New Course Offerings -- Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures

URDU 3559
URDU 6559

Readings in Urdu Poetry
Mehr Farooqi
M 7:00-9:30pm

The Middle East in Ethnographic Perspective
Daniel Lefkowitz
MW 3:30-4:45pm

Survey of the anthropological literature on the Middle East & North Africa. Begins historically with traditional writing on the "middle east" and proceeds to critiques of this tradition and attempts at new ways of constructing knowledge of this world region. Readings juxtapose theoretical and descriptive work toward critically appraising modern writers' success in overcoming the critiques leveled against their predecessors.

Bollywood Dreams: Indian Cinema
Richard Cohen
T 7:00-9:30 PM

The course principally covers the evolution of the Hindi film, now known globally as “Bollywood cinema,” which is emblematic of the post-colonial national project of the 1950s, continuously interacting and intersecting with the traditional and modern worlds of rural and urban India through the 60s, the experiments in social realism of the 70s and beyond into the 80s, 90s and the 21st century, where the unique Indian mix of folk, mythos and techno combine to transform the cinema into yet something newly responsive to the diasporic/globalized condition.

Imperial Civilizing Mission: Indian Women's Writing
Aminur Rahman
MWF 10:00-10:50am

This course gives students a comprehensive understanding about how colonial Indian women perceived masculine power and displayed feminist resistance in their creative and critical writings. It has always been perceived by a number of scholars that during the colonial period Indian women were doubly subjugated by being both colonized and women, therefore remained frozen fixed mentally and socially throughout. Going beyond such a hasty and conclusive pretension, this course examines how women’s participation in the ‘men’s activities’ such as ‘writing and publishing’ transgressed and transformed the boundaries of traditional gendered role, which has conversely showcased women’s active participation in the colonial social settings. Taking pioneering examples from the nineteenth and twentieth century women’s writing (mostly from Bengal), this course also examines how Indian women continually negotiated with perceived gendered role and their newly acquired identity, not only as a ‘literate reformed women’,  but also as a ‘writers’ which traditionally considered as male identity.