Spring

This course will provide an overview of Chinese unearthed documents, beginning with the oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty and the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou dynasty, and then concluding with bamboo and silk manuscripts of the Warring States, Qin and Han dynasties. By reading selections from these materials, we will seek to gain a general sense of both how they were produced and used at the time and also how their modern study has evolved.

This class explores the late imperial fascination with the boundaries between reality and illusion, genuine and counterfeit, self and role. Focusing on the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century—a period marked by both tremendous commercial growth and devastating political turmoil—we will trace the development of a discourse that at once imposes and seeks to overcome these categories of real and fake. In addition to readings from drama, fiction, and poetry, materials will include manuals on forgeries and scams, dream encyclopedias, designs for imaginary gardens, and guidebooks to fantastical realms. All readings available in English, but students with Chinese reading ability will be encouraged to read the original texts.

As Japanese leaders in the mid 19th century faced the threat of colonization at the hands of the Western powers, they launched a project to achieve “Civilization and Enlightenment,” quickly transforming Japan into a global power that possessed its own empire. In the process fiction became a site for both political engagement and retreat.  A civilized country, it was argued, was supposed to boast “literature” as one of its Fine Arts. This literature was charged with representing the inner life of its characters, doing so in a modern national language that was supposed to be a transparent medium of communication. Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, a new language, new literary techniques, and a new set of ideologies were constructed to produce the “self” in novels and short stories. As soon as these new practices were developed, however, they became the objects of parody and ironic deconstruction. Reading key literary texts from the 1880s through the 1930s, as well as recent scholarship, this course will re-trace this historical and literary unfolding, paying special attention to the relationship between language and subjectivity. All readings will be in English.

China's shift from a predominantly rural country to an urban majority is one of the greatest social and demographic transformations in world history. This course begins with the roots of this story in the early modern history of China's cities and traces it through a series of momentous upheavals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will learn about how global ideas and practices contributed to efforts to make Chinese cities "modern," but also how urban experiences have been integral to the meaning of modernity itself. We will discuss urban space, administration, public health, commerce and industry, transportation, foreign relations, and material culture. In addition to tackling these important topics in urban history and tracing the general development of Chinese cities over time, another primary concern of our course will be the place of urban history in English-language scholarship on Chinese history more broadly. We will track this development from Max Weber's observations on Chinese cities through the rise of "China-centered" scholarship in the 1970s through the "global turn" of the 2000s. During the course students will develop the skills necessary for writing an effective historiography paper, i.e., doing background research, writing annotated bibliographies, and using citation management software. Students will put these skills to work by writing a critical historiographical review of scholarship on a topic of their choice.

This class is an introduction to the forms, practices, and meanings of dance in China and the diaspora from ancient times to the present day. Through readings, videos, class demonstrations, and performances, we will explore the reconstruction of court dance in early China; Central Asian dance and dancers in the medieval imagination; the development of operatic movement in the late imperial period; the introduction and transformation of concert dance in the first half of the 20th century; socialist dance and the model ballets of the Cultural Revolution; folk dance and PRC ethno-nationalist discourse; the post-reform transnational avant-garde; ballroom dancing and everyday urban street life; Han revivalism, Shen Yun, and “classical Chinese dance” in the 21st century. Across these varied materials we will ask: what do we mean when we speak of dance, and what makes a dance Chinese? All materials in English; no background required.

What is a ghost? How and why are ghosts represented in particular forms in a particular culture at particular historical moments and how do these change as stories travel between cultures? How and why is traditional ghost lore reconfigured in the contemporary world? This course will explore the complex meanings, both literal and figurative, of ghosts and the fantastic in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tales, plays, and films. Issues to be explored include: 1) the relationship between the supernatural, gender, and sexuality; 2) the confrontation of death and mortality; 3) collective anxieties over the loss of the historical past; 4) and the visualization of the invisible through art, theater, and cinema.

This course is an experiment in rethinking what has conventionally been studied and taught as "postwar Japanese culture" as instances of global Cold War culture. We will look at celebrated works of Japanese fiction, film and popular music from 1945 through 1990, but instead of considering them primarily in relation to the past events of World War Two, we will try to understand them in relation to the unfolding contemporary global situation of the Cold War. We will also look at English-language writing on Japan from during and after the Cold War period. Previous coursework on modern Japanese history or culture is helpful, but not required. All course readings will be in English.

This course offers an introduction to Japanese animation, from its origins in the 1910s to its emergence as global culture in the 1990s. The goal is not only to provide insight into Japanese animation within the context of Japan but also to consider those factors that have transformed it into a global cultural form with a diverse, worldwide fanbase. As such, the course approaches Japanese animation from three distinct perspectives on Japanese animation, which are designed to introduce students to three important methodological approaches to contemporary media — film studies, media studies, and fan studies or cultural studies. As we look at Japanese animation in light of these different conceptual frameworks, we will also consider how its transnational dissemination and ‘Asianization’ challenge some of our basic assumptions about global culture, which have been shaped primarily through the lens of Americanization.