Asian Pacific American Studies... Courses
Summer 2008 Courses
Electives Courses
MUSI 208D: Music in Asian America
Wendu Hsu
MTWRF 1030-1245
May 12, 2008 - Jun 06, 2008
This interdisciplinary course explores the musical lives of Asian Pacific Americans (APA's) as well as the music by APA musicians in 20th and 21st century U.S. We will read ethnographic and historical studies of musical practices of APA's in jazz, hip hop, Taiko drumming, karaoke and Christian churches. We will also read criticism of Asian American musical representations such as Yoko Ono, Cibo Matto, William Hung, Jin, Mountain Brothers, Black Eyed Peas, Fred Ho, and Yo Yo Ma while analytically engaging with their music and image.
Fall 2008 Courses
Survey Courses
AMST 201 / ENMC 355: Asian-American Cultural History
Sylvia Chong
TR 1700-1815
The historical experiences of Asian Americans-a broad, panethnic category inclusive of Americans with roots in the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, North and South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more-shed light on issues of immigration, citizenship, education, war, labor, and assimilation which have affected all Americans to differing degrees. This "multi-media" cultural history will draw heavily on American visual and popular culture to situate, visualize, and define Asian Americans at various historical moments against and alongside African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and white Americans. Some of these moments involve intense conflict and division, while others gesture towards camaraderie and affiliation. This class will be neither a simplistic celebration of ethnic pride and diversity, nor a condemnation of American history as singularly oppressive, although we will acknowledge both these strands. Rather, the eclectic materials of this class will replicate the heterogeneous history and make-up of Asian America, and establish Asian America as a relationship with itself and with America, rather than a "thing" to isolate and analyze.
This is an introductory course that assumes no prior knowledge of American Studies or Asian American history. During the semester, we will concentrate on developing close reading skills for visual, cinematic and textual materials that may prove useful to future courses you might take in American Studies, History, English or Media Studies. We will engage with a number of primary texts from various genres (fiction, poetry, graphic novel, political cartoon, theater, narrative film, documentary, news media, sociological texts, Supreme Court cases), and spanning the mid-19th century to contemporary times. While obviously not an exhaustive overview of Asian Americans in American cultural history, we will try to touch upon a diverse range of historical moments and cultural and political issues, so as to gain insight into the interconnectedness of multi-ethnic America.
Electives
This is not an exhaustive list, but is based on the course descriptions posted by the instructors. If you have taken a course that deals with Asian American culture, history, or issues, that is not on this or previous semestersÕ lists, please contact the APAS Director for permission to list that course as an APAS elective.
AMST 201: The Global South
Eric Lott
TR 1400-1515
Following the lead of the "new southern studies," this course will introduce you to the practice of American Studies by remapping the South from cotton belt to sun belt and beyond. We'll consider the region in three conceptual frames: as a sub-national section with a distinctive, historically changing political economy (antebellum chattel slavery, postbellum debt peonage, post-Fordist neoliberalism) and cultural history; as the northern part of a hemispheric South that includes the Caribbean and Latin America; and as a key component in what has come to be called the global South-that low-wage losing player in today's international division of labor, perhaps best keynoted by that Bastard Out of Arkansas, Wal-Mart. This is all obviously a tall order, and we'll only be able to chart certain genealogies of cultural-political thought and struggle. But among other things, I'd like to take up the idea of southern exceptionalism or what used to be called the "mind" of the South and certain of its cultural expressions (e.g., the plantation romance, the slave narrative, the rape-lynching nexus, Faulkner, Hurston, the blues, Deliverance, Dorothy Allison, Outkast); the U.S. South's various and extensive cultural-political relations with its southern neighbors (e.g., the Mexican War, Jose Marti and the "Spanish-American War," U.S. military involvement in Haiti, post-Cuban Revolution Havana and Miami, Russell Banks's Continental Drift, Faulkner's influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, the invention of the Caribbean steel drum out of U.S. oil drums, reggae's transformation of American R&B, Derek Walcott's Arkansas Testament); and the place and role of the U.S. South in a global North-South divide (e.g., African agricultural practices in slave-owning South Carolina, Richard Wright's reporting in The Color Curtain on the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned nations, post-1965 Asian immigration to states like Virginia, Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, "Toyotization" in North Carolina auto plants, the sweated labor behind and cultural influence of Wal-Mart).
AMST 401 / ENAM 481G: Orientalism and the US War Film
Sylvia Chong
TR 1400-1515
The concept of "American Orientalism" describes how America social scientists and policy makers defined and racialized Asians in the 20th-century so as to produce an opposition between the "East" and the "West"--a binary that both complements and disturbs the usual black-white opposition of American race relations. Although Orientalism in Europe was largely a product of colonization in Asia and Africa, American Orientalism has a stronger relationship to Asian immigration to America, as well as to America's numerous wars in the Orient. This class will examine the issue of race and American Orientalism through the war film-films about World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and possibly the Gulf War as well. Through films and historical readings, we will attempt to define the epistemology of American Orientalism. How is Orientalism different from racism against Asians? What is the relationship between American Orientalism and other racial ideologist? Is Orientalism opposed to Americanness, or to whiteness? Some of the historical events we will examine are the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the invasion of the Philippines, the forced evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans from the American West Coast, the conscription of Japanese Americans into the American military, the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Occupation of Japan, China as ally in World War II and enemy in the Cold War, and the political immigration of Vietnamese "boat people."
ANTH 355: Everyday Life in America
Frederick Damon
MWF 1100-1050
Taking a production and exchange orientation to society, this course uses anthropological models to analyze aspects of the US experience in North America and its extension into the world. The models will be drawn from the anthropological analysis of exchange, rites of transition, sacrifice and mythology. The course will be organized in two parts. The first will provide a journalistic introduction to United States culture focusing on its financial/productive center, political institutions, and national ideologies. Anthropological, i.e. analytical, models will be reviewed as part of this introduction. The second part will examine the place of war, athletics, and movies in US culture. The collective readings of this second part are to be used by each student as a point of departure for his or her own research project and paper. Several short thematic and response papers will organize the first part. A research paper anchors the second part. Students must enroll in a section of 355D. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.
ENLT 252: Mestizas, Halfies, and Others
Hallie Smith
MW 1530-1645
Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students
How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself? How others in the United States see you? In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United States. Our texts are an alternate form of cultural history: they depict a range of interactions between various immigrant communities and the larger "American" culture, which as it turns out, has no single definition. Our texts are written by women who are often assigned hyphenated labels to indicate their family origins--Sandra Cisneros is Mexican-American, Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American, and so on--and many of our works feature protagonists who are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and who negotiate among several different cultural modes. Some recurring themes of the course will be the experience of living in between two or more languages (many of the texts incorporate untranslated pieces of languages other than English) and the language act of naming and renaming (for instance in Marilyn ChinÕs "How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation.") We will see that it is not only the ethically "other" citizens who are influenced by the American experience but indeed that their languages and voices penetrate into and profoundly shape American experience as a whole, both in terms of literary content and in terms of formal accomplishment.
In the course we will analyze literary moments of cross-cultural contact, stereotyping, and exchange, and our goal during the semester will likewise be to create a small exemplary community in which open exchanges can occur. We will discuss and critique the terms "mestiza" and "halfie," among other labels for people of mixed race and mixed cultural experience, and we will compare the use and implications of these colloquial terms to the purposes and political intentions of scholarly definitions by cultural critics such as Gloria Anzaldœa and Lila Abu-Lughod. We will also be strongly interested in questions of literary form. For instance, what is significant about a novel or poem following a linear narrative characteristic of realism, in other words producing a "straight" take on identity and history? What is at stake in the poem or novel that takes a more postmodern approach and emphasizes a fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid experience? Course requirements include regular and well-prepared participation, three papers, email responses to two of the readings, one class presentation, one or two periods leading discussion, and an essay-based final exam.
Possible texts include:
- Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Vintage);
- Gloria Anzaldœa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books)
- Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Bantam)
- Nella Larson, Passing (Penguin); Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead);
- Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (Vintage)
- Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (Norton).
ENLT 252: Writing Women's Lives
Deandra Little
TR 0930-1045
Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students
Introducing a collection of loosely autobiographical essays, Tony Earley writes, "While it is necessary for our sanity to keep the line between fiction and nonfiction clearly drawn, that particular boundary, as with the boundaries between nations, is more arbitrary than we care to think." In this course, we will examine the generic boundaries between fiction and non-fiction as we read and discuss memoirs, essays, short stories, poems, and longer works written by and about women writers. Questions weÕll examine include: What does it mean to write a life? How do these women writers see their gender, class, or ethnic identity in relation to their writing? What boundaries do they draw or negotiate for their own (or their readersÕ) sanity?
Course readings will primarily include works by American women from the 19th and 20th centuries, including such authors as Dorothy Allison, Sylvia Plath, Anne Patchett, Maxine Kingston, Zora Neale Hurston, and Fanny Fern, among others.
This course serves as an introduction to the major and as a second-writing requirement. In it, youÕll hone your skills for close reading and interpretive analysis as we discuss such topics as narrative structure, audience, and the construction and presentation of the self through tone, diction and imagery. Course assignments include three 6-7 page papers, short response papers, and a group presentation.
ENMC 481G Cultures of South Asian Diaspora
Sandhya Shukla
TR 1100-1215
This course will explore the time-space of South Asian diasporas through local, national and transnational perspectives. To consider the imaginaries formed through migration as diasporic is already to suggest that peoples on the move see themselves and the world within multiple narratives, just as it implies that specific forms of belonging and loss remain powerful long after physical dislocations have occurred. It is the constitutive tension between experiences of multiplicity and desires for unity that will shape our inquiry into the cultural production of South Asians at home and abroad. The work for this class embeds diaspora in history, to interpret the effects of colonialism, postcolonialism, and development of the nation-state as being present in every text of South Asian migrancy. We will engage with a variety of forms of representation: novels by Bapsi Sidhwa, Achmat Dangor, Kiran Desai, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and others; critical discourses including those generated by Ernest Renan, Benedict Anderson and Paul Gilroy; and also recent films and diasporic musics. Requirements will be: active class participation based on careful reading, viewing and/or listening, a class presentation, five reading responses throughout the course of the term, and one short and one long paper.
ENMC 483 The Global Novel
Mrinalini Chakravorty
TR 1100-1215
This course will focus on representations of globalization in the Anglophone novel. By the early 20th Century the British Empire is reputed to have extended over 85% of the globe, drawing together diverse cultural zones into the encyclopedic regime of colonial modernity. Yet this flattening of the globe due to colonialism is arguably different from the effects of globalism that have come to prominence within the postcolonial era. We will consider links between imperial modernity and the post-Soviet global era in our exploration of the connections between literary worlds and the world at large. In reading some of the seminal global novels in contemporary English literature by writers such as Rushdie, Roy, Desai, Ondaatje, Mootoo, Smith, Ali and others, we will debate what it means for these novels to be "global" and what the conditions of this globalized world hinge on. We will think about how cultural identities circulate in this newly globalized world, and within these novels, to suggest transformations that may come from the decline of nations, borders, and older modes of exchange. Does the emergence of a hybrid, cosmopolitan citizen of the world who belongs nowhere and everywhere simultaneously suggest a different aesthetic and form unique to the global novel? How does cultural globalism reflected in literature address the more vexed conditions of economic globalization where conditions of inequity, and social difference still remain world dividing? What is the relationship between cultures of colonialism and cultures of capitalism that a lot of the new literatures of globalization attempt to capture? In answering some of these questions, we will be mindful of the ways in which the global novel negotiates commonplaces about globalismÕs association with cross-cultural diffusion, the lure of world markets, new speeds of travel, networks of communication, and innovative techno-scapes. We will ask critical questions about whether the global novel paradoxically challenges the assumptions of globalization itself by representing in literary terms what has been called an ethics of counter-globalization, or alter-globalization politics. How do identifications based on racial, sexual, and cultural differences that cohered the terms of colonialism fare as power goes global? Aside from the primary literary texts, you will also be required to read critical materials on globalization, and view films such as Dirty Pretty Things, East is East, The English Patient, Babel, Lost in Translation etc.
MDST 412: Cyberspace, Race, Ethnicity
David Golumbia
TR 0930-1045
This class will examine the profound and to some extent covert connections between sociocultural representations of race and ethnicity and the formal and material organization of computers and the internet. We will look both directly at computer technology and also at representational media in which cyberspace, race, and ethnicity play determinative roles. We will address questions including the so-called digital divide, the provision of computing resources to people in the global south, language ideologies, and technoscientific progressivism. Our reading will also include a significant amount of poststructuralist, postcolonial, and theoretical cultural studies texts, about which students will be expected to write response papers, give oral presentations, and be prepared to engage in sustained class discussion.
PLAP 424A: Race, Ethnic And Immigration
Vesla Weaver
TR 0930-1045
Theory
Note: Because APAS theory courses also serve as requirements for other majors and often have other pre-requisites, it is strongly recommended that you contact the professor before enrolling in the course. If you have already taken an eligible theory course that you need to count towards your major, you may substitute an APAS elective for your theory requirement with the APAS Director's permission.
ANTH 301: History & Theory Of Anthro
Susan McKinnon
TR 1100-1215
This course will provide a survey of anthropological theory from the late 19th-century up to the present. We will explore a diverse range of anthropological approaches developed over the course of the century, including: 19th-century evolutionism, Boasian cultural anthropology, British structural-functionalism, French structuralism, British symbolic anthropology, American cultural materialism and neo-evolutionism, later American cultural anthropology, feminism, and post-colonial and post-modern theories. We will be concerned to understand these approaches not only as theoretical frameworks for understanding other cultures, but also as cultural and historical productions, in themselves. The discussion session is obligatory. This is a required course for anthropology majors.
ENCR 481: Critical Race Theory
Marlon Ross
T 1530-1800
What does race mean in the late 20th and early 21st century? Given the various ways in which race as a biological "fact" has been discredited, why and how does race continue to have vital significance in politics, economics, education, culture, arts, and everyday social realities? How has the notion of race shaped, and been shaped by, changing relations to other experiences of identity stemming from sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism? Using Winston NapierÕs text African American Literary Theory: A Reader, this course surveys major trends in black literary theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing especially on these movements: the Black Aesthetic, womanism and feminist critique, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, gender and queer theory, hip hop, incarceration, and postcolonial and diaspora studies. Although theoretical writings comprise the heart of the course, discussions will revolve around several artistic works as applicable case studies: Percival EverettÕs 2005 novel Wounded, Spike LeeÕs 2000 film Bamboozled, and Suzan-Lori ParksÕ 1994 The America Play. Requirements include several short critical response essays, one class discussion presentation, and a term research paper.
SOC 341: Race and Ethnicity / Race and Ethnic Relations
Justin Snyder
TR 1230-1345
This course provides a graduate level introduction to the field of Race and Ethnicity. As such, it attempts to cover a broad spectrum of topics, focusing on the theoretical and consequential aspects of conceptions of race and ethnicity. Of necessity, the course also has a historical focus, since modernday debates over race are strongly conditioned by the past. Moreover, to really understand issues of race and ethnicity, we must take a crosscultural perspective, since these debates have often been skewed by a focus on the wrenching problems produced by racial/ethnic conflict in the United States. By adopting these perspectives, the course seeks to provide insight into the complexities that surround issues of race and ethnicity.
SWAG 381: Feminist Theory
Rina Williams
TR 1400-1515
This course provides an overview of the historical bases and contemporary developments in feminist theorizing and analyze a range of theories on gender, including liberal, Marxist, radical, difference, and postmodernist feminist theories. We will explore how feminist theories apply to contemporary debates on the body, sexuality, colonialism, globalization and transnationalism. Throughout the course we will incorporate analysis of race, class, and national differences as well as cross-cultural perspectives.
Transnational
ANTH 230: Buddhism in Asian Societies
Nicolas Shile
TR 1400-1515
This course is an examination of Buddhism in contemporary Asian societies, from an anthropological perspective that will challenge common reductive depictions of Buddhism as primarily philosophical or "spiritual", and highlight how socially and culturally embedded, and historically situated, the various forms of Buddhism are. Doctrinal and historical aspects, beyond a brief general introduction at the beginning of the course, and occasional mentions later on, will not be a major focus in themselves. The central focus of this course will be the analysis of a very diverse array of living traditions stretching from Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma to Tibet, parts of Nepal, and Japan. The fundamental, overarching aim, beyond an (assuredly wholesome) sustained exercise in familiarizing ourselves with alien places, will be to reconsider critically our assumptions of what "religion" is. Prior coursework in anthropology or religion is not required. Students must however be ready to engage in a relatively demanding, reading- and writing-intensive course.
ANTH 363: Chinese Family and Religion
John Shepherd
TR 1230-1345
This course will introduce students to anthropological analysis of the traditional Chinese forms of the Chinese family and popular religion, and their modern transformations. Topics to be covered include the dynamics of Chinese marriage and domestic life, gender roles, the religious underpinnings of Chinese family life in ancestor worship and the Chinese cult of the dead, marriage rituals, and the cult of filial piety. The forms of temple worship, the interaction of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian traditions, and the shamanic tradition will also be covered. Finally, attention will be paid to the changing role of the family and religion in 20th- and 21st-century Chinese life. This course will satisfy the Second Writing Requirement. Meets College's Non-Western Perspective Requirements.
ANTH 370: Anthropology of Contemporary India
Ravindra Khare
W 1400-1630
The course discusses selected major socio-cultural, religious, political aspects of and issues in India since independence, with particular focus on the distinctly Indian fabrication of modernity for its fast spreading social position, cultural value and practical reach among contemporary Indians. This increasingly interpenetrating change will be studied against (a) India's current caste-family-kin-class social organization; (b) religions, gender issues and the Untouchables or Dalits; (c) caste alliances and Indian democratic politics; (d) Indian modernity in history and social practices; and (e) the Indian identity under globalization. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.
ANTH 401A: Social Inequalities: The Postcolonial and Modern
Ravindra Khare
M 1400-1630
This is a seminar on anthropological discussion of social inequalities in the societies postcolonial and modern, with a comparative cultural focus on the inequalities in postcolonial India and the contemporary U.S. Beginning with (a) a comparative discussion of social inequalities in selected modern Western societies, the seminar will turn to (b) Indian caste, religious and gender inequalities; (c) anthropology of race; (d) American class-race-gender-ethnic differences; (e) Indian "casteism" and identity politics and American "race without racism"; and (f) inequalities in health care and globalization. The seminar will encourage students to research and write on innovative programs and activities (local, national or international) addressing inequalities to reduce human suffering. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.
EAST 355: WomenÕs Social Movements
Ellen Fuller
TR 1700-1815
HIEA 207: Japan From Susanoo To Sony
MW 1400-1450, Discussion sections: 0830-0920 R, 1530-1620 R, 1400-1450 F
Frederico Marcon
Comprehensive introduction to Japan from the earliest times to the present, highlighting the key aspects of its social, economic, and political history, and illuminating the evolution of popular culture and the role of the military.
HIEA 403: North Korea: Rise of the Kim Dynasty
M 1530-1800
Ronald Dimberg
This undergraduate colloquium will focus attention on the Democratic PeopleÕs Republic of Korea (aka North Korea) from its founding in the late 1940Õs through the year 2008. Much of the semester will be spent reading about and discussing the "Kim Dynasty", i.e., Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, but students also will read material covering social, cultural and economic developments in the DPRK. During the semester students will read such recent publications as Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, Human Remodeling in North Korea, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, Two Dreams in One Bed, The North Korean Revolution, North Korea: The Politics of Regime Survival, and Crisis in North Korea. Students will be prepared to discuss assigned reading material during the weekly meetings of the class, and will write critical reviews of two of the assigned books. The course grade will be based on participation in weekly discussion (2/3) and the review essays (1/3).
HISA 203: History of Modern South Asia
Neeti Nair
TR 1400-1515
India is home to diversity: of histories, religious traditions, languages, kinds of polities, architecture, cuisine, and styles of music, clothing and dance. It is a place where history meets the present in complex and contentious ways. In this course we will read and discuss a wide range of sources about South AsiaÕs rich past. Major topics include conflict and accommodation in the Indo-Islamic world; change and continuity under colonial rule; competing ideas on the shape and substance of a new India; and the Partition of the subcontinent. The following textbooks will be available in the bookstore: Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy and Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: the Indian History of a British Sport. Other required readings consisting of primary and secondary sources will be placed on toolkit. Films will also be used to accompany textual materials.
Course requirements include attendance and active participation in class (15%); a book review (20%); a midterm exam (25%); and a final exam (40%). This course is the first of a two-semester sequence: in the spring we will focus on Twentieth century South Asia.
HISA 401A: History Seminar: The Partition of India: Problems and Perspectives
Neeti Nair
R 1600-1830
The Partition of India has been the defining political misstep in 20th century South Asia, confounding centuries of fluid identities in one sweeping irreversible decision. In this course we examine the texture of life in pre-Partition Punjab, the United Provinces and Bengal; detail the denouement in political negotiations that culminated in Partition; consider the violence that became constitutive of Partition; and mark the enormous consequences of the international boundary line separating India from Pakistan and later, Bangladesh. Films, fiction and a range of primary and secondary sources will be used. A five page proposal will be due for the mid-term. The final essay of 18-20 pages will be a research paper drawing upon a range of primary sources like the Transfer of Power volumes, contemporary newspapers, collections of correspondence, memoirs, Partition literature etc. The following books will be available for purchase at the bookstore:
- Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, [1985], 1994.
- Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Oxford University Press, [1990], 2006.
- Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007
All other chapters from books, journal articles and short pieces of fiction will be made available on toolkit. This research seminar fulfils the second writing requirement. Permission of the instructor is required to register for the course. Prior coursework in South Asian Studies/ History will serve as a prerequisite for this course. The reading load will average 200 pages a week.
Course requirements include active participation in discussions (20%); weekly one-page position papers (20%); a short proposal of 5 pages (10%), the presentation of research (10%) and the final research paper of 18-20 pages (40%).
JPTR 490: Sleuthing JapanÕs Culture
Michiko Wilson
W 1400-1630
PLCP 351 Chinese Politics
Brantly Womack
MW 1530-1645
General introduction to Chinese politics in its societal context. Conveys a concrete appreciation of ChinaÕs societal reality and how it interacts with the political system. Covers ChinaÕs changing role in Asia and the world. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or the history of China.
PLCP 551 Chinese Domestic Politics
M 1900-2130
Brantly Womack
Studies the structure and process of the Chinese political system, emphasizing political culture, socio-economic development, and political socialization. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of China.
SAST 364 / PLCP 364: Women and Politics in South Asia
Rina Williams
TR 1100-1215
This course examines the role and effects of women in the politics of three countries of the South Asian subcontinent. We begin with the role of women under British colonial rule, and in anti-colonial nationalism and the movement for independence. The course will then examine women and politics in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Particular attention will be paid to issues of democracy and authoritarian rule; womenÕs political leadership, participation, and representation; economic development; and identity politics (religion, caste, nationalism) and political violence.
SWAG 365: East Asian Women: Self Portrayals in Social Context
Ellen Fuller
TR 1400-1515
This seminar is a sociological examination of representations of East Asian women in both written (biography, autobiography, and novel) and visual (documentary and film) media. We will explore the changing cultural and social assumptions about women and men in China, Japan and Korea over the course of the 20th century, with emphasis on the post-World War II environment. Recurring themes include the impact of the West on historical developments in each country and the various relationships among the three East Asian countries. Requirements include active participation in discussion and written analysis of several works.
Archive of past semesters' APAS courses
Because APAS is still developing as a program, its course offerings are constantly in flux. Please look at these listings of past courses to get a sense of what classes typically count towards the APAS minor.
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