anti-modern,” “free” and “communist” throughout the Cold War. Yet, how did “religion” emerge as a category in East Asia? What did “religious freedom” mean in the context of occupations, divisions and hot/cold war? How was religion managed by states, and how did religious communities negotiate with local and global political currents? By pivoting to East Asia as a privileged site of analysis, this course will interrogate the notions of “religion” and “religious freedom” as they were articulated and mobilized for various motives. Core areas of analysis will include the relationship between religion and state-building, religion and human rights, and religion and empire. Moreover, this course decouples the temporal qualifier “Cold War” from “East Asia” to challenge conventional demarcations of the Cold War (1945-1991), for its “end” is still a contested discussion.

S. Park
2020-2021 Spring

EALC 24517/34517 Human Rights in China

(HIST 24516, HIST 34616)

This seminar explores the diverse range of human rights crises confronting China and Chinese people today. Co-taught by Teng Biao, an internationally recognized lawyer and advocate for human rights, and University of Chicago China historian Johanna Ransmeier, this course focuses upon demands for civil and political rights within China. Discussions will cover the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power, the mechanisms of the Chinese criminal justice system, and the exertion of state power and influence in places like Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan, as well as the impact of the People's Republic of China on international frameworks. We will discuss the changing role of activism and the expansion of state surveillance capacity. Students are encouraged to bring their own areas of interest to our conversations. Throughout the quarter we will periodically be joined by practitioners from across the broader human rights community.

J. Ransmeier
2020-2021 Spring

CHIN 41000 Advanced Readings in Literary Chinese III

This quarter we will focus on reading selected tales from Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異, Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡seventeenth-century masterpiece, using Zhang Youhe’s 張友鶴variorum edition Liaozhai zhiyi huijiao huizhu huiping ben 聊齋誌異會校會注會評本alongside the nineteenth-century glossaries and pingdian 評點commentaries included. Problems to be addressed include how to deal with allusions (diangu) and engage with period/ individual style in literary Chinese.  We will work on not only understanding the meaning of the text but also on producing stage by stage polished English translations. This will culminate in a class anthology of our final translations. The course meets remotely Mon/Wed 11:30-12:50 PM.

E-versions of tales we select for translation in class will be available on canvas.

Prerequisites

Course may be repeated for credit with consent of instructor. Undergraduate enrollment is encouraged. CHIN 40900, or CHIN 21000, or placement, or consent of instructor. Note(s): Not offered every year; quarters vary.

2020-2021 Spring

CHIN 40900 Advanced Readings in Literary Chinese II

Throughout this sequence, students read selections in pre-modern Chinese literature from the first millennium B.C.E. to the end of the imperial period. The course covers important works in topics ranging from philosophy, history and religion to poetry, fiction and drama. Each quarter's specific content varies by instructor. Specific content varies by instructor.

Prerequisites

Course may be repeated for credit with consent of instructor. Undergraduate enrollment is encouraged. CHIN 40800, or CHIN 21000, or placement, or consent of instructor. Note(s): Not offered every year; quarters vary.

2020-2021 Winter

EALC 24117/34117 Aino/Ainu/Aynu: Reading Indigenous Tales in Japanese

(HIST 24117/34117)

The Aynu indigenous peoples of Japan have an extensive collection of oral tales that have been collected over the past century. In this course we will read and translate (from Japanese and Aynu originals) into English, various examples of Aynu oral literature. The selections range from everyday tales in the Uwepeker(Talking Tales) genre to the sacred songs of the Aynu Yukar.  Reading ability in Japanese is required.

Prerequisites

JAPN 20300 Intermediate Modern Japanese-3 (or equivalent)

2020-2021 Spring

EALC 65601 Extraordinary Ordinary: Reading and Writing Grassroots and Microhistory

(HIST 65601, SALC 65601)

This graduate seminar confronts the challenges of writing history from the bottom up. Although the syllabus engages heavily with the debates launched by the Subaltern Studies collective, our investigation will not be bounded by any specific regional or temporal focus. Students should feel free to experiment beyond their usual comfort zone in both terms of writing style and or topic. We will consider the theoretical legacies and challenges of postcolonial history writing, the linguistic turn, subaltern studies, and microhistory. The course pays special attention to different ways to grapple with sources and the construction of diverse archives.

J. Ransmeier
2020-2021 Winter
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