English

Generally, Southeast Asian culture can be seen as a grand confluence of culture from local pre-history, India, China, Islam and Europe. These factors are complicated by geological separation between the continent and the archipelago. This course examines historical cultural change with particular focus on each art; architecture, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, performing arts (including dance and music), and archaeological remains.

This course presents an overview of the major Sunni and Shiite Islamist organizations that have developed and spread throughout the twentieth century. Through the cases of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Jama‘at ul-Tabligh in India, the Hizb al-Tahrir in Palestine, the Islamic Da‘wa Party in Iraq, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and even the afghan origins of al-Qaeda, the course explores the origins, ideology, social bases, and actions of these organizations, as well as their various forms of transnationalization in the Muslim world. The circulation of actors and ideas are particularly developed in order to highlight the anchoring of Islamism in an increasingly globalized space.

This course examines the scope and impact of American media. It looks at the relationship between US media industries and the stories people consume. It surveys multiple forms and formats, including cinema, television, radio, podcasts, literature, and social media. Students will be encouraged to examine their own media habits and practices, as well as understand how the US projects an image of itself through its media industries.

This course considers the socio-political stakes of global environmental change under ongoing conditions of crisis and emergency. It pays special attention to the ways in which environmental change has always been a driver of violent conflict abroad, as well as a key terrain of racial management and pacification at home. Through a combination of detailed case study work and close readings of academic and non-academic texts, students get a clearer sense of how environmental change and conflict is intimately bound up in questions of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, militarism, and imperialism. Drawing inspiration from the work of activists, communities, and collectives across the Pacific – including the Mauna Kea Kiai and Indigenous water protectors across Turtle Island – the course emphasizes how the politics of environmental justice is always the politics of racial, gender, class, and social justice.

This course surveys Asian North American literature and criticism. Given their similar immigration policies and cultural specificities, North America here includes Canada and the U.S.A., and Asia here is understood as East Asia as South(east) Asia has another complicated British/European colonial history. Since this is an introductory class in nature, students read the excerpts and a long novel from major works from the late 19th century to the present. While discerning the broad scope of Asian American literature as a whole, the course emphasizes the recurring themes, the bi-cultural contexts in which these writers wrote, and their literary experimentation and innovation over the time. To supplement readings of literary texts, students examine selected works of criticism, history, and social sciences. As heterogeneity is a crucial concept in defining the umbrella term “Asian American,” an important goal is to understand Asian North Americans as diverse groups and individuals given their different historical and cultural backgrounds. The course covers both East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Eurasian) and North American (American and Canadian) writers, and also attempts to cover all genres (short story, poetry, fiction, prose, graphics) to give the students a panoramic view of the “heterogeneity” in this quite established discipline.

The course offers a global perspective on US foreign policy from the early period to the present. The class focuses on major episodes of US foreign policy-making rather than individual US administrations. Topics include general knowledge about the history of US foreign policy; detailed knowledge of at least one major episode (case study) or historical period of US foreign policy-making; the ability to apply theoretical perspectives in the analysis of US foreign policy.

The course surveys the international developments of the film medium and the film industry from the introduction of sound in the late 1920s through WWII and into the postwar era up to the late 1950s, covering key technological, textual and institutional developments and tying these together with the broader cultural and social context in which films were made, exhibited, and understood. Students gain understanding of the style, content, industrial organization, and production and marketing strategies of a range of national cinemas. Special emphasis may be given to questions about realism, technology, the representation of race, formal experimentation, entertainment and politics in filmmaking of this period.