Winter

The course examines the multiple religious traditions spread across the Japanese archipelago, their tenets, rituals, values, and their intimate ties to literature, politics, social structures and economy. The goal will be to arrive at a substantive understanding of Japanese religions and the state of the field of religious studies, and explore potential directions for future research. We will consider both the openness of Japanese religion to incorporate new ideas and its proclivity for relational and amalgamative theories and practices, and also cases of outright rejection of certain Sinitic and pan-Asian ideas. Accordingly, this course will focus not only on the religions of Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism, but also their interactions with other traditions such as Onmyōdō, Shugendō, and popular religion (minkan shūkyō).

Each week we will read a recent monograph and analyze the main arguments and its methodological contribution to the field of religious studies and Japanese religion. Students will be asked to reflect critically on the central arguments of the books, as well as their discussion of doctrine, practice and cultural trends examined in the readings. The topics that we will discuss each week are diverse and include: Esoteric Buddhism (mikkyō), original enlightenment thought (hongaku), religious readings of literature (narrative and poetry), visual culture in Pure Land Buddhism, Kuroda Toshio’s Marxist and political theory, State Shinto and nationalism, cross-cultural transmissions between Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen, mountain worship and maritime religiosity, and Japan’s imagination of South Asia. We will pay close attention to how scholars use various methodologies and theories in their examinations of religious phenomena, such as ritual theory, literary and critical theory, feminist and queer theory, among others. Over the course of the quarter, students will build their own methodological and theoretical toolkits and put them into practice by writing a research paper.

An introduction to Buddhism in China, examined through lenses of texts, thought, and art. We will explore the major currents of Chinese Buddhist practice with a focus on the premodern tradition through around the 13th century (with some attention to modern connections), giving special consideration to major textual and artistic monuments, such as translated scriptures, Chan literature, and the cave-shrines of Dunhuang.   

This class will trace the emergence of the vernacular short story as a new genre in the late Ming and early Qing. We will focus on the seveteenth-century story collections of Feng Menglong, Ling Mengchu, Aina Jushi, and Li Yu, whose stories map the social whole of late imperial China—from merchant schemes to courtesan romances, from the friendships of students to the follies of emperors. Alongside close readings of selected stories, we will examine the structure, sources, and publication histories of these collections and locate them in a broader discussion of the meanings and functions of vernacular literature. All readings in English.

Introductory studies of Chinese history and culture often ignore religion, treating Confucius’s alleged agnosticism as representative of mainstream culture. But ideas about supernatural entities—souls separated from bodies, ancestral spirits, demons, immortals, the vital energies of mountains and rivers, and many more—and practices aimed at managing those spirits were important elements in  pre-1949 life. Spirits testified in court cases, cured or caused illnesses, mediated disputes, changed the weather, and made the realm governable or ungovernable. After declining in the 1950s–1970s, various kinds of worship are immensely popular again today, though usually in altered forms. This course traces changes in the intersection of ideas about spirits and daily social practices from late imperial times forward, focusing on attempts to “standardize the gods,” resistance to such efforts, and the consequences for cohesion, or lack of cohesion, across classes, territory, ethnicity, and other differences.

This course examines how the modern concept of "rights" and "human rights" localized in Japan and how different parties in Japan have used the language of human rights in attempts to remake Japan's social, cultural, and legal landscape. We will explore a wide range of topics including the translation of Eurocentric rights talk in East Asia, colonization and decolonization, statelessness and migration, transitional justice and reconciliation, biopolitical rights and bio-citizenship, indigenous rights, and women and gender-specific rights. Throughout the course we pay special attention to the ways in which rights talk and human-rights politics in Japan intertwine with the country's efforts to modernize and build the "nation within the empire" and, after its defeat in WWII, to close off its "long postwar" and reconcile with its neighbors. This is an introductory course, and no previous knowledge of Japanese history or the international history of human rights is required. However, you should be prepared to read (and watch, browse, and listen to) a wide array of primary and secondary sources that destabilize the most common vocabulary and concepts we take for granted in contemporary human-rights talk such as race, state responsibility, and the very notion of universalism so central to the idea of human rights.

This course focuses on the modern history of a country that is well known for shifting its course at dizzying speed. Beginning with the last monarchic dynasty's "opening" to the world in the late nineteenth century, the course will move on to deal with radical transformations such as Japanese colonization and Korea's subsequent liberation in 1945; the civil war, national division, dictatorship in two Koreas; and the economic miracle and democratization in the South and nuclear development in the North. How do we understand recent events like the South Korean president's impeachment in 2017 and the North Korean leader's high-profile diplomatic détentes in 2018? Do they come out of nowhere, or can we find an underlying consistency based on an understanding of the long twentieth century? Through a careful study of Korea's modern history, this course is designed to reveal the longer trajectories of Korea's historical development, showing how the study of this contentious peninsula becomes a study of modern world history.

The history of Maoist China is usually told as a sequence of political campaigns: land and marriage reform, nationalization of industry, anti-rightist campaign, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc. Yet for the majority of the Chinese population, socialism was as much about material changes as about politics: about the two-storey brick houses, electric lights and telephones (loushang louxia, diandeng dianhua) that the revolution had promised; about new work regimes and new consumption patterns – or, to the contrary, about the absence of such change. If we want to understand what socialism meant for different groups of people, we have to look at the "new objects" of socialist modernity, at changes in dresscodes and apartment layouts, at electrification and city planning. We have to analyze workplaces and labor processes in order to understand how socialism changed the way people worked. We also have to look at the rationing of consumer goods and its effects on people's daily lives. The course has a strong comparative dimension: we will look at the literature on socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to see how Chinese socialism differed from its cousins. Another aim is methodological. How can we understand the lives of people who wrote little and were rarely written about? To which extent can we read people's life experiences out of material objects?