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This course will introduce students to the origin and history of Chinese calligraphy and to the interrelationship between Chinese calligraphy and panting- including bamboo, orchid, and bird painting. This is a hands-on course; students are expected to practice Chinese calligraphy several times a week, to get to know how to use Chinese brushes and charcoal ink, and to develop an understanding of Chinese art and culture through brushwork.

This course explores the myths and traditions of Hindu history, with an emphasis on music, dance, and puppetry. The class involves a heavy performance component; students will be creating and performing their own versions of episodes from the Ramayana, including making shadow puppets, writing a script, and working the puppets. This story features princes and princesses, magic eagles, a demon king with ten heads, and a flying monkey. A final performance in Packard Hall will be a highlight. 1 unit – Lasmawan

The course examines the Tale of Genji, the 1000-year-old masterpiece of Japanese literature about the commoner son of an emperor whose romantic dalliances, poetic sensibilities, and otherworldly beauty take him to the heights of political supremacy. The story of Hikaru Genji, “the shining prince,” is considered the pinnacle of classical literature and endures in Japanese cultural memory, inspiring works of traditional theater, art, and popular media. In this course, we will read key passages from this classic text in English translation, acquainting ourselves with its modes of literary expression and major themes. We will also examine the political and social contexts that shaped its production, reproduction, and reception. Finally, we will engage with the tale’s various retellings and reinterpretations across media and history to consider the role that adaptation plays in redefining the meaning and value of cultural expression.

This course is an immersion into the literary record (the experience, remembering, and reimagining) of the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. We will spend time with work (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film, music) produced entirely by survivors and descendants of the concentration camps. We will contemplate the ways these works address/inhabit memory and memorialization, transgenerational trauma (anti-Asian racism, white supremacy, immigration, assimilation, citizenship), and transgenerational healing and redemption.

This course offers a study of the histories, theories, and practices associated with hierarchy and injustice based on caste. We focus primarily on caste in modern India, from the colonial period to today, and explore debates in the understanding of caste as a form of identity and social structure. We then turn to “caste” in other historical and social contexts and analyze the politics of comparison and translation in the application of “caste” to other contexts, such as racialization in the United States. Throughout the course, our discussions highlight the struggles and achievements of anti-caste activists and the movements against caste injustice.

The Nakedness of Being is an experiential and experimental performance course taught by distinguished guest artist, Eiko Otake, a New York-based movement artist. This course combines Eiko’s embodied creative practice with the study of postwar Japanese arts. Through the study of movement, readings, videos, and films students learn that space/time is not a white canvas that stands alone and empty. Here and now are continuous parts of a larger geography (space) and history (time) and as such are dense with memories, shadows, and possibilities. Viewings of art works and films from postwar Japan serve as examples of artistic representations of despair and perseverance. What is it to forget, remember, mourn, and pray? How do we transcend violence and loss? How does being or becoming a mover or dancer affect our emotional rigor, seeing/learning, and creativity? These are some of the many questions the class explores. This is not a dance class, nor is it geared only toward performers. The course encourages students to think about movement as a method of accessing human experiences and building knowledge, a way to explore sensations, thoughts, and reactions to a particular space. 1 unit - Otake.

Japan during the so-called “Bubble Period” was a decade of decadence and consumer excess fueled by an unsustainable asset price bubble that would burst in the early 1990s and bring about the “Lost Decades.” Before then, however, the country rode a wave of affluence that reverberated in the cultural mainstream. In this course we will focus on the fiction and films of Japan in the 1980s, while also examining manga, music, and city landmarks, in order to understand a society and culture in a decade of prosperity. This examination of diverse cultural forms will introduce us to interpretive strategies drawn from various disciplines. We will consider how cultural productions reflected the urbanization, technological growth, and consumerism of the decade, but also, how some of the works interrogated the costs and repercussions of such exuberance on its society.

This course is designed to explore the contemporary Japanese culture and language from historical, social, and linguistic aspects. It will introduce the brief history of Japanese culture and language, including its writing system, and discuss how they have changed over time. The course will especially emphasize the linguistic aspect of the contemporary Japanese society and culture by drawing examples from anthropological, linguistic, and socio-linguistic studies. Major topics are traditional and modern writing systems, diversity among the speakers, and language in pop culture. Additional topics include gender differences, geographical differences, style shifting, and register. No prior knowledge of Japanese language/culture is required.

Since the Enlightenment, philosophers and historians have argued that individual freedom and autonomy depend upon the confinement of religious beliefs and practices to the private sphere. On their view, the spread and entrenchment of institutions of modernity would result in the decline of religion as an active moral and political force. These modern ways of thinking assume that there are discrete entities called religion and the secular; where the latter is conceived as the arena of activities such as politics, economics and science in which religion has no place. In this seminar, we will examine the phenomena of religion and the secular and their place in the modern world through close readings of historical, sociological, philosophical and anthropological works that address the question of religion and its relationship to politics in diverse contexts such as the Middle East, South Asia, Europe and the United States. Our aim will be to acquire an understanding of the variety of ways in which the relationship between religion and politics is configured and debated and to complicate our understanding of key concepts and problems such as modernity, progress, freedom, citizenship and belonging, religious difference, toleration, and the question of religious minorities. (Meets the Equity and Power: EPG requirement.) 1 unit - Chandrani.

Cultural understandings of Asian Americans in the United States have always been constructed through food, food practices, and food systems. Food identifies, on the one hand, a site to trace anti-Asian exclusion. Since the nineteenth century, stereotypes abound around Asians eating dogs, rats, and MSG. These ideas proliferate today, as it is believed that Chinese consumption of bats caused the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, food reveals how culinary interest in diasporic Asian foodways in the food industry serve to exalt white chefs at the expense of Asians. Since the fusion craze of the 1990s, white chefs have appropriated diasporic Asian food practices to gain stardom. However, food also identifies a site of solidarity and resistance. During the mid-twentieth century, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers in California aligned to strike against capitalist exploitation. This course centers food as a critical entryway into exploring key concepts in Asian American food studies such as authenticity, fusion, food colonialism, culinary tourism, and taste, while traversing a range of institutional sites where food is cultivated and produced, like the farm, food truck, restaurant, home kitchen, professional kitchen, and street market. Along the way, we will read a range of texts, including cookbooks, cooking competition shows, film, literature, critical history, academic theory, and, of course, food itself. Overall, this class insists that food is more than just food—it is a material expression of long-standing histories of racialization, colonialism, inequality, resistance, and solidarity.

Sometimes called “the Forgotten War” in the U.S., the Korean War was anything but forgettable to the millions of Koreans, Chinese, Americans and others who lived through it. This course approaches the conflict from a regional and transnational perspective, examining its impact and implications for the two Koreas and China, as well as considering lesser-known dimensions of the American experience.

An overview of the art, music, dance, and traditions of the kingdom of Bali. 1 unit - Lasmawan

This course explores the arts and culture of Bali, Indonesia, on location in Bali. Music, dance, theater, and visual arts are ubiquitous in Bali, where artistic production is far out of proportion to the size and population of the island. The Hindu-Balinese religion (Agama Hindu Dharma) requires performing and visual arts for the successful completion of the thousands of ceremonies undertaken each year, and therefore virtually every Balinese person is a dancer, musician, actor, visual artist, or poet, and many individuals are equally competent in several media. The unique history and culture of Bali are best understood through the arts, which connect past to present, self to community, and religion to reality. Students and faculty will live and study at Sanggar Manik Galih, a music and dance studio located in the Lasmawan family compound in Bangah, a small village in central Bali. The compound has been outfitted with a gamelan angklung, gamelan gong kebyar, gamelan gender wayang, gamelan balaganjar, and gamelan joged bumbung for course use. The daily class schedule in Bali will include lectures and discussion of readings on Balinese history, culture, arts, and the environment followed by practical instruction in traditional music, dance, cooking, and the arts. Students will experience Balinese arts and culture through participation in daily life, attendance at a wide range of performances, and lecture-demonstrations by a variety of artists and craftsmen.