Spring

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, the promise of socialism was as much about material improvements as it was about political change: a socialist revolution would bring about “two-storey brick houses, electric lights and telephones” (loushang louxia, diandeng dianhua), new work regimes and new consumption patterns. 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 dress codes and apartment layouts, at electrification and city planning – or at the absence of such changes and the persistence of older patterns of material life under a new, socialist veneer. At the methodological level, we ask how Material Culture and Everyday Life approaches help us understand the lives of people who wrote little and were rarely written about. How do we read people's life experiences out of the material record of their lives?

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.

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.

With the long tradition of Chinese archaeology, archaeological monographs and site reports have become the primary source for studying ancient China, from the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, to the Bronze Age and the Late Imperial period. Thanks to the scale and the intensity of archaeological operations across China, tens if not hundreds of new titles are published each year. As a genre, archaeological site reports are supposed to describe excavated data in an objective, descriptive, and scientific way. But are archaeological site reports truly "objective"? How do we “read between the lines” and identify and discover the important information hidden in the seemingly dry and tedious details?  This course is designed for students to read and analyze Chinese archaeological site reports for the information and the hidden and underlying theoretical approaches. Site reports included in the course are selected both for the importance of the finds and for the approaches taken to reflect the history and the practice of Chinese archaeology.

In this class we will read and discuss recent monographs in the field of Ming Qing literature and culture. Each week we will focus on a different book, covering topics that range from early modern translation to Qing court theater to the literary fascination with objects. In addition to the substance of these books, we will discuss the place of this new work within the broader scholarly field as well as the art of book-writing and the state of academic publishing more generally. Over the course of the class, students will produce book reviews and a state of the field article. All readings in English.

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.

How has the digital revolution changed the way that creative works, especially literature, are produced and consumed in contemporary East Asia? How has the growth of regional and global online platforms altered the field of cultural production? What do all of these changes mean for the study of culture itself? This seminar takes up these questions in the course of surveying recent theoretical and empirical work on social media platforms, the digital revolution in publishing, and user-generated content. We will survey some of the recent forms that the platformization of culture has taken in East Asia, including internet literature in China, Japanese cellphone novels, and Korean webtoons, putting all of these into comparative perspective with developments elsewhere. We will also look to specific historical forms of platformization in literary culture (e.g., newspaper serialization, mass-market anthologies) to reflect on what is distinct about the platforming of creativity in the digital age.

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.

This colloquium is intended for graduate students preparing for a field exam in Japanese history and others interested in reading recent scholarship on the social, political, and cultural history of modern Japan.

PQ: Open to MA and PhD students only.

How has the digital revolution changed the way that creative works, especially literature, are produced and consumed in contemporary East Asia? How has the growth of regional and global online platforms altered the field of cultural production? What do all of these changes mean for the study of culture itself? This seminar takes up these questions in the course of surveying recent theoretical and empirical work on social media platforms, the digital revolution in publishing, and user-generated content. We will survey some of the recent forms that the platformization of culture has taken in East Asia, including internet literature in China, Japanese cellphone novels, and Korean webtoons, putting all of these into comparative perspective with developments elsewhere. We will also look to specific historical forms of platformization in literary culture (e.g., newspaper serialization, mass-market anthologies) to reflect on what is distinct about the platforming of creativity in the digital age.