Professor Laurence Coderre | R: 2:00 PM - 4:45 PM

This course examines whether and to what extent “postsocialism” is a useful analytical framework for the study of contemporary Chinese culture. What kinds of questions might it allow us to ask? What might it elide? And what if any conversations might it facilitate outside Chinese Studies? Primary materials will be taken from literature, film, and contemporary art.

Professor Tatiana Linkhoeva | R: 9:30 AM - 2:15 PM 

This seminar will explore the history of capitalism in Japan in global perspective to identify the roots of current Japanese capitalist system. We will explore attempts by historians, social scientists, government officials, literary men, and political activists, both classic and very recent, to conceptualize capitalism from different, overlapping perspectives: as a story of national “development”; as the latest phase in a far longer process of globalization; as the intrinsic feature of modernity itself. We will also deal with political, social and cultural forms of resistance to capitalism in modern and contemporary Japan. The course will put particular emphasis on the regional and global comparative context of Japanese development and situate it deeply in the political and social developments of the age.

Dr. Moss Roberts | W: 3:30 PM - 6:30 PM

The aim of this introductory course is to develop a comparative understanding of the national independence movements in China, India, and Vietnam, as well as the context within which they unfolded, in the period 1885-1962. The course will introduce students to some of the figures in modern Asian history who played a major role in the transition of India and Vietnam from colonial subordination to independent nationhood and of China from its semi-colonial status to liberation. The principal figures whose writings will be studied and compared are Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mao Zedong. In addition we will study the biography of Ho Chi Minh in order to develop a third angle of comparison. The course will give due attention to other relevant figures such as Gokhale, Tilak, Jinnah, and M.N. Roy in the case of India; Li Hongzhang, Sun Yatsen, Chen Duxiu, La Dazhao, and Chiang Kai-shek in the case of China; Phan Boi Chau in the case of Vietnam.

Professor Annmaria Shimabuku | TR: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

This seminar addresses the biopolitics of Japanese empire through literary, historical, and philosophical texts that touch upon the areas of Ezo (Hokkaido), the Ryukyus (Okinawa), Taiwan, and the Korean peninsula, in addition to mainland Japan. Paying close attention to the economic crises from the 1920s, we will examine how intellectuals and literary figures in both the metropole and colonies started to envision a new world history that could surmount the limitations of European imperialisms through a regionalism that would come under the official heading of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Integral to this regionalism was a new conception of life itself in relation to sovereignty, the reproduction of labor power, and language. Using translation theory, we will explore the compulsion to render life intelligible, how it was translated into an intelligibility, and what became of unintelligible life amidst the cataclysms of Japanese fascism and its postwar/postcolonial reincarnations in Japanese democracy. We will read literary texts from Chiri Yukie, Kim Saryang, Zhuoliu Wu, Abe Kōbō, Medoruma Shun, and Sakiyama Tami, and theoretical texts from Nishida Kitarō, Uno Kōzō, Tanabe Hajime, Tosaka Jun, Naoki Sakai, and Harry Harootunian, among others. All readings are in English and no prior knowledge of Japan is required.

For more information, please visit our Independent Study page.

An Independent Study course provides students with the opportunity to work one-on-one with an instructor on a particular topic or creative project. Registration for this course requires approval of the Director of Graduate Studies. You will be asked to submit a proposal, that must include a project abstract (200-250 words) and a bibliography, approved by the professor supervising the course.